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Article by Kyle Wiens is a right-to-repair advocate and CEO of iFixit, a free repair-manual Web site. He has dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics. This article appeared in The Scientific American
The U.S. Congress needs to uphold the freedom to repair electronic devices
My trusty Xbox is out of warranty. Although it has been a real workhorse for many years, all that swapping of discs is eventually going to kill its optical drive. I’m a fixer, and if the disc drive failed in a different kind of product, I could easily repair it by installing a new part. But this particular fix is beyond hard—it is illegal. Or at least it was until late last year.
Fighting for the right to fix such problems has taken me down a decade-long rabbit hole of work on federal policy, including an obscure section of U.S. copyright law, Section 1201. It blocks the breaking of digital locks used to guard access to devices’ software. Cell phones, for example, are locked to the mobile…
Read the rest of the article in The Scientific American