After Colorado and New York passed new laws last year, legislators in at least 17 states introduced bills this year that would compel manufacturers to provide information and parts for do-it-yourselfers or independent shops to fix devices.
But given the resistance from industry on broader actions and a last-minute effort last year that weakened the New York law, repair advocates are skeptical that new state laws will make much of a difference. They say manufacturers are trying to open loopholes that would prevent owners and smaller repairers from doing simple fixes, such as swapping out cracked screens or replacing weak batteries.
Some of the state bills cover a broad variety of devices, as does New York’s law. Others are more tailored: Montana, for example, had a bill that would have helped wheelchair users fix their equipment, mimicking Colorado, which enacted similar legislation last year. Those amendments eliminated the original requirement that manufacturers provide passwords, security codes or materials to override security features on devices and allowed the manufacturers to provide entire assemblies of parts, rather than individual parts, to fix broken devices. Critics say that last requirement forces consumers to pay for an entire assembly rather than, say, one chip.
Chris Gilrein, executive director of Massachusetts/the Northeast for TechNet, another industry coalition, said in a statement emailed to Stateline that the New York bill as passed by the legislature “presented unacceptable risks to consumer data privacy and safety, requiring manufacturers to expose critical security information and hand over the keys to surreptitiously unlock customers' devices.”"We still have concerns with the final legislation signed into law.