91°µÍø

This article by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, teaching professor of Global and Intercultural Studies, appeared in May 22.

If you have ever tried to repair something, realized that it was beyond your financial or technical means, and ended up buying a new one, you are not alone. Repairing electronics and household appliances has not been a real option in the United States for decades now, particularly for items that have proprietary software in them.

Absurd situations have proliferated. It can cost about the same to buy a new printer as it does to . The U.S. Department of Defense  it purchases because the intellectual property rights remain with the manufacturer. John Deere, the farming equipment company,  to access the software needed to repair their own combines and tractors because, while the purchase covers the physical machinery, it does not cover the software.

One consequence, in addition to cost and frustration for consumers, is environmental harm. The U.S. is the world’s second producer of electronic waste after China, to the tune of about  annually per person. Only .

The right-to-repair movement emerged in response, calling for people to be able to repair what they purchase, or have third parties do the repair work, without unnecessary financial, legal or technical barriers. Right to repair seems to be a rare area of bipartisanship in Congress.  – introduced in 2025 by a Democrat – and the  – introduced by a Republican – are two ongoing legislative initiatives to create a federal legal framework that would make it easy and cheap for American users to repair their devices. Both bills are fiercely opposed by .

As a , I found through my research that the origins of the legal and technical obstacles to product repairs lie in debates in the 1980s over new media and copyright guardrails.

Hollywood and VCRs

The rapid rise and popularity of video cassette recorders, or VCRs, in the late 1970s transformed films and TV shows from transient experiences into tangible consumer goods. As I show in my book, “,” despite the potential for extra revenue, Hollywood was alarmed by the fact that users were now able to copy films on videotape, and tried to stop the technology. Today’s repair bans are part of that story.

The first U.S. copyright provisions were embedded in . Over time, the law was amended to include new technologies, but at the core of future legal arrangements remained : to protect the financial rights of creators while giving enough access to information for society as a whole to progress.

Until the second half of the 20th century, the American doctrine of , which allows the unlicensed use of protected works under specific conditions, allowed judges to prevent copyright law from negatively affecting public interest. Organizations such as public libraries, book clubs, universities and news organizations benefited from this legal approach. The concept was codified into American law in the .

When the film studios took  to stop the production and sale of video recorders in 1976, they argued that Sony’s product encouraged copyright infringement. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that taping TV content for personal use , expanding the understanding of fair use.

The industry then focused on finding a technological solution to the piracy problem and on  for its products.

They identified the digital versatile disc, or DVD, as a safer alternative to the VHS tape. Initially, the DVD was a read-only format. It took a few more years of engineering before affordable recording was possible. Even then, the process was far more complicated for users than videotape recording. In 1997, barely one year after the video disc was launched, all of the Motion Picture Association of America member studios joined the , collectively adopted the new format and started to phase out films released on videotape.

Copyright and virtual locks

Then came digital rights management. Collectively, the term refers to the battery of technological tools that the industry developed in order to control user access to content. These include  and various forms of authentication or enforcement software that limit which types of digital activities users can perform. For instance, some mechanisms block the option to download or share a digital file.

The , or DMCA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998, provided the broad legal framework that allowed these technological locks to expand far beyond entertainment, including to software. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act reflected a new alignment in interests between the entertainment and software industries. It increased existing penalties for copyright infringement online and criminalized any technology used to bypass technological locks. The law was adopted although at the time – and since then – critics  that it could stifle  and increase costs for consumers.

Since 1998, more and more consumer products, from toys to dishwashers, use microchips and proprietary software protected by copyright. Because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, third party repairers cannot alter or bypass the proprietary software. If they did so, they would be liable for infringing the manufacturer’s intellectual property rights, as is the case for . Some electronics are even designed to make .

Manufacturers maintain that only they or authorized personnel can and should repair their products. These repairs . When getting a product repaired becomes almost as expensive as buying a new one, many consumers will choose to buy and throw repairable items away.

Rising resentment over repair bans

Technology tends to . With over 80% of Americans , it remains to be seen when or if American law will catch up with the unexpected consequences of a law meant to protect the intellectual rights of the creative industries, but which is now hurting consumers’ pocket books.

Watch a TED-Ed video on YouTube:  Manufacturers use several tactics to block consumers and third-party repair shops from fixing their products.