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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.
Is this actually good news? What can a single state do? Shouldn't this be federal?
Special exceptions are hard to deal with when you're mass producing. That's why a fair amount of the rulings made by the European Union also end up applying to North America when it comes to international businesses.
It basically means someone like Apple has to decide between not selling in Oregon at all, making special phones for Oregon, or making all of their phones not have paired parts. It's a pretty big thorn in their side, and it would only take a few more states to join in before they really have to start committing to a solution.
My guess: they'll go the lawsuit route.
If Apple's approach in the EU is anything to go by, they'll disable repaired phones if they're taken outside Oregon.
Ooh that would be a bastard approach to it wouldn't it? You've nearly convinced me that's totally what's gonna happen now.
A single state is still a large market to pass up, and tooling costs make it impractical to manufacture different versions of things.
Even for software, the US experiences positive externalities of the GDPR and the rest of the US does from privacy laws in California and Illinois (likely others that I don't know off the top of my head)
State laws also often serve as the prototype for federal ones.
It should be federal, but this is absolutely good news.
what kind of logic is that? A small victory is better than no victory
They can ban selling products which do it