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Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans “parts pairing”
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's interesting to me that Game Consoles get an exception... Not sure whats up there, other than straight up ~~bribery~~ lobbying.
HVAC makes sense when you consider environmental concerns (some refrigerants are really terrible pollutants).
Medical equipment, particularly equipment in public health care should be held to high standards. Authorized, properly trained repair; peoples lives depend on it.
Energy storage when attached to public infrastructure (you back-feeding the grid) can be a saftey concern for workers and the supply/load needs to be balanced to prevent damaging that infrastructure and other private equipment attached to it. Not sure preventing repair is the right move here; you can still buy and install new without oversight. Perhaps it's again a saftey concern (for the person performing repair).
Vehicles, farming or otherwise, I'm on the fence about; there's an argument to be made for public saftey/roadworthness, but I'm not sure that's enough of an argument to prevent home-repair. Again seems more to do with lobbying than anything else.
John Deere probably ~~bribed~~ lobbied hard for that carve out. It was their practices that helped drive the right to repair movement. Giving them a pass really diminishes the accomplishment.
Smaller farms are going to get screwed over with all the fees and mandatory maintenance that can be imposed.
Everyone gets angry about printers needing a debit card on file but manufacturers like John Deere do similar stuff. If they think you've tinkered with it, they can disable the equipment remotely.