Review - S 3830 Introduced – Right-to-Repair

Earlier this month, Sen Lujan (D,NM) introduced S 3830, the Fair Repair Act. The bill would establish a requirement for original equipment manufacturers to make available “documentation, parts, and tools, inclusive of any updates to information or embedded software” for the purpose of diagnosis, maintenance or repair of equipment sold or used in the United States. It would also make the Federal Trade Commission the agency responsible for enforcement of the requirement. The bill is very similar to HR 4006 that was introduced in June. No action has been taken on that bill.

Moving Forward

Lujan is an influential member, as is one of his two cosponsors {Sen Lummis (R,WY)} of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there should be sufficient influence to see this bill considered in Committee. There will be some opposition to this bill from many manufacturers, but I suspect that there will be sufficient bipartisan support for this bill to be adopted in Committee.

The bill is unlikely to make it to the floor of the Senate under regular order, it is just not important enough. The bill would draw sufficient opposition to ensure that the bill would not be considered under the unanimous consent process. The only way this bill would make it to the floor is as an amendment to some more important bill.

Commentary

The comments that I made about the ‘security-related function’ provisions of the House bill apply equally well to this version of the bill.

While this bill (and the House version) does make an effort to provide support for repairs of digital equipment by owners and independent repair providers, the lack of definition of the terms ‘diagnosis, maintenance, or repair’ means that making changes to software not approved by the OEM will still be able to be restricted as copywrite infringement.

For more details about the provisions of this legislation, and its differences from HR 4006, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-3830-introduced - subscription required.