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Ah, Denuvo. It’s been several years since we checked in on this once vaunted DRM tool that billed itself as undefeatable. The end of PC gaming piracy was said to be at hand, at least for any title using Denuvo. Then, predictably, the cracking community saw the target the company had put on its own tool and got to work. They were first able to crack games using Denuvo in months, which turned into weeks, which turned into days, which eventually turned into it being cracked essentially on a game’s launch day.
So, how’s it been going for Denuvo since? Well, it’s essentially been rendered completely useless at this point.
As recently reported by Tom’s Hardware, on April 27, a large Reddit thread tracking which games using Denvuo DRM still needed to be cracked or bypassed officially hit zero. (This list tracks games that don’t require an online server connection, not MMORPGs and other games that do.) What that means, effectively, is that according to Denuvo modders and hackers, the DRM tech is no longer able to stop pirates from downloading and installing games for free. This milestone for hackers is largely thanks to the MKDev collective and modder DenuvOwO. It was these people who created the hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to bypass Denuvo’s DRM checks.
Technically, Denuvo is still in the game, but it isn’t functioning as it should, and pirates can play without paying. And there is already some evidence that bypassing Denuvo has led to performance improvements in titles like Resident Evil Requiem, which might push some people to use the bypass even if they bought the game legally. We saw this in a previous Resident Evil game when hackers bypassed Denuvo in 2021.
This is always the life cycle of DRM in video games. Whatever audacious claims a DRM company might want to make early on with its product, the technology is eventually defeated to one degree or another and all that is left are the byproducts of the DRM that serve to do nothing other than annoy legitimate customers of a video game. If the technology is so intrusively bad that even legit buyers of a game want to crack it out of their games, and the pirates are completely unencumbered by it as well, then it’s a wonder why anyone would bother including it in their games to begin with.
DRM is pretty much always bad. The desire to protect a game from pirates is understandable, but ultimately pointless. There is almost never enough benefit in terms of generating more sales by trying to fight piracy to be worth pissing off your actual paying customers. And tactics such as what publisher 2K has decided to do in the wake of Denuvo’s complete failure aren’t any better.
2K Games has apparently begun adding 14-day online check-ins to some of its PC games. The check-in has apparently been added to NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. These games now reportedly use a “fixed offline authorization token” that expires after two weeks. Once that happens, the game will not be playable until you connect to the internet and let the game ping Denvuo to get a new token. Pirat Nation and hackers are claiming this new countdown isn’t properly disclosed on the games’ Steam Store page or in each title’s respective EULA.
I’ll just add that pushing this new requirement out via an update to existing purchases is also a problem. Customers bought these games with the understanding of how they would work or not when offline. 2K suddenly changing the product in a meaningful way after it had already been purchased is a flatly anti-consumer move.
And I have no doubt that this online check requirement will be defeated by the same folks who defeated Denuvo. This arms race continues, but it shouldn’t. Why not focus on making great games and connecting with your paying customers to give them reasons to actually pay instead?
Filed Under: check ins, denuvo, drm, video games
Companies: 2k, denuvo
Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren’t to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. Would the console always need to be online when launching games? Would it need to check in online on a certain cadence for games to work, such as every day? Every 30 days?
Microsoft did very little to calm the waters in all this speculation. Very little came out from the Xbox team prior to launch, and what did come out was often confusing. What became very obvious, however, was that the lack of clear and direct messaging from Microsoft made a bad situation much worse. The backlash to the requirement rumors was severe and Xbox largely ended up scrapping them.
Fast forward to the present and the internet has exploded the past few days with claims that an update pushed to PlayStation consoles has introduced a 30 day online check in requirement for newly purchased games.
Some PlayStation users have noticed a new online DRM policy for digital games purchased on the PlayStation Store: newly purchased digital games now display a “Valid Period” tag showing a start date, an end date, and a countdown timer. If the console does not connect to the internet within 30 days, the game’s license reportedly expires, and the title becomes unplayable until an online connection is restored.
The story broke over the weekend through Lance McDonald, the well-known modder who managed to patch Bloodborne to run at 60 frames per second. He posted on X: “Hugely terrible DRM has now been rolled out to all PS4 and PS5 digital games. Every digital game you buy now requires an online check-in every 30 days. If you buy a digital game and don’t connect your console to the internet for 30 days, your license will be removed.
We thought about reporting this story as soon as McDonald surfaced it. However, several users also swore they saw nothing of the sort in their libraries, so we waited. Thus far, Sony has not made any official public statement, but a few hours ago, a PlayStation Support assistant confirmed to a user that the 30-day timer is not a bug at all.
That support assistant being referenced is a bot, however, not a human being behind a keyboard. You can see the response it gave in the screenshot below.
That is, at the time of this writing, the most that Sony has said about whatever the hell is going on here. As a result, all kinds of people, big and small within the gaming community, are losing their shit over this new “online DRM requirement” for existing consoles that previously didn’t have it. Oh, and it’s a requirement that Sony mocked Microsoft for trying to require way back in 2013 before the backlash.
The silence is, as they say, deafening. Is this fully intentional? Not all the reporting suggests that at all. Other reports indicate that this is just a bug in the update and this was not intended to be rolled out at all.
Shortly after the issue surfaced, video game preservation site Does it play? weighed in on the matter. It reported hearing from an anonymous insider that the timer was actually just a bug. “From what we gathered, Sony accidentally broke something while fixing an exploit. They’ve known about the confusing UI for a while, but didn’t see it as urgent,” their X post read.
However, many noted that an accidental deployment still implies Sony was testing the concept, since the interface had already been built. Throughout the confusion, Sony has yet to provide an official comment regarding the issue.
That last sentence is the most important one. Hey, Sony: what the actual hell is going on here?
The fact that all of this rumor, speculation, and angst has gone on for at least a couple of days now without a single word being uttered directly from Sony is remarkably stupid. The waters need to be calmed and that’s only going to happen by the company speaking up. Was it a bug? Cool, say so and let’s move on. Is the online requirement DRM now a thing? Much less cool, but at least we’ll know where the company stands (though, then we can start talking about Sony changing its policies on consoles after they are sold).
What can’t happen is this vacuum of information because Sony wants to give the public the silent treatment. That’s just bad business.
Filed Under: 30 day timer, drm, playstation, playstation online assistant
Companies: sony
Back in 2023 we wrote about how regional Polish rail company and a train manufacturer NEWAG had taken to using DRM to lock down trains that are repaired by independent technicians, in a bid to both monopolize — and drive up the costs of repair. This kind of effort to monopolize repair is common across numerous industries, driving an organic, grass roots “right to repair” reform movement.
The original story by 404 Media noted that NEWAG put code in their train’s control systems preventing them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent any time at an independent repair company, and if certain parts had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number. Some independent companies responded by hiring a white hat hacking group dubbed Dragon Sector to bypass the DRM and get the trains running again.
Two years later and it sounds like NEWAG has taken all the wrong lessons from the experience.
The folks at iFixit note that the company has now sued both the Polish repair service SPS that fixed those original trains, and has also gone after the individual members of ethical hacking group Dragon Sector for helping them. NEWAG is looking for $1.7 million for copyright violations and “unlawful competition” in one court, and $1.36 million for unlawful competition and infringement of personal rights in another.
Like most unethical companies trying to monopolize repair, NEWAG tries to insist that this isn’t about making more money, but about the public’s safety. But iFixit notes that the company’s case has several major inconsistencies, including both claiming that the hacking group did and didn’t modify their software:
“Newag claims that the Dragon Sector team endangered passengers’ safety by modifying the software without proper experience. But Newag then turns right around and claims that Dragon Sector did not modify the software at all. They point out that EU law only allows reverse engineering of software in order to fix bugs. And if Dragon Sector did not actually modify the software, it cannot have fixed any bugs, in which case their reverse-engineering must be illegal.”
The Biden FTC under Lina Khan issued a report stating that such safety claims were almost always bullshit; a useful bogeyman used by companies trying to justify anti-competitive, anti-consumer behaviors.
The problem for companies like NEWAG is the harder they try to monopolize repair and bully independent repair shops, the greater public attention and animosity is. The greater public attention and anger becomes, the more likely companies are to see “right to repair” legislative reform forcing them to do what was the right thing in the first place.
Still, there’s no shortage of companies across a dozen different industries which seem to think it’s a good idea to try and monopolize repair through DRM, making parts and manuals hard to find, or engage in “parts pairing” that makes it impossible to simply replace individual “unsanctioned” parts.
Filed Under: consumers, copyright, dragon sector, drm, lawsuit, locomotives, parts pairing, poland, right to repair, trains
Companies: newag, sps
When it comes to the anti-piracy efforts taken by some of the more aggressive companies out there, such as Nintendo, the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me is just how completely short-sighted those efforts tend to be. Take Nintendo’s updated EULA for its Switch consoles, for example. The updated agreement makes several changes from its previous iteration, but the most notable is that Nintendo says that if it thinks you’re doing the piracy for any reason, it can suspend all kinds of services on your console, up to and including bricking it completely. And, while the company has yet to go the bricking route so far, it has already begun suspending all online services on consoles for the use of MIG Switches, cards for Switch devices on which you can load legitimately extracted ROMs from purchased games, or pirated versions of the same.
Now, the first layer of how this is short-sighted is easy enough to see. In order to engage in copyright protectionism, Nintendo is risking long-term reputational damage by functionally ruining the consoles of customers for actions that aren’t illegal, or even immoral. Short term protection, longer term risk of everyone thinking you don’t care about your own customers.
But there’s another layer to this, as a result of these service suspensions being tied directly to the device rather than the person. And that is what this protectionism means for the secondary market for Nintendo Switches.
As spotted by Android Authority, a Reddit poster bought themselves a pre-owned Switch 2 from a Walmart store, only to find it had been previously incapacitated by Nintendo.
“I was driving between work sites and stopped at two different Walmarts,” says user Bimmytung. “At the second one I find a Mario Kart edition sitting in the case and couldn’t believe my luck.” They were informed by the Walmart staff that it was an “open box return,” so it was removed from the box to be checked over, and all looked well. The code for the packaged Mario Kart World had been scratched off already, so Walmart knocked another $50 off the price, and it all seemed like a good deal. Until they got home.
Finally after work I get a chance to set it up. Quickly realize I need the super special micro SD card and none of the ~half dozen in the house would work. Drive ten minutes to Target and get one there and pick up a few other accessories as well. Get home and go to finish the setup—quickly get Error Code 2124-4508. A quick Google search shows me I’m screwed. FML.”
Now, there are several layers of shame here to go around. Shame on Walmart for selling a device without ensuring it would work for the buyer the way it is intended to work. And shame on Nintendo for creating an anti-piracy program such that the punishments meted out are linked to hardware rather than the supposed bad-actor it seeks to punish.
But all of that aside, it should also be true that this sort of thing drives the value of a Nintendo Switch console lower than it would be otherwise. Part of the value you gain when you buy a physical thing is the ability to eventually put it on the secondary market at some point. Because of the actions that Nintendo is taking in disabling and/or bricking its own consoles, that injects a great deal of risk into the prospect of buying one on the secondary market. The value of the hardware is, by at least some measure, diminished.
But because Nintendo seems to only think about these things in the short term, the company probably doesn’t much care.
However, the more immediate issue is for those looking to pick up a Switch 2 from a reseller or previous owner, given their current scarcity at first-party sellers. There’s really no way of knowing at all if a console has been bricked when buying the device online, and this could make the resale market a complete shambles for the whole life cycle of the console. And, grimly, that’s not exactly a priority for Nintendo, given that reselling, either in store or online, gains the company nothing, and some would argue actually costs the company a sale—it’s not like it’ll be in a rush to address the problem.
Which is why I won’t be in a rush to buy a Switch 2 anytime soon. And I’m certainly in their target market, having two young children who desperately want one. Instead of the console, however, they will be getting a lesson in making smart buying decisions as a consumer.
Filed Under: bricked, copyright, drm, pre-owned, resale, switch 2, used goods
Companies: nintendo
President Trump’s attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there’s a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing—one that will take away Americans’ right to unencumbered access to our publicly owned airwaves.
The FCC is quietly contemplating a fundamental restructuring of all broadcasting in the United States, via a new DRM-based standard for digital television equipment, enforced by a private “security authority” with control over licensing, encryption, and compliance. This move is confusingly called the “ATSC Transition” (ATSC is the digital TV standard the US switched to in 2009 – the “transition” here is to ATSC 3.0, a new version with built-in DRM).
The “ATSC Transition” is championed by the National Association of Broadcasters, who want to effectively privatize the public airwaves, allowing broadcasters to encrypt over-the-air programming, meaning that you will only be able to receive those encrypted shows if you buy a new TV with built-in DRM keys. It’s a tax on American TV viewers, forcing you to buy a new TV so you can continue to access a public resource you already own.
This may not strike you as a big deal. Lots of us have given up on broadcast and get all our TV over the internet. But millions of American still rely heavily or exclusively on broadcast television for everything from news to education to simple entertainment. Many of these viewers live in rural or tribal areas, and/or are low-income households who can least afford to “upgrade.” Historically, these viewers have been able to rely on access to broadcast because, by law, broadcasters get extremely valuable spectrum licenses in exchange for making their programming available for free to anyone within range of their broadcast antennas.
Adding DRM to over-the-air broadcasts upends this system. The “ATSC Transition” is a really a transition from the century-old system of universally accessible programming to a privately controlled web of proprietary technological restrictions. It’s a transition from a system where anyone can come up with innovative new TV hardware to one where a centralized, unaccountable private authority gets a veto right over new devices.
DRM licensing schemes like this are innovation killers. Prime example: DVDs and DVD players, which have been subject to a similar central authority, and haven’t gotten a single new feature since the DVD player was introduced in 1995.
DRM is also incompatible with fundamental limits on copyright, like fair use. Those limits let you do things like record a daytime baseball game and then watch it after dinner, skipping the ads. Broadcasters would like to prevent that and DRM helps them do it. Keep in mind that bypassing or breaking a DRM system’s digital keys—even for lawful purposes like time-shifting, ad-skipping, security research, and so on—risks penalties under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That is, unless you have the time and resources to beg the Copyright Office for an exemption (and, if the exemption is granted, to renew your plea every three years).
Broadcasters say they need this change to offer viewers new interactive features that will serve the public interest. But if broadcasters have cool new features the public will enjoy, they don’t need to force us to adopt them. The most reliable indicator that a new feature is cool and desirable is that people voluntarily install it. If the only way to get someone to use a new feature is to lock up the keys so they can’t turn it off, that’s a clear sign that the feature is not in the public interest.
That’s why EFF joined Public Knowledge, Consumer Reports and others in urging the FCC to reject this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea and keep our airwaves free for all of us. We hope the agency listens, and puts the interests of millions of Americans above the private interests of a few powerful media cartels.
Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: atsc, drm, fcc, over the air tv
State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own tech continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, U.S. PIRG notes that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills:
“This is more than a legislative landmark—it’s a tipping point. We’ve gone from a handful of passionate advocates to a nationwide call for repair autonomy,” said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit. “People are fed up with disposable products and locked-down devices. Repair is the future, and this moment proves it.”
While U.S. consumer protection issues are a hot mess in the United States, the right to repair movement continues to be a singular bright spot. The more that giants like Apple, John Deere, and others try to monopolize repair (usually through obnoxious DRM, “parts pairing,” or legal fine print), the greater the public support for the movement seems to grow.
The catch: so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually passed laws. And in some instances the bills have been watered down post-passage, like in New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul buckled to company lobbying to make the law much weaker while also exempting many of the most problematic industries.
Elsewhere, state governments just aren’t really enforcing the laws so far despite no shortage of corporate violators. Reformers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to see a meaningful enforcement action against a major company in any of the states that have passed such legislation.
And I’d suspect that as Trump 2.0 takes aim at labor rights, civil rights, and pollution standards, most states will have their hands full facing costly legal battles across a litany of other subjects. Challenging big companies on right to repair probably won’t be a high staffing or budget priority.
That’s not to say the right to reform movement shouldn’t be hopeful. But activists and consumers alike need to understand that getting a law passed is only the first step; they’ll need to apply pressure on state officials that pass such laws, consider the issue settled, then immediately fall into a deep coma.
Filed Under: consumers, drm, hardware, ifixit, monopoly, parts pairing, reform, right to repair, us pirg
I’ll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they’re certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We’ve been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d’etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public storefront for gamers to legitimately purchase. GOG stated that it was doing this in part in order to get into the business of video game preservation, a prospect that everyone knew would be tested largely due to fights and/or confusion over IP rights held by publishers, studios, and god knows who else.
But, going back to the opening of the post, the platform is absolutely putting its efforts where its mouth is. GOG has long had a “Community Wishlist” where customers could list out which retro games they wish could be brought back onto the platform that weren’t already there. It allowed GOG to do two things: know what the customers most wanted and serve as evidence to publishers that their games would sell well if they partnered with GOG.
The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often “the fuel for our actions,” Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG’s blog. “When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going.” GOG attributes the newly available Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, “two Polish dudes” approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.
A pretty cool concept for how to galvanize a dedicated community to the effect of serving as market research for both the platform and the publishers needed to make the platform useful. But with GOG’s return to a focus on retro games, versus newly released AAA games, it has also decided to revamp the Wishlist into something more robust, with a more specific goal of using it to push more publishers’ older games onto the platform. Add to that a little prodding from the folks at GOG itself and you have a community-driven demand center that will be very public.
The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux’s Lionhead Studios that was a true “god game,” giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.
GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”
The idea here is a central place for GOG customers to establish both what they want to see on the platform and, by dint of those submissions remaining on the Dreamlist, the studios and publishers that refuse to make their games available, either at all or at least in a DRM-free format. Studios and publishers have every right to withhold their works in that fashion, of course, but this new setup has the ability to apply some public pressure in a way that is beyond the old Wishlist.
It may also serve to highlight for a larger audience just how absurd some of the IP hang-ups of old video games can be. For instance, one of the other top games listed on the Dreamlist is The Operative: No One Lives Forever, a game that is in IP rights hell, as we have discussed several times in the past.
We’ll of course have to see how successful the Dreamlist program is at bringing more games into the GOG Preservation Program. Any progress would be useful, but it sure would be great if something of a groundswell was created for these preservation efforts.
Filed Under: community wishlist, copyright, drm, preservation, retro games, video games
Companies: good old games
A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and logistical hurdles dramatically for farmers.
John Deere executives have repeatedly promised to do better, then just ignored those promises.
Now the company is on the receiving end of a belated FTC lawsuit over its effort to monopolize repair, something outgoing FTC boss Lina Khan says made operations much more difficult and expensive for farmers the world over:
“Illegal repair restrictions can be devastating for farmers, who rely on affordable and timely repairs to harvest their crops and earn their income,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s action today seeks to ensure that farmers across America are free to repair their own equipment or use repair shops of their choice—lowering costs, preventing ruinous delays, and promoting fair competition for independent repair shops.”
The FTC lawsuit was filed in conjunction with the states of Illinois and Minnesota.
In addition to intentionally acquiring repair alternatives to monopolize repair and drive up consumer costs, John Deere also routinely makes repair difficult and costly through the act of software locks, obnoxious DRM restrictions, and “parts pairing” — which involves only allowing the installation of company-certified replacement parts — or mandatory collections of company-blessed components.
More recently, the company has been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agree to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s complaint notes.
Several class action antitrust suits and ample warning from the FTC wasn’t enough to deter John Deere. The FTC’s suit comes as Lina Khan heads out the door, and it’s more than possible that Trump 2.0 — keen on taking a hatchet to what’s left of U,S, corporate oversight and consumer protection — either kills or undermines FTC legal efforts to finally hold John Deere accountable. You know, for “populism.”
Filed Under: agriculture, drm, ftc, hardware, lina khan, repair, right to repair, tractors
Companies: john deere
U.S. consumer protection has been beaten to a pulp over the last few decades. Consumer protection regulators are routinely on the ropes, left understaffed, underfunded, and boxed in by an increasingly corrupt and radical 5th Circuit and Supreme Courts stocked with Trump sycophants.
One bright spot, however, has been the “right to reform” movement, or efforts to ensure that it’s easier and cheaper for consumers to repair their own technology, without being boxed in or overbilled by corporations (across numerous industries) looking to monopolize repair.
Last March Oregon became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states contemplated such bills in 2024.
While it seems extremely unlikely that any federal right to repair legislation takes root during a second Trump administration, right to repair advocates are trying to keep the faith. In part because right to repair reform historically has broad, bipartisan support:
“Right to repair has been firmly bipartisan from the beginning,” says Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit and an occasional contributor to WIRED who has testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary about repairability policy. “I’m really not ‘doom and gloom’ on any of this. We feel very strong going into this. We have a really great working relationship with a lot of conservatives on the Hill, and we’re looking forward to continuing that.”
Of course Trumpism (read: authoritarianism) doesn’t really hew to traditional understandings of partisanship. The ideology professes to be populist, but broadly supports hugely unpopular policies across the spectrum — most notably the coming disintegration of consumer protection and public safety standards, environmental reform, female bodily autonomy, and labor rights.
Similarly, just because something has bipartisan appeal doesn’t mean it has a chance in hell of surviving Trumpism (see: net neutrality). Trumpism is populist when it’s convenient. In reality, it’s a highly performative ideology that coddles corporate power at every conceivable opportunity (see: the appointment of telecom industry coddling Brendan Carr to the FCC).
Trumpism’s primary belief, buried under all the racism, sexism, and populist bullshit, is utterly unchecked wealth accumulation free of government oversight regardless of broader public or market harm. That doesn’t gel particularly well with cracking down on corporate power’s efforts to monopolize repair.
So while I greatly admire Wiens and his work, I’m not sure the optimism he expresses in Wired is particularly realistic:
“Even if the FTC takes a hard swing to the right, I don’t think that impacts right to repair too much,” Wiens says. The position is just popular and gaining steam, he says, and he anticipates a wave of repair friendly-policies will come to red states soon. “I think it’s critical mass. I think the time has come. People see the economic benefits for their community.”
I mean yes, right to repair will remain hugely popular, because consumers across partisan ideologies don’t like being bullied by big corporations. But the idea that a Republican Congress or FTC will take this issue seriously strikes me as wish-casting.
The hope is a little brighter on the state level, where state laws continue to be passed. The problem is I’ve yet to see states actually enforce any of them, and most corporations are simply ignoring the laws without penalty. With state and legal resources about to be strained to an historic limit by a flood of battles across everything from immigration to environmental law, right to repair could easily get lost in the mix.
That’s not to say the right to repair movement won’t continue to gain traction and popularity, that advocates should abandon any hope, or that this groundswell of public support can’t be leveraged into expanded real-world change on the state or local level. But I do think keeping fascism from destroying democracy and the rule of law will overshadow more than a few reform efforts for the foreseeable future.
Filed Under: donald trump, drm, hardware, parts pairing, right to repair, software, software locks, state laws
The world might be going to hell, but at least activists’ efforts to protect consumers’ rights to affordable and easy tech repair continue to gain steam.
Most recently in Canada, where the country’s Copyright Act was amended by two different bills allowing the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if done for the purposes of “maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing,” and “to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component.”
These TPMs take on a variety of shapes, whether it’s just password protected access to administrative functions, or the need for a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted parts of software. Initially implemented to “fight piracy,” such restrictions were quickly expanded to be leveraged to help companies monopolize repair. Like in the U.S., Canadian copyright bars circumvention.
Overall, Canada’s legal updates should be a great boon to independent repair shops looking to provide affordable repair options to Canadian consumers, and to tinkerers wanting to repair devices and hardware they own. iFixit calls the amendments a “huge step forward” for right to repair:
“These bills are a huge step forward for the right to repair, giving Canadians more freedom to repair their own devices without breaking the law. They make Canada the first country to tackle copyright law’s digital locks at a federal level in favor of repair access.”
iFixit notes there’s still work left to be done, given that Canada’s latest legal updates do nothing to help improve access to the needed repair tools:
“While Canadians can now legally bypass TPMs to fix their own devices, they can’t legally sell or share tools designed for that purpose. This means Canadian consumers and repair pros still face technical and legal hurdles to access the necessary repair tools, much like in the US.”
Here in the States, any hopes for a federal right to repair law have been crushed by Trump’s electoral win. Activists have, however, had considerable luck passing numerous state right to repair laws.
Last March Oregon became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states contemplated such bills in 2024.
The problem: I’ve yet to see any examples of these laws actually being enforced. And with Trumpism ushering in a whole bunch of new life and death legal struggles hinging at the state level (immigration, the dismantling of all federal consumer protection), I strongly suspect going toe to toe with major companies over right to repair won’t be a priority for state officials with limited resources.
Filed Under: canada, copyright, drm, hardware, locks, right to repair, software, tpms
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