Let’s be real about something: when you hand over money for a product, you should own that product. Not license it. Not subscribe to it. Not rent access to it pending the manufacturer’s continued goodwill. Own it the way you own a hammer or a chair or a book. You paid for it, it’s yours, end of sentence.
That used to be obvious. It isn’t anymore, because a lot of powerful companies spent a lot of money making sure it wasn’t.
What “Everything as a Service” Actually Means
The subscription economy gets sold as convenience. Pay a little each month instead of a big upfront cost. Always get the latest version. Seamless updates. What it actually means is that the company retains control of the thing you’re paying for indefinitely, and that control can be exercised against you at any time.
John Deere figured this out before most tech companies did. Farmers buying $500,000 tractors discovered they couldn’t fix their own equipment. The software that runs the tractor, software on hardware the farmer owns, on land the farmer owns, is locked behind manufacturer authorization. A broken-down tractor during planting season isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a financial catastrophe. And the manufacturer’s answer was: wait for our authorized technician, at our price, on our timeline.
This isn’t a glitch. It’s the model. Lock the software, lock the repair market, extract rent from people who thought they were buyers.
It’s the same logic as Adobe killing Photoshop perpetual licenses. The same logic as appliance manufacturers disabling features via remote update. The same logic as car companies charging monthly subscription fees for heated seats that are physically already installed in your car. The hardware is there. You paid for it. They’re just decided it works on their schedule, not yours.
The DMCA Is Being Used as a Weapon Against You
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1998 ostensibly to protect intellectual property. Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent digital access controls and manufacturers figured out quickly that if they put a digital lock on anything, they could threaten anyone who bypassed it with federal criminal liability.
Your insulin pump has a digital lock. Your tractor has a digital lock. Your phone has a digital lock. Your car’s diagnostic port has a digital lock. None of these locks exist to protect creative works. They exist to protect repair monopolies, and the DMCA is the legal mechanism manufacturers wave around to keep independent repair shops and individual owners from touching their own property.
This is not a fringe abuse. It is standard industry practice, and it has been for over two decades.
Right to Repair Is an Ownership Issue, Not a Tech Issue
The framing of right to repair as a niche concern for tech hobbyists drives me insane, because it completely misses what’s actually at stake.
This is the same fight as labor rights. The same fight as housing rights. The same fight as healthcare autonomy. In every case the underlying question is: who controls the things that matter in your life? You or an institution that can change the terms whenever it’s profitable to do so?
You’re always one missed payment, one policy update, one company acquisition away from losing access to something you thought was yours. That’s not a coincidence of product design. That’s a deliberate architecture of dependency. The goal is to eliminate the conditions under which you could ever just tell a corporation to go to hell and walk away, because they’ve made sure you can’t function without their continued permission.
FOSS (free and open source software) is the software world’s answer to this problem. If you can read the code, modify the code, and run the code, no company can revoke your access to the tool. Right to repair is the hardware equivalent. If you can open the device, diagnose it, and fix it with parts and documentation you can actually obtain, no manufacturer can hold your equipment hostage.
These movements exist because ownership without the ability to maintain and repair what you own isn’t really ownership. It’s a conditional lease with extra steps.
What Actual Reform Looks Like
I’ve drafted model federal legislation on this, the Consumer Right to Repair Act, and the core demands aren’t complicated:
Using authentic parts from the same manufacturer never triggers a digital lock. Full stop. You can’t buy a manufacturer-genuine part and have the device brick itself because you installed it yourself.
Third-party parts and software are legal to use. A manufacturer can note in warranty terms that non-OEM parts void the warranty, fine, that’s something, but they cannot use DMCA threats, software locks, or “unauthorized repair detected” kill switches to punish you for exercising ownership of your own device.
Wiring diagrams, schematics, and diagnostic tools must be available at reasonable cost with no certification requirements for individual consumers. Not just for authorized dealers. For anyone who owns the product.
No digital lock may prevent a device from functioning, and no manufacturer modification may brick a device as retaliation for repair. A device that functions before you work on it must be capable of functioning after, assuming competent repair.
None of this prevents manufacturers from competing on quality, on service, on warranty terms. It just removes their ability to use software as a weapon against the people who bought their products.
The companies fighting this will tell you it’s about safety. It’s about intellectual property. It’s about quality control. It’s not. It’s about a business model that requires you to never fully own the things you buy, and it’s worth naming that plainly.
You bought it. You should own it. The law should say so.