Right to repair in Canada

The Conversation talks about Updates to Canada’s Copyright Act bring consumers closer to the ‘right to repair’ your devices:

On November 7, two bills that make enormous progress toward establishing a meaningful right to repair in Canada have become law after receiving royal assent.

These two bills ammend the copyright act that do deal with Technical Protection Measure (TPM) also know as DRM, and provide exceptions for repairing. Unlike with the US DMCA, it is not legal in Canada to break a lock to repair something, because this is unrelated to copyright. Vendor have been abusing the law since before it came to effect in 2012 to prevent repair. This abuse lead to the ink jet printer cartridge racket, and other commercial practice designed to extort more money and stiffle competition. This include preventing third-party repairs like on John Deere equipment.

These changes include allowing work to make interoperability possible even if the device doesn’t want to allow it.

The Register Canada passes new right to repair rules with the same old problem:

As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so.

These bills are a good first step but don’t go far enough as they don’t require vendors to provide the tools. So one still has to break the (digital) lock. But unlike for the US DMCA, this is now law in Canada while in the US the exceptions are decided by the Library of Congress and can be taken away.

Right to repair will need much more legislation. And it’s also an environmental problem.

Bill C-244 and Bill C-294.