IP Law Daily, TECHNOLOGY/INTERNET NEWS: Governor Newsom signs California right-to-repair law, (Oct 11, 2023)

By Cheryl Beise, J.D.

California joins Minnesota and New York in passing right to repair consumer protection laws.

California Governor Gavin Newsom on October 10 signed the Right to Repair Act, SB 244, into law. The bill ensures that independent repair shops and consumers have access to parts, tools, and information to repair electronics and appliances. Both houses of the state legislature unanimously passed the bill last month. The new law will take effect on July 1, 2024.

The Right to Repair Act amends the California Public Resources Code, to require manufacturers of various consumer electronics and appliance products with a wholesale price of $50 or more to make available documentation and all functional parts and tools, inclusive of any updates, on fair and reasonable terms, to owners of the product, service and repair facilities, and service dealers in order for them to diagnose, maintain, or repair a product. Device makers will have to stock replacement parts and tools, and maintain documentation for three years for products cost between $50 and $99, and for seven years for products that cost $100 or more. The bill does not apply to industrial equipment. It also excludes certain consumer products, such as alarm systems and video game consoles.

This bill provides that a city, a county, a city and county, or the state may bring an action in superior court to impose civil liability on a person or entity that knowingly, or reasonably should have known that it violated, these provisions.

Other right to repair proposals and laws. New York became the first state to pass a general consumer right to repair law. In 2022, New York passed and the Governor signed the Digital Fair Repair Act providing consumers with the right to repair certain electronic products. Minnesota followed suit in May 2023. Right-to-repair legislation has been introduced in more than 25 states and in Congress. In February 2022, Reps. Mondaire Jones (D., N.Y.) and Victoria Spartz (R., Ind.) introduced the Freedom to Repair Act, which would amend section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow consumers to circumvent technological protections for software to repair their own electronic devices or have repairs performed by third parties. In 2021 the Federal Trade Commission released a report, “Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions,” finding that “[m]any consumer products have become harder to fix and maintain” because repairs tend to require “specialized tools, difficult-to-obtain parts, and access to proprietary diagnostic software.”

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