In brief. For two decades, manufacturers have used intellectual property—copyright and the DMCA, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets—to decide who may fix the things they sell and to keep the aftermarket profits for themselves. That control is now being pried back from every direction at once. A growing roster of U.S. states has enacted electronics right-to-repair statutes, several of them now banning "parts pairing." The EU's Right to Repair Directive takes national effect across the bloc by July 2026. The FTC has sued John Deere over repair-software restrictions. The Supreme Court's Lexmark decision strangles patent-based control. And the Copyright Office's triennial DMCA rulemakings keep widening the exemptions that legalize the very circumvention repair requires. This article maps that terrain and the compliance choices it forces. It is not legal advice; consult qualified IP counsel on specific facts.

A tale of one tractor, one toner cartridge, and a chip the size of a fingernail

Start with a scene that has become a folk legend in farm country. It is harvest, the weather window is closing, and a half-million-dollar combine throws an error code in the middle of a field. The machine still has working hydraulics, a working engine, and a working header. What it does not have is permission. A sensor has been swapped, and until a technician with the manufacturer's proprietary software plugs in and tells the combine that the new part is "genuine," the combine decides it would rather not run. The nearest authorized dealer is ninety miles away and booked solid. The crop does not care about any of this.

Multiply that scene across smartphones whose screens dim when a third party replaces them, ventilators that hospitals were barred from servicing during a pandemic, wheelchairs whose owners waited weeks for a dealer to swap a fuse, and you have the emotional engine of the right-to-repair movement. The legal engine is more interesting. Almost none of these restrictions are physical. The combine can run; the phone can light up; the cartridge can hold toner. What stops the repair is a layer of law—copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret—superimposed on the hardware through software, serialization, and a chip the size of a fingernail.

That is the through-line of this article. The right to repair is not, at bottom, a fight about screwdrivers. It is a fight about whether intellectual property—a body of law built to promote innovation by granting limited monopolies—can be repurposed into a tool for controlling a product forever, long after the customer has paid and carried it home. For background on how those IP rights attach to a device and its code in the first place, see our overview of the legal protection of software through copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and contracts.

To keep the doctrine concrete, this article follows two hypothetical actors (clearly labeled as hypothetical—do not go looking for them in a docket). Vantage Devices makes connected consumer electronics: tablets, smart appliances, home-automation hubs. Its components are serialized; its diagnostic software is locked to authorized partners; its warranty card frowns on outside repair. Hartwell Repair is the independent shop down the street that wants to fix Vantage products—to source parts, get the manuals, lawfully bypass the software locks where it can, and put a sign in the window saying it services Vantage gear. Nearly every rule below resolves into one question for each of them: what may Vantage still restrict, and what may Hartwell now lawfully do?

Part I — The legislative landscape: a fast-moving patchwork

The breakthrough and the wave behind it

For years, right-to-repair bills died quietly in committee. Then, in December 2022, New York enacted the Digital Fair Repair Act, the first comprehensive electronics-repair statute in the country. It requires manufacturers of "digital electronic equipment" to make documentation, parts, and tools available to independent repair providers and consumers on "fair and reasonable terms"—with carve-outs for trade secrets and security information, and exclusions for whole categories like motor vehicles, medical devices, and certain home appliances. The bill that reached the governor's desk was narrower than advocates wanted (it covered only devices first sold after July 2023 and let manufacturers supply assemblies of parts rather than individual components), but the template was set. The states that followed varied the scope, the exclusions, and the teeth.

As of mid-2026, the count of enacted electronics or device-repair laws sits in the high single digits and keeps climbing. Beyond New York:

  • Minnesota (2023, effective July 1, 2024) passed a notably broad electronics statute, widely regarded as the strongest of the first wave—it reaches "digital electronic equipment" generally and supplies fewer of the assembly-level escape hatches.
  • California's SB 244 (2023, effective July 1, 2024) covers electronics and appliances priced above $50, on a phased schedule, and requires manufacturers to keep repair materials available for three years for lower-priced goods and seven years for goods over $100. In a move that surprised everyone, Apple publicly backed it—a signal we return to below.
  • Colorado has legislated repeatedly and category by category: powered wheelchairs (2022), agricultural equipment (2023), and consumer electronics (2024). It is the closest thing the country has to a comprehensive state regime assembled in pieces.
  • Oregon's SB 1596 (signed March 2024, effective January 1, 2025) became the first law in the nation to ban "parts pairing."
  • Washington joined in 2025 with a Right to Repair Act for digital electronic products plus a companion law for wheelchairs and mobility devices, and other states (Minnesota's neighbors and several in the Northeast) have bills at various stages.

The categorical, piecemeal pattern is itself a lesson: there is no single "right to repair" in American law. There is a quilt, and a manufacturer's obligations turn on both the state and the product category.

Parts pairing: the frontier the newest laws target

"Parts pairing" is the practice that keeps independent repairers up at night, and it deserves a careful definition because it is where the next decade of litigation will live. Pairing uses software to bind a device to the serial numbers of its own components. When a part is replaced, the device checks whether the new part's identity is on an approved list maintained by the manufacturer. A physically identical, fully functional replacement—same screen, same battery, same sensor—may be rejected, throttled, or stripped of features (no True Tone, no biometric unlock, a nagging "unknown part" warning) unless the part is both sourced from the manufacturer and digitally blessed by the manufacturer's tool.

Notice what pairing does that nothing else on this list does. The state disclosure laws say give the independent shop the part and the manual. Pairing renders that hollow: Hartwell can have the screen and the manual and still watch the Vantage tablet refuse to accept the screen as real. That is why the newest statutes attack pairing head-on. Oregon's prohibition (for covered devices manufactured after January 1, 2025) forbids using pairing to prevent or inhibit the installation or function of a replacement part, to reduce functionality, or to display misleading warnings about unidentified parts. Colorado and Washington have followed. For Vantage Devices, the strategic implication is stark: serialization that was a quiet engineering default is becoming, in a widening set of states, affirmatively unlawful.

Two cautions temper the momentum. First, several statutes carry delayed enforcement—Oregon's pairing rules took effect in 2025 but are not enforced until 2027—so the obligations phase in. Second, the exclusions are extensive and inconsistent. Motor vehicles (covered by a separate body of automotive right-to-repair law), medical devices, video-game consoles, agricultural equipment, energy-storage systems, and HVAC are carved out in different combinations across states. A compliance team cannot reason from one statute to the next; it must read each.

Automobiles: the original right-to-repair fight

Long before anyone uttered "parts pairing," the automotive sector ran the experiment. Massachusetts voters passed the original Motor Vehicle Right to Repair Law by ballot initiative in 2012, which prompted a national 2014 Memorandum of Understanding between automakers and the aftermarket to share diagnostic and repair information industry-wide. Massachusetts then went further in 2020 with a ballot question extending the law to telematics—the wireless data streams modern cars generate—setting off years of litigation (including a federal preemption challenge invoking the Vehicle Safety Act and cybersecurity concerns) that kept the telematics provision in limbo well into the mid-2020s. The automotive story is the cautionary preview for electronics: a hard-won disclosure regime, a voluntary industry accord, and then a second-generation fight over the data layer once the simple parts-and-manuals layer was settled. Electronics is now entering its own telematics phase.

Federal efforts and the shift to enforcement

Comprehensive federal repair legislation—various Fair Repair Acts, an agricultural right-to-repair bill, and a medical-infrastructure repair bill introduced after the pandemic ventilator shortages—has been introduced repeatedly and enacted never, beaten back by sustained industry lobbying. The growing, divergent state patchwork increases the pressure for a uniform national standard, and the preemptive shape of any eventual federal law—floor, ceiling, or both—would reorder the entire field. But for now, the federal action is at the enforcement agencies, not Congress.

The most consequential federal development is litigation. In January 2025, the FTC, joined by state attorneys general (Illinois and Minnesota), sued Deere & Company under Section 5 of the FTC Act, alleging that Deere unlawfully withholds the fully functional version of its repair software, Service ADVISOR, from anyone but Deere-affiliated dealers—forcing farmers and independent shops into the dealer network for repairs the independents could do faster, cheaper, and closer to the field. The complaint frames the restriction as an unfair method of competition and an unfair practice that has inflated repair costs for a captive customer base. The suit sits beside private Sherman Act multidistrict litigation against Deere running since 2022 (In re Deere & Co. Repair Services Antitrust Litigation), and together they form the most direct test in U.S. history of whether repair restrictions can be an antitrust or unfair-competition violation. (Enforcement priorities shift with administrations, and the agency's appetite has waxed and waned; counsel should track the Deere docket itself rather than assume any trajectory.) For the antitrust framing—tying, monopoly leveraging, and refusals to deal—the doctrines overlap heavily with the patent-misuse and licensing-refusal questions that run through the rest of this piece.

The FTC's older work supplies the policy backdrop. Its 2021 report to Congress, Nixing the Fix, surveyed the manufacturers' standard justifications—safety, cybersecurity, quality, liability, IP protection—and concluded that they were "not supported by the record," that repair restrictions impose real costs on consumers and competition, and that the burden falls hardest on lower-income, rural, and underserved communities and on small repair businesses disproportionately owned by people of color. Then, in July 2024, FTC staff sent warning letters to eight companies whose warranty language appeared to condition coverage on the use of authorized service or branded parts—a likely violation of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, discussed in Part II. Nixing the Fix is not binding law, but it is the analytical lens the agency now brings to the subject, and it reframes the manufacturer's safety-and-security defenses as claims that must be substantiated, not merely asserted.

The EU goes binding

The most significant development outside the United States is the European Union's Right to Repair Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1799), adopted June 13, 2024, in force July 30, 2024, which member states must transpose and apply by July 31, 2026. Where U.S. law proceeds state by state and category by category, the EU bolts a repair obligation onto its existing product-regulation architecture. The Directive requires producers of goods whose reparability is already regulated under EU product law and listed in its annex—smartphones, tablets, certain household appliances and displays, with the list expanding as Ecodesign rules are added—to repair those goods on request, within a reasonable time and at a reasonable price, even after the legal guarantee has expired, and even for products sold before the deadline.

The mechanics are clever. The Directive introduces a standardized European Repair Information Form—an itemized, comparable repair quote that, once given, binds the price for 30 days—so consumers can shop repairs the way they shop insurance. It requires every member state to adopt at least one repair-promotion measure (repair funds, vouchers, information campaigns, skills training). Most pointedly, it nudges the repair-versus-replace calculus by extending the legal guarantee by twelve months, once, when a consumer chooses repair over replacement—a quiet but powerful thumb on the scale. An EU online repair platform is to follow, with a common interface by mid-2027 and full operation by 2028. Because the obligations attach to producers placing goods on the EU market, they reach non-EU manufacturers—including U.S. companies like Vantage Devices—that sell into Europe.

The Directive does not stand alone. It layers onto Ecodesign spare-parts-availability mandates, France's mandatory repairability index (and the EU's broader move toward a harmonized repairability label under the consumer-empowerment rules), and the UK's post-Brexit regime requiring certain appliance spare parts to remain available for up to a decade. Australia's Productivity Commission has recommended reforms; Canadian provinces, Quebec foremost, have legislated in the agricultural space and amended consumer-protection law to mandate parts and repair information. The cumulative effect is a global tilt toward mandated repairability that a multinational can no longer treat as a U.S.-only headache.

Part II — How manufacturers use IP to control repair, and where the law now stops them

This is the heart of it. Four bodies of intellectual property supply the levers manufacturers pull. We take them in order of how powerfully the law has cut each one back: copyright/DMCA (curbed by exemptions but still potent at the trafficking layer), patent (gutted by exhaustion), trademark (a narrow lever, hemmed by fair use), and trade secret (a real but frequently overstated shield).

A. Copyright and the DMCA: the most powerful lever, and the cleverest workaround

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has become the sharpest copyright tool for restricting repair, and the mechanism is worth slowing down on. Section 1201 does two distinct things (17 U.S.C. § 1201):

  1. § 1201(a)(1) prohibits circumventing a technological measure that "effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work.
  2. § 1201(a)(2) and (b) prohibit trafficking in technologies, products, or services designed to circumvent—whether to defeat access controls or copy-protection controls.

Here is the repair-restriction theory, in a chain: a Vantage tablet contains copyrighted firmware; that firmware is wrapped in a technological protection measure (TPM)—encryption, an authentication handshake, a signed-code check; diagnosing or repairing the tablet requires getting past the TPM; therefore the repair is itself a § 1201 violation, independent of whether any copyright is actually infringed. That last clause is the killer feature for manufacturers. Section 1201 created a new right—a right against access—that does not depend on proving infringement of the underlying code. As the Copyright Office and courts have explained, Congress deliberately left circumvention of a copy-protection measure unprohibited (to preserve fair use) but flatly banned circumvention of an access control. Repair locks are pitched as access controls.

But the theory has cracks, and the cracks are exactly where repair advocates have built their case.

Crack one: the lock must actually protect a copyrighted work. A TPM is only covered if it controls access to, or protects the copyright in, a work protected by the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)). When a "lock" really just blocks interoperability rather than guarding expression, courts have refused to bless it. The seminal repair-adjacent decisions are two Sixth Circuit/Federal Circuit cases that the manufacturers would rather forget. In Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 387 F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004), Lexmark used an authentication handshake to stop third-party toner cartridges from working with its printers and sued the chip-maker who replicated it. The Sixth Circuit held the measure did not "effectively control access" to the printer's copyrighted code, because any purchaser could read that code simply by buying the printer—the lock controlled the cartridge market, not access to the work. In Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc., 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004), a garage-door-opener maker sued a competitor whose universal remote bypassed a "rolling code" security routine. The Federal Circuit rejected the claim, holding that a § 1201 plaintiff must show a nexus between the circumvention and a copyright interest the DMCA protects—and that homeowners had implied authorization to operate their own garage doors. Together, Lexmark and Chamberlain stand for a principle with enormous repair significance: the DMCA protects copyrights, not aftermarket monopolies. A lock whose real function is to fence out independent repair, not to prevent copying, is on shaky § 1201 ground. (The split is not perfectly clean—the Ninth Circuit in MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., 629 F.3d 928 (9th Cir. 2010), rejected Chamberlain's infringement-nexus requirement—but the access-control reasoning of Lexmark remains influential.)

Crack two: the triennial exemptions. Even where a TPM is a genuine access control, the Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, may grant temporary exemptions from § 1201(a)(1) every three years (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(C)). Repair advocates have won steadily expanding ground:

  • 2015: narrow exemptions for vehicle and some device diagnosis and repair, and the first agricultural-equipment exemption.
  • 2018: a broader "diagnosis, maintenance, or repair" exemption for motorized land vehicles and a range of consumer devices.
  • 2021: a significant expansion reaching smartphones, "home appliances or home systems," and—crucially—medical devices and their data, plus broader device coverage.
  • 2024 (the ninth cycle): renewal and further expansion, extending repair-related exemptions to additional commercial and industrial equipment categories and refining the agricultural and consumer-device language.

These exemptions matter enormously to Hartwell Repair: they make the act of circumventing a repair lock lawful for covered devices. The mechanics, the history, and the limits of this rulemaking are the subject of our companion piece on unlocking cell phones and the DMCA exemption, which traces how cell-phone unlocking became the proof-of-concept for using § 1201's safety valve as a consumer-rights tool—right down to the 2014 Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, the only time Congress has stepped in to reverse a denied exemption.

Crack three's catch—the trafficking trap. Here is the elegant, maddening limit that every independent shop must understand. The triennial exemptions lift only the ban on the act of circumvention under § 1201(a)(1). They do not touch the trafficking bans of § 1201(a)(2) and (b). So Hartwell may have a clearly lawful right to bypass a Vantage lock and no lawful way to obtain the tool that does the bypassing—because making, selling, or distributing that tool can still be trafficking. The Copyright Office has acknowledged this gap and lacks the statutory power to fix it; only Congress can. The practical upshot is a doctrine that grants the right with one hand and withholds the means with the other. And it is precisely this gap that the state statutes are designed to close: by ordering manufacturers themselves to hand over the tools, documentation, and parts, the New York/Minnesota/California model routes around the federal trafficking problem entirely. Where a state repair law applies, Hartwell does not need to acquire a gray-market circumvention tool; it can demand the real one. That is the quiet genius of the state legislation—it solves a federal copyright problem with state consumer-protection law.

A final wrinkle worth flagging for litigators: § 1201 also includes copyright-management-information provisions (§ 1202) that bar removing or falsifying ownership and licensing data. These rarely drive repair disputes directly, but a manufacturer that strips or rewrites firmware identifiers during a "repair" should keep § 1202 in view.

B. Patent: exhaustion and the repair/reconstruction line

Patent-based control has fared the worst of the four levers, and the reason is a 165-year-old doctrine the Supreme Court recently fortified.

Patent exhaustion provides that an authorized sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee's right to control that particular article: the buyer may use, repair, and resell it without further permission. The doctrine traces to Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. (14 How.) 539 (1852), and the Supreme Court has been tightening it for years—Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008) (sale exhausts even method patents practiced by the article)—but the decisive repair case is Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., 581 U.S. 360 (2017). (Note that this is a different Lexmark fight from the Sixth Circuit DMCA case above—same company, same toner cartridges, different IP theory. Lexmark fought the right-to-repair war on two fronts and lost both.)

The facts are tailor-made for the movement. Lexmark sold toner cartridges at a discount under a "Return Program" whose terms forbade reuse and resale; the cartridges even carried a microchip to deter refilling. Impression Products acquired spent cartridges, refurbished them, and resold them. The Federal Circuit, relying on its own Mallinckrodt, Inc. v. Medipart, Inc., 976 F.2d 700 (Fed. Cir. 1992), had long held that a "clearly communicated" post-sale restriction survived exhaustion and could be enforced by an infringement suit. The Supreme Court unanimously reversed on the domestic question and (over a partial dissent by Justice Ginsburg) on the foreign one. Its holdings:

  • An authorized sale exhausts the patentee's rights automatically, and a post-sale restriction cannot be enforced through patent law. Restraints on alienation of personal property are the issue; once Lexmark "received its reward" through the sale, it could no longer wield the patent against downstream use or resale. The patentee retains contract remedies (subject to privity), but not patent-infringement remedies, against the buyer.
  • A sale anywhere in the world exhausts U.S. patent rights, overruling Jazz Photo Corp. v. International Trade Commission, 264 F.3d 1094 (Fed. Cir. 2001), and harmonizing patent with copyright's first-sale rule from Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013).

For repair, Lexmark is close to dispositive of the simple case: you cannot contract around exhaustion through patent law to forbid a buyer from repairing or refurbishing what the buyer owns. That is why patent has receded as a primary repair-control tool. For a fuller treatment of how infringement claims and defenses fit together, see our practical guide on what constitutes patent infringement—claims and defenses.

But exhaustion is not a blank check, and two limits keep patent in the conversation.

Limit one: repair versus reconstruction. A buyer may repair a patented article—replace worn or spent components—but may not reconstruct it, meaning rebuild a spent article so thoroughly that it is, in effect, a new unpatented-to-the-buyer making. The line comes from cases like Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961) (replacing a worn fabric top on a patented convertible-top mechanism was permissible repair, not reconstruction), and Wilson v. Simpson, 56 U.S. (9 How.) 109 (1850) (replacing worn cutter-blades in a patented planing machine was repair). The test is qualitative, not a stopwatch on how many parts you swap: replacing a spent element is repair even if it is the part most likely to wear out; building a new combination is reconstruction. Manufacturers accordingly argue that major-assembly replacements—or refurbishment that amounts to manufacturing a fresh patented combination—cross into reconstruction. The argument has real force in heavy equipment and rarely any force in "I replaced the battery."

Limit two: exhaustion protects the owner's repair, not third-party manufacture of patented parts. This is the limit aftermarket suppliers must internalize. Exhaustion frees the article you bought; it does not license you to make new copies of the patented invention. An independent who fabricates and sells a patented replacement component can infringe under 35 U.S.C. § 271 even though every device the part goes into was lawfully sold. The buyer's right to repair and the supplier's right to manufacture are different questions with different answers.

That second limit collides head-on with design patents on repair parts, and the leading case is one every aftermarket counsel should know. In Automotive Body Parts Ass'n v. Ford Global Technologies, LLC, 930 F.3d 1314 (Fed. Cir. 2019), an association of aftermarket parts makers challenged Ford's design patents on the F-150's hood and headlamp, arguing (1) that the designs were functional—and thus unprotectable—because consumers buy a replacement hood precisely to match the original, and (2) that exhaustion or a "repair" right should let owners buy aftermarket copies. The Federal Circuit rejected both. A design's value as an aesthetic match for the original does not make it "functional" in the patent-invalidating sense; the relevant function inquiry asks whether the design is dictated by the article's mechanical function, not whether buyers want their replacement fender to look like the original fender. And the right to repair one's truck does not include a right to have third parties manufacture patented body panels. Automotive Body Parts is, in effect, the design-patent counterweight to Lexmark: utility-patent exhaustion may free the owner, but a valid design patent can still bar aftermarket copies of the patented appearance. It is also why the recent upheaval in design-patent obviousness law matters so much to this field—if more design patents fall as obvious, more aftermarket parts become safe to make. The Federal Circuit's en banc LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Fed. Cir. 2024) (itself an aftermarket-parts case) overhauled that obviousness standard, and we unpack it in the LKQ decision and the seismic shift in design-patent obviousness analysis; the broader doctrinal fight over what configuration designs may even be protected is treated in design patents vs. trade dress protection for product configurations.

C. Trademark: authorization, channels, and nominative fair use

Trademark is the narrowest of the four levers, and the law has long fenced it in—but manufacturers still reach for it three ways.

First, licensing the mark to an "authorized" network. Manufacturers grant repair partners the right to display the brand and call themselves "Authorized Service Providers," conditioning the license on genuine-parts use and approved procedures. That is unremarkable and lawful; quality-control conditions are the heart of trademark licensing.

Second, channeling trademark-bearing parts. A manufacturer may restrict who sells parts that carry its mark, and it may pursue genuine counterfeits—parts stamped with the brand that did not come from (or were not authorized by) the brand owner—under §§ 32 and 43(a) of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125(a). The safe course for an aftermarket maker is clean non-OEM branding: a part that says "compatible with Vantage" but bears its own maker's mark is selling itself honestly; a part that bears Vantage's logo without authorization is asking for a counterfeiting suit. Note the first-sale (trademark exhaustion) principle, too: a reseller may resell genuine branded goods, and even resell refurbished genuine goods, provided the condition is adequately disclosed so consumers are not deceived—the rule of Champion Spark Plug Co. v. Sanders, 331 U.S. 125 (1947), which allowed resale of reconditioned plugs stamped "Champion" only because they were clearly marked "Repaired" or "Used." Pass a repaired part off as factory-fresh, and first sale will not save you.

Third—and this is where manufacturers overreach—suing an independent shop for naming the brand it services. This runs straight into nominative fair use. Hartwell Repair may truthfully say "We service Vantage tablets" because there is no other practical way to identify the product it fixes. The doctrine, from New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992), permits using another's mark to refer to that party's own goods when (1) the product is not readily identifiable without the mark, (2) the user takes no more of the mark than necessary, and (3) nothing in the use suggests sponsorship or endorsement. So Hartwell may use the word "Vantage"; it may not reproduce Vantage's stylized logo, color scheme, and "Authorized" badge in a way that implies a relationship that does not exist. The boundary is the implication of sponsorship, not the mere reference. For repairers, the practical rule is simple: describe what you fix in plain words, disclaim affiliation, and skip the borrowed logos.

D. Trade secret: secrecy versus mandated disclosure

The last lever is the one manufacturers invoke most loudly against repair legislation itself: that forcing disclosure of service manuals, diagnostic algorithms, and technical specifications would destroy trade secrets protected under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, and state law (most states' Uniform Trade Secrets Act). Both bodies of law condition protection on reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy and on the information deriving value from not being generally known.

The tension is real but, as a legal matter, frequently overstated—for two reasons.

Reason one: the statutes have carve-outs. Right-to-repair laws routinely excuse disclosure of genuine trade secrets. New York's Act, for example, does not require a manufacturer to divulge a trade secret to the extent doing so would require relinquishing protection. So the disclosure mandate and the trade-secret shield are reconciled by design, not by litigation: the manufacturer must hand over the manual, not the crown-jewel algorithm.

Reason two—the sharper point—the predicate often fails. Information already shared with hundreds or thousands of authorized repairers may not be a secret at all. Secrecy survives limited disclosure to partners under genuine confidentiality obligations, but it erodes with broad dissemination and lax controls. A diagnostic procedure distributed to every dealer in the country, behind a clickwrap nobody enforces, is a weak secret. The most contested disputes therefore cluster around the categories where the "secret" claim is plausible: proprietary diagnostic software, gated service-information portals, and telematics data streams. Each must be tested against how widely the information already circulates—and the discipline that determines whether such a claim survives is the same operational hygiene we describe in trade secrets in the age of remote work and cloud computing. A manufacturer that wants to win the trade-secret argument against a repair mandate has to have actually treated the information as secret long before the legislature came calling.

E. Magnuson-Moss: the warranty lever, turned against the manufacturer

One more federal statute belongs here because it cuts for repair: the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 2301–2312. Its anti-tying provision, § 2302(c), forbids a warrantor from conditioning warranty coverage on the consumer's use of an authorized service provider or branded parts—unless the part or service is provided free, or the FTC has granted a waiver. The familiar sticker—"Warranty void if opened by anyone but our techs"—is, for most consumer products costing more than a nominal amount, presumptively unlawful. That is the violation the FTC's July 2024 warning letters targeted, and it is the first place Vantage's counsel should look when reviewing the warranty card. A manufacturer may recommend genuine parts and may truthfully warn about counterfeit risks; it may not make the warranty itself the hostage.

Part III — The cases and clashes that drew the map

Doctrine is cleaner when you can attach it to a fight. Beyond the Lexmark twins and Automotive Body Parts v. Ford, three sagas defined the modern terrain.

Apple and the parts-pairing wars. Apple has been the movement's most-watched antagonist and, lately, its most surprising convert. Norway's Consumer Council challenged warranty messaging implying independent repair voids coverage; the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission scrutinized the infamous "Error 53" software update that bricked iPhones repaired with non-OEM Touch ID parts; and U.S. consumer class actions have attacked screen and battery serialization as throttling lawful repair. Apple responded by launching its Independent Repair Provider program and a Self Service Repair store renting tools and selling parts—and then, in a genuine plot twist, publicly backing California's SB 244 and announcing it would support pairing-friendly repairs and reuse of used genuine parts. Skeptics note the concessions remain bounded by Apple's own parts catalog and pairing system; supporters call it the clearest sign that the largest incumbent has decided to compete on repair rather than litigate against it.

John Deere and the tractor that wouldn't run. Deere is the movement's emblem. After the Copyright Office's agricultural exemptions kneecapped its DMCA theory, Deere signed a 2023 Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation pledging to make diagnostic tools, manuals, and parts available—commitments critics dismissed as voluntary, vague, and unenforceable. Colorado's 2023 agricultural-repair law then targeted Deere's restrictions directly, and the FTC's January 2025 lawsuit put them on trial under federal law. The Deere arc compresses the whole story: copyright lock, exemption, voluntary pledge, state statute, federal enforcement.

Medical devices and the pandemic. When ventilators failed during COVID-19 surges and hospital biomeds were locked out of service software and manuals, the abstract debate became life-and-death. The episode produced emergency manual-sharing, a wave of legislative proposals, and heightened FDA attention to repair restrictions that impede device availability—while leaving medical devices, paradoxically, among the most commonly excluded categories in the state electronics statutes, on safety grounds. The medical-device fight is the field's unresolved frontier.

Part IV — Compliance and strategy

For manufacturers (counsel to Vantage Devices)

Start with an honest audit, because most of the legal exposure here is discoverable in a spreadsheet:

  • Inventory the service materials and map what is available to authorized providers versus independents and consumers—the gap is the compliance problem.
  • Map parts channels and pricing, and identify the minimum availability periods each applicable state law requires (e.g., California's three-/seven-year tiers).
  • Catalog every TPM, software lock, and serialization/pairing scheme, then run each against two filters: (1) does a DMCA exemption already legalize the circumvention it tries to prevent (making the lock useless against covered repair), and (2) does a parts-pairing ban now make the lock itself unlawful in Oregon, Colorado, Washington, or wherever it sells?
  • Pressure-test every "trade secret." Information already in thousands of dealer hands is not a crown jewel; do not build a compliance posture on a secrecy claim that discovery will demolish.
  • Read the warranty card for Magnuson-Moss landmines. Strike any term that conditions coverage on authorized service or branded parts absent free provision.

From that baseline, the strategy writes itself: jurisdiction-specific repair programs that account for the state patchwork while preparing for EU obligations from July 2026 and for potential federal preemption; "fair and reasonable" documentation-access portals; parts availability for the required minimums; diagnostic-software licensing that gives independents real access while protecting genuine security interests; and warranty cleanup. The legitimate interests a manufacturer keeps should shape, not defeat, the program. Safety restrictions that genuinely require specialized training may justify limited, substantiated limits—documented, not pretextual (recall Nixing the Fix's skepticism of unsupported safety claims). Cybersecurity for connected devices is a real concern best met with security protocols and repairer credentialing, not a blanket repair ban. The throughline: every restriction must trace to a substantiated interest, not to the wish to keep the aftermarket.

For independent repairers and aftermarket suppliers (counsel to Hartwell Repair)

Hartwell's playbook:

  • Map the documentation and subscription rights available under each applicable statute, and use them—the whole point of the state laws is that you can demand the real tools rather than scrounge gray-market ones.
  • Know the DMCA exemptions cold—and their trafficking trap. The right to circumvent a covered lock does not, by itself, give you a lawful source for the circumvention tool; lean on the state-law disclosure right to close that gap.
  • Write nominative-fair-use marketing rules. Describe what you service in plain words ("We repair Vantage tablets"), disclaim affiliation, and never borrow the logo or the "Authorized" badge.
  • Keep quality procedures and insurance. Expanded access does not erase liability for negligent repair; if anything, it raises the bar for doing the work competently.

Aftermarket manufacturers carry distinct exposure: parts that embody patented technology need a real patent clearance, because exhaustion frees the owner's repair, not your manufacture of patented parts (remember Automotive Body Parts v. Ford for design patents); parts must avoid OEM marks unless genuinely authorized; and engineering around software authentication to achieve compatibility must be done without copying protected code—the reverse-engineering and interoperability analysis that lives at the intersection of copyright and trade secret, and that we treat in the legal protection of software.

For consumers

Research repairability before buying—EU repairability labels and France's index increasingly make this a purchasing factor; understand that, under Magnuson-Moss, independent repair generally does not void a warranty; keep your repair documentation; and report suspected violations to the FTC and your state attorney general. The enforcement machinery now depends partly on complaints.

Part V — The environmental dimension and the road ahead

The movement's alliance with environmental advocates rests on hard numbers, not vibes. The EU estimates that prematurely discarded but repairable goods generate roughly 35 million tonnes of waste and 261 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions in the bloc each year—much of it from devices abandoned for repair difficulty rather than functional failure. Repair extends product lifecycles, defers the extraction and manufacturing impacts of a replacement, and is the load-bearing wall of the "circular economy" now embedded in EU Ecodesign rules, extended-producer-responsibility schemes, and repairability labels. E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream on earth; "fix it" is, increasingly, an environmental policy.

The legal trajectory points one way: more states, broader categories (appliances, industrial equipment, and—eventually—medical devices), stronger enforcement, and the steady advance of parts-pairing prohibitions from frontier to norm. The wildcard is a federal statute, whose preemptive scope would reorder everything. And the smartest incumbents have read the room. Rather than litigate every rearguard position, some are designing for repairability as a sustainability selling point, competing on service quality rather than exclusivity, and—in a few cases—shifting toward product-as-a-service models that may legitimately restrict repair within an ongoing service relationship (you don't repair a leased copier; the lessor does), while inviting their own fresh regulatory scrutiny.

Conclusion: rebalancing control across the product lifecycle

For two decades, manufacturers used intellectual property to extend control past the point of sale—capturing aftermarket revenue and customer relationships the way a landlord captures rent. The tools existed, the technology enabled them, and the commercial logic was airtight. The pendulum has swung. Legislatures in a growing list of states, the European Union, and federal enforcers have concluded that unrestricted manufacturer control over repair harms consumers, competition, and the environment. Impression Products v. Lexmark drains patent-based control through exhaustion; Lexmark v. Static Control and Chamberlain v. Skylink remind everyone that the DMCA guards copyrights, not aftermarket monopolies; the triennial exemptions keep legalizing the circumvention repair requires; parts-pairing bans attack the newest lock at its root; Magnuson-Moss disarms the warranty threat; and trade-secret carve-outs reconcile disclosure with genuine secrecy. Even Automotive Body Parts v. Ford—a manufacturer win—maps the narrow remaining lane where IP still legitimately controls a repair part. The intellectual-property system exists to promote innovation and benefit the public. When IP rights are wielded mainly to extract aftermarket rents rather than to reward creation, the balance has tilted too far, and the law is correcting it. The manufacturers, repairers, and counsel who engage the new regime early—rather than defending each lock until a court or a legislature pries it loose—will navigate the transition best.

Frequently asked questions

Does fixing my own device or having an independent shop fix it void the warranty? Generally no. Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (15 U.S.C. § 2302(c)), a warrantor usually cannot condition coverage on the use of authorized service or branded parts unless those are provided free or the FTC grants a waiver. A manufacturer can deny coverage for damage actually caused by a bad repair, but it cannot void the whole warranty merely because an independent did the work. The FTC's 2024 warning letters targeted companies whose warranty language crossed that line.

Is it legal to bypass a manufacturer's software lock to repair a device? It depends on the device and the year. The Copyright Office's triennial exemptions to DMCA § 1201 currently make the act of circumventing repair-related access controls lawful for many categories—motorized vehicles, smartphones, home appliances and systems, medical devices, and a growing list of commercial equipment after the 2021 and 2024 cycles. The catch is the trafficking trap: the exemptions do not legalize making or distributing the circumvention tool, so the right to bypass a lock does not guarantee a lawful source for the means. State repair laws increasingly solve this by ordering manufacturers to supply the tools directly.

What exactly is "parts pairing," and is it illegal? Parts pairing uses software to bind a device to the serial numbers of its components, so a physically compatible replacement is rejected, throttled, or stripped of features unless the manufacturer digitally authorizes it. It is becoming unlawful in a growing set of states—Oregon's SB 1596 was the first to ban it (effective 2025), with Colorado and Washington following—though enforcement dates and product exclusions vary. It is not yet banned nationwide.

Can a patent stop me from repairing something I own? Almost never for ordinary repair. Under Impression Products v. Lexmark, 581 U.S. 360 (2017), an authorized sale exhausts the patentee's rights automatically; a post-sale restriction cannot be enforced through patent law. The owner may use, repair, and resell the article. Two limits survive: replacing so much of a patented article that you effectively reconstruct a new one can infringe, and exhaustion does not let third parties manufacture patented replacement parts—including parts protected by design patents, per Automotive Body Parts Ass'n v. Ford, 930 F.3d 1314 (Fed. Cir. 2019).

Can an independent shop advertise that it repairs a particular brand? Yes, within nominative fair use. A shop may truthfully use a brand name to identify what it services, using no more of the mark than necessary and doing nothing to imply sponsorship or endorsement (New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992)). Use the word; skip the borrowed logo and the "Authorized" badge; disclaim affiliation.

Does the EU Directive reach U.S. companies? Yes. The Right to Repair Directive (EU) 2024/1799 attaches obligations to producers placing goods on the EU market, so U.S. manufacturers selling covered products into Europe must comply once member states transpose it—by July 31, 2026. The obligations include repairing on request at a reasonable price even after the guarantee expires, a standardized repair-information form, and (for repair-over-replacement) a twelve-month guarantee extension.

Can a manufacturer refuse disclosure by calling its service information a trade secret? Only for information that genuinely qualifies. State repair statutes carve out true trade secrets, but the threshold question—whether the information is secret at all—often defeats the claim, because data already shared with thousands of authorized dealers under loose controls may not be "secret." The contested cases involve proprietary diagnostic software, gated service portals, and telematics data.

Related Articles

This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The right-to-repair landscape is changing rapidly—several statutes and enforcement actions discussed here postdate one another by months, and effective and enforcement dates differ from adoption dates—so readers should confirm current law and consult qualified intellectual property counsel regarding their specific circumstances. For assistance, please contact our intellectual property and technology practice.

Selected authorities

Statutes, directives, and rules: 17 U.S.C. § 1201 (DMCA anti-circumvention and trafficking) and § 1202 (copyright-management information); 17 U.S.C. § 109 (copyright first sale); 35 U.S.C. § 271 (patent infringement); Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125(a) (trademark); Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1831–1839; Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 2301–2312 (esp. § 2302(c) anti-tying); FTC Act § 5; N.Y. Digital Fair Repair Act (2022); Minn. right-to-repair law (2023); Cal. SB 244 (2023); Colo. consumer-electronics, agricultural-equipment, and powered-wheelchair repair laws (2022–2024); Or. SB 1596 (2024); Wash. Right to Repair Act (2025); Mass. Motor Vehicle Right to Repair Law (2012, 2020 telematics amendment); Directive (EU) 2024/1799 (Right to Repair) and the EU Ecodesign framework; Copyright Office § 1201 triennial exemptions (2015, 2018, 2021, 2024).

Cases and agency actions: Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc., 581 U.S. 360 (2017); Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Elecs., Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008); Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013); Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961); Wilson v. Simpson, 56 U.S. (9 How.) 109 (1850); Bloomer v. McQuewan, 55 U.S. (14 How.) 539 (1852); Lexmark Int'l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 387 F.3d 522 (6th Cir. 2004); Chamberlain Grp., Inc. v. Skylink Techs., Inc., 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004); MDY Indus., LLC v. Blizzard Entm't, Inc., 629 F.3d 928 (9th Cir. 2010); Automotive Body Parts Ass'n v. Ford Global Techs., LLC, 930 F.3d 1314 (Fed. Cir. 2019); LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Tech. Operations LLC (Fed. Cir. en banc 2024); New Kids on the Block v. News Am. Publ'g, Inc., 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992); Champion Spark Plug Co. v. Sanders, 331 U.S. 125 (1947); FTC v. Deere & Co. (filed Jan. 2025); In re Deere & Co. Repair Servs. Antitrust Litig. (N.D. Ill., 2022– ); FTC, Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions (May 2021); FTC staff Magnuson-Moss warranty warning letters (July 2024); Apple "Error 53"/warranty inquiries (Norway Consumer Council; ACCC).

Secondary sources: National Conference of State Legislatures right-to-repair tracking; U.S. PIRG right-to-repair reports; Copyright Office § 1201 rulemaking recommendations (2015–2024); contemporary practitioner analyses (2024–2026) of the state statutes, the EU Directive, and the FTC v. Deere litigation. Legislative status changes quickly; confirm current effective and enforcement dates before relying on any statute described here.