Farmers still don't have the right to fix much of their own equipment, but N.Y. 'right to repair' law could show the way

Photo by Liz Hafalia, San Francisco
Chronicle, via Getty Images

New York's Digital Fair Repair Act was signed into law last week, strengthening Americans' ongoing fight with equipment manufacturers from John Deere to Apple. "The law has been heralded as the nation’s first comprehensive 'right to repair' law," reports Austin Jenkins of Pluribus News. "It requires original equipment manufacturers to provide diagnostic and repair information to product owners and to independent repair shops even if they are not preferred or authorized vendors."

The law gives New York consumers, most notably farmers, a solid foothold to demand right-to-repair concessions from manufacturers of original equipment. Repair provisions for farmers have been an ongoing pursuit for the Biden administration, but the proposed Agriculture Right to Repair Act has not passed.

"Proponents quickly touted the new law as a significant victory in an ongoing, multi-state fight to pass right-to-repair laws," Jenkins reports. "TechNet, a tech industry trade group, had a positive response about changes made to the law before it was signed." Those include deletion of a proposal that manufacturers provide “passwords, security codes or materials to override security features” and addition of one allowing manufacturers to provide assembled parts rather than individual components “when the risk of improper installation heightens the risk of injury.”