Right to Repair Won More Than a Court Case This Year
For most of a decade, "right to repair" sounded like a niche cause for people who heat-gun their own phones. Then it started winning — a state law here, a federal carve-out there — and somewhere along the line the fight stopped being about one court case and started being about something bigger: who actually owns the things you buy. 2026 is the year that shift became impossible to ignore.
I've written about this beat for years, and the thing that strikes me now is how quiet the wins have become. No single moment feels like a before-and-after; instead there's a stack of them — a parts-pairing ban that actually took effect, states expanding coverage one session at a time, and a copyright process that finally stopped treating repair as a crime. That's what victory looks like in slow motion: not one gavel, but a hundred small ones.
The Parts-Pairing Ban Actually Took Effect
Start with the law that changed the conversation. Oregon's Right to Repair Act took effect January 1, 2025 — the first US state law to prohibit parts pairing, the practice of tying components to a specific device with software locks so an independent repair or a DIY swap gets bricked. The law applies to devices manufactured after January 1, 2025, with broader repair provisions reaching back to devices sold since 2015.
Why does one state law matter? Because it was the first to go after the mechanism, not just the symptom. Earlier laws — Massachusetts on autos in 2012, then New York's Digital Fair Repair Act — said manufacturers must provide parts and documentation. Oregon said you also can't actively sabotage the repair once it's done. That distinction is everything. A repair law without a parts-pairing ban is a manual you can read but can't act on. Oregon closed that loophole, and its language is already showing up in bills filed in other states.
Other States Kept Building
Oregon wasn't alone. Minnesota's digital fair repair law — the first in the country to cover home appliances — went live for products sold after July 1, 2024, meaning independent shops finally have a legal leg to stand on when a manufacturer refuses documentation. Colorado expanded its law in 2024 from farm equipment to digital electronic equipment, covering devices sold or used in the state on or after July 1, 2021 — a bill its own legislature described as the most comprehensive right to repair bill in the country. And in 2025, Texas passed its own right-to-repair bill covering consumer electronics retailing over $50 sold after September 2026, which means the next wave of compliance deadlines is already on the calendar.
The pattern here is the classic one: when federal action stalls, states build a patchwork, and manufacturers eventually find it cheaper to comply nationally than to maintain fifty state-specific policies. We've seen it with privacy and auto emissions, and repair is riding the same curve. The tell is the one we've seen before — companies that spent years lobbying against these bills, through groups like TechNet and the Entertainment Software Alliance, are now quietly publishing service manuals they once swore were safety risks.
The Copyright Side Moved Too
The legal backdrop matters just as much. For years, manufacturers leaned on Section 1201 of the DMCA — the anti-circumvention provision — as a threat to keep independent repairers from bypassing software locks, even for perfectly legal repairs. The Copyright Office's triennial Section 1201 rulemaking has steadily carved out repair exemptions, and the current exemptions cover everything from smartphones to — this is the part gamers should care about — video game consoles. Repairing your own console, including bypassing a software lock for diagnosis and repair, is now explicitly protected under the exemption. That's not a rounding error; that's the legal foundation shifting under the "don't open it, you'll void everything" playbook.
Combine that with the state laws above and you get a structural change: the intimidation strategy that kept small shops from touching certain repairs is losing its legal cover. When the enforcement mechanism loses in rulemaking and in court, the whole quiet-threat ecosystem starts to crumble — and I'd bet some of the nastiest pairing schemes are being quietly rolled back as we speak.
The Marketplace Shift Nobody Planned
And then there's the part I find genuinely fascinating: the market moved faster than the law. Apple's Self Service Repair program — launched in 2022 and expanded steadily since — now covers more devices and more countries, and even some laptop makers now publish service manuals and sell genuine parts to individuals. Framework proved that a laptop designed around user-replaceable everything can survive in a market everyone said demanded sealed aluminum slabs. Even the EU's ecodesign and reparability scoring rules are doing quiet, unglamorous work: when a repairability score is printed on the product page next to the price, it changes purchasing decisions at the margins, and margins are where design decisions actually get made.
What Still Needs Fixing
I'm not declaring victory, because there are real gaps. Console and handheld makers have been slower to change their practices, and I'd argue gaming hardware remains a disaster zone — try finding official documentation for a first-party console teardown, or buying a genuine controller analog stick module without buying a whole controller. Software locks are also migrating to appliances, vehicles, and medical devices, often faster than the laws can keep up. And the triennial DMCA exemption ritual is still a Kafkaesque process where we petition the government for permission to fix our own stuff every three years — a schedule set by copyright law, not by whether repair is safe or reasonable.
The other risk is hollow compliance. A manufacturer can publish a service manual written in lawyer-speak, price a genuine part at 80% of the cost of a new device, and technically satisfy a repair law while repairing nothing. Watch the parts pricing, not the press releases. That's where the sincerity test lives.
What I Think
(Editorial Opinion)
I think the fight is past the tipping point. Court cases get appealed and laws get repealed, but a change in what consumers consider normal is durable. A generation of buyers now checks whether a device is repairable before they check the camera specs, and that's a cultural shift no amount of lobbying reverses.
My prediction: within three years, parts-pairing as we know it will be dead in phones and laptops, not because of any single ruling but because the combination of state bans like Oregon's, regulatory attention, and bad press makes it untenable. Manufacturers will discover — with fake surprise — that they can still be profitable selling parts and service. They always could. The lock was never about safety; it was about margin.
The gaming side still needs its moment. When a $500 console dies because of a $12 fan and the official answer is "buy another console," gamers should be the angriest constituency in this fight — and honestly, we've been too quiet. Console makers watch how we react to everything else. It's time they watched us care about this too.