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Copyright and repairs...

It's both sad and enraging that copyright laws are used to prevent people to repair devices they own, and effectively enforce planned obsolescence since there is no way to actually keep any of your devices up and running.

Since service manuals can be copyrighted, it means that companies can deny access to them by independent repair shops or just users that want to have the information. Which means that people outside the company, can't make any repair at all. Thus, giving the companies the chance to enforce planned obsolescence by making their products unrepairable after a certain point in time.

This is unacceptable, since the products we buy are our owned by us. We should have unrestricted access to the information needed to service the products we own, either by ourselves or by independent repair shops if we choose to take them there.

Most importantly, by allowing to those products to have a longer life-cycle expectancy the impact they have on the environment will be a lot less. By allowing the service manuals available to the public, it would greatly help to make electronics more sustainable since their life will be higher and there will be less need to buy replacements more often.

There is a real need to reduce as much as possible our waste footprint on our environment as much as possible, and planned obsolescence doesn't help at all. By making companies release their service manuals, we are ensuring that human activity becomes more sustainable over time by allowing longer life cycles and reducing waste.

Not only that, we are empowered to choose when to change our devices for new ones and what to do with them other than throwing them away. Donation of electronics can be more viable, since they could be serviced and put back into action for people that can't afford to buy new ones. This is specially true with computers, refrigerators and the like, where the price of a new one and a second hand one can be quite significant.

So, making repair manuals available for everyone to use is of the up-most importance in order to make human activities more sustainable, and to give access to more modern devices to people that otherwise would be left out.

If companies don't make their service manuals available freely available to all, we have to make them do it. The common good is far more important that their private profits.

Comments

  1. Leon3/19/2013 5:09 PM

    Maybe it is possible to find a forum to present this complain and start a policy change by the manufacturers

    ReplyDelete

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