What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Right to Repair: The Fight for Digital Ownership
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever bought something only to discover you don't really own it? That's the troubling reality Lewis Rossman is fighting against through his work with the Fulu Foundation.
What began as frustration over limited access to repair parts for Apple products evolved into a broader movement challenging how technology companies control our devices long after purchase. Rossman takes us behind the scenes of the right-to-repair movement, revealing how Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act effectively criminalizes breaking digital locks on products you've purchased – with penalties reaching up to five years in federal prison.
The conversation reveals shocking examples of companies remotely disabling functionality through firmware updates, then demanding subscription payments to restore features customers already paid for. From Samsung's Frame TVs to smart home devices, this practice is becoming alarmingly common. As Rossman explains, "When you buy things now, you just don't own them anymore."
We explore how these issues extend far beyond consumer electronics – affecting farmers with tractors, wheelchair users, military equipment, and even the gaming community through the "Stop Killing Games" movement. The environmental implications are equally concerning, with repair restrictions contributing significantly to e-waste problems. Rossman's behind-the-scenes stories about technicians smuggling motherboard components "in underwear through underground tunnels" highlight the desperate lengths repair professionals must go to circumvent these restrictions.
Despite these challenges, the movement has achieved meaningful victories. By documenting anti-ownership practices and encouraging everyday resistance, Rossman demonstrates how collective action can influence both policy and corporate behavior. His most powerful message? Change happens when millions of people push back, even in small ways, against practices that undermine true ownership.
Visit ConsumerRightsWiki to document instances where companies have disabled functionality on products you've purchased or required subscriptions for previously included features. Every contribution strengthens the movement for digital ownership rights.
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Hey everyone, fascinating topic today as we dive into the world of right to repair and consumer protection, ownership of software, hardware and more with the Fulu Foundation. Lewis, how are you?
Speaker 2:Pleasure to meet you.
Speaker 1:Good to meet you. You have a lot going on there in the background which we're going to talk about and more Before that. Maybe introduce yourself the really interesting mission you're on and how did you come to it.
Speaker 2:Sure, so my name is Lewis Rossman.
Speaker 2:I had a repair shop that I started about 16 years ago that did component-level electronics repair, focusing on Apple products for data recovery, and also for it to work again, it was really difficult to get the parts that I needed, which is why I'm surrounded by donor boards that came out of recycled old junk.
Speaker 2:So that's what all of this stuff is over here, and I started a nonprofit to try and get something called Right to Repair passed. It's legislation that says that the manufacturer would have to provide the repair documentation and parts to the customers the same way they provide it to their authorized service centers. And this year I started a different nonprofit called Fulu Foundation, which seeks to deal with digital locks inside of the devices you buy. So when you buy things now, since it connects to the cloud, the manufacturer has the ability to send firmware updates that can disable functionality, unless you decide that you want to pay again via subscription, and that's something that we find to be morally wrong, and, in an ideal world, taking away what you bought and paid for would also be legally wrong as well.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about that. Many of us have followed the right to repair movement and we've seen some incremental change. Where are we now, do you think, on this continuum? Where are we with stronger consumer protections? Where should we be, in your opinion?
Speaker 2:With rights and repair. There's been laws that have been passed, but for certain industries it's helpful. With wheelchairs, it's been helpful to people that have wheelchairs. Companies have complied to some extent. When it comes to consumer electronics, it's mostly window dressing because there are ways around the laws.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, instance, if I say you say, like, make available what you make available to your own service centers, I don't want the like 800 motherboard, I want the one dollar chip on the 800 motherboard and I'll pay 20 bucks for the chip, or 50, but I did. But I don't feel like buying a five or eight hundred dollar motherboard when the problem is a one dollar issue. Uh so, but culturally, that's what I was hoping to win, which is changing hearts and minds so that when people start their own companies into the future, or when the management changes at these businesses, for people to just start asking questions they wouldn't ask before. So if you're one of the, if you're somewhere in that supply chain and you're told, oh, you know, when you're dealing with Texas instruments, I don't know exactly how this works. Is there a checkbox which is can we sell this chip to Mauser and DigiKey? Can we sell this charging chip to other companies? So if somebody wants to fix a device that doesn't charge, they can do that. I want the person there to just default to of course you can, why not? And then to push back against the management if they argue with them.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to kind of inspire change in hearts, hearts and minds of people with the legislative stuff being like I have my hopes but they're not. You know, it's not my main thing. Got it?
Speaker 1:And you've also been behind something called the warrior rights to repair act. Maybe describe what that is and why it matters so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the same things that applied to me when it came to fixing consumer electronics I learned to apply to everything. It was this one room I walked into in 2017 in Nebraska and I thought I was in the wrong room because it was a bunch of farmers there. I was expecting to see a bunch of tech people. And you're not in the wrong room. We have the exact same problem you do. We replace a part in our tractor and it won't work unless we have a specific piece of software. The dealer has to come out at a rate of 150 or something an hour and then charge us to be able to do this, or if they can't come out, then we have to pay $2,000 to tow our tractor to a dealer. So they had the exact same issues that I did, and then I slowly started realizing that this applies everywhere and, of course, it's going to apply to where we have a 500 to almost $1 trillion budget every year that we spend on the military.
Speaker 2:There is so much bloat there that comes out of completely unnecessary waste, of throwing things away that are completely fixable. Or one case is even where higher level technicians in the military are not able to get access to a schematic but so like somebody from boeing will come out and they'll say oh wow, you have the schematic diagram, this is going to be great. And they say we can't show you this. And they go what, what are you talking about? And I can only imagine what boeing is billing the united states taxpayer to come out with that schematic and replace something that one of our own military service members who's been in one of our aircraft mechanics, who's been there for 10 or 20 years, could fix very easily. So that bill was trying to get right the repair push forward for the military. Obviously I do not fix military equipment, but the more I can normalize the idea that you should be able to fix what you bought and paid for in any sphere, hopefully the more it gets normalized in our sphere as well. There's so many roadblocks.
Speaker 1:of course me too. It's great to get behind this, and yet there's so many challenges, roadblocks, hurdles. What are the biggest ones you're facing this year? Which hills are you looking're facing this year? Like which hills are you looking to climb?
Speaker 2:this year. I'm looking to focus on section 1201 of something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What this says is that if breaking a digital lock and something you bought and paid for, if you show people how to do this, this is illegal and I think not just illegal as in I can sue you. I mean illegal like three to five years of federal prison federal prison, which is scary and the reason this is more important now than ever is because you don't really own anything that you bought and paid for. This law came out in the late 90s. So in the late 90s you bought a tape like it worked. You bought a computer program and you could still use that computer program 30 years later. Now you buy you. You buy a movie on sony. Streaming service is, but they they use the word purchase and you download the movie, but they can take it out of your library. They did this with 10,000 titles in December of 2023. They just said, sorry, this is not available. So there are many different ways that when you buy things now, you just don't own them anymore.
Speaker 2:So having the ability to break a digital lock on what you bought and paid for is important, because the manufacturer can and has used these digital locks on what you bought and paid for to revoke access to it. An example very recently, samsung sent out an update on other televisions. They had this feature in the frame TV that would allow you to show your art, kind of like a slideshow, a digital picture frame. And then one day people got an update on the television and it said that you have to pay a subscription for an application in order to use it. That's insane, and they just took away the functionality that was in your television.
Speaker 2:Future Home creates smart home devices like water heaters and thermostats. They went bankrupt and then, when the new CEO came and took over the company, they sent out a firmware update that would then require that everybody who bought this product pay $117 a year in order to have access to the smart features again. So it's whether devices are getting bricked because the company doesn't want to support it anymore or the company just decides we've. We want more money, so we're just going to reach into what you bought and paid for and grab it out. It's important now that you be able to break a digital lock on what you bought and paid for so that you can get access to what you, what the company was trying to take away from you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I would agree with you there, and the DMCA is an abomination in my humble opinion, but that's a whole nother topic. So maybe small wins are good, maybe talk about some of the progress that you've seen yourself make and your wider movement make so far.
Speaker 2:Well, simply getting bills passed at all, even if they do have loopholes in them, is a success, because it shows people that if you actually band together, you can get a senator or congressperson to listen to you. Does it always move the way you want? No, and that's annoying, but simply showing people that you can actually get changed in these areas is great. There was somebody who reached out to me whose parents had multiple sclerosis and they called the wheelchair company and they said you sold to me in Colorado. If you don't want to sell me the part we can, I'll keep pushing this if you want me to keep pushing this. And they actually sent her mother a brand new power wheelchair which is instead of fixing it, and that obviously you know. It'd very cool to see that people have had this outcome where sick family members that otherwise would not have been able to go to the grocery store, do their chores or leave their house could leave their house as a result of those bills getting passed and being able to show my audience that and say look, I know that you think emailing and calling your senators is useless and now you think talking about this issue is useless, but there's a person that has their freedom that otherwise wouldn't have without all of you. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:So I try to focus on those small wins, because the reason that those small wins don't happen more often is because of how jaded and cynical most people are, and I don't blame them for being cynical and jaded For the most part, you have very good reason to be cynical and jaded. But the thing is, when people actually come together and do something I mean, if 10,000 people show up to a senator's office in one day, that has an effect. When you actually explain the issues, these have an effect. When a senator's grandson, when they're talking about something, says Grandpa, you have to listen to this, can you believe this thing? And then, wow, wait, my grandson knows, this is real. This is not just random people like random bots trolling me on Twitter. It has an effect. So I guess showing people that when they actually speak up in numbers together, that has an effect has been very helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, digital ownership is huge, including for many young people who big gamers or big online participants and they realize that you know they don't own the digital technology. Their their purchasing can be a pretty big shock with their favorite tech gadgets or apps.
Speaker 2:So a lot of young people behind this movement as well yeah, the stop killing games movement is a big one that I feel horrible that I failed to mention. Ross got there and the good work that he did in mobilizing a lot of people to sign this petition in the eu to try and have manufacturers have some sort of consideration for what happens when they decide to take a game offline. Your games used to not connect to the internet only so that I could play you. I was. I was not connecting to 20 or 40 or 60 different services running on 60 different servers that I have to connect to in order for it to work. Like many of these businesses, they don't want to give you, just they're not going to give you the binary or the raw access to it. It's kind of like like chat gp open ai is not going to give me their you know, like many uh terabyte model for chat gpt. That's just not going to happen. I have to connect to their server to use it, and many video games are the same way.
Speaker 2:The problem with this is that, like when they decide to stop supporting the game, it's just dead and that that's that's a problem and like, well, then people say, well, the game, it's not a game, it's a game as a service and game as a service I mean like this I I understand the technical under the why, how. I completely understand how you design this technically and I completely understand why it is the way it is. But seeing so many people just come together and say like, for lack of a better way to put it, like, nah, I have this, I think was great. And so many people have band together that would likely disagree on so many different areas of politics to just say I'd like to own what I bought and paid for, I'd like for it to not get turned off, and that was exceptional, yeah amazing topic.
Speaker 1:You know, tech companies are, you know, often part of the problem, or the problem in many cases. But how can they become part of the solution and how can we get them to act?
Speaker 2:I think getting them to be part of the solution means listening to their customers and not seeing. It's kind of like if my assistant comes over to me and I'm in the middle of doing something and I just don't want to be bothered and it's like somebody is suggesting I changed something or they're complaining about something. My, if I'm really busy and hyper-focused on what I'm doing, I may just just like make them go away. And I think that that's what a lot of tech companies do when they deal with their lobbyists, with like they they just tell somebody that doesn't really understand any, tell them, so you know, you'll have somebody like Charlie Brown from CTA come out and say and they say, innovation, tiktok, china, stealing data, china authorization, whatever and try to get somebody to go. Oh yeah, okay, never mind, we don't want to do this. And they don't understand the issue at all. I mean, when Charlie Brown from CTA that's the association that runs the CES show every year said this he represents Samsung as well and Samsung started pre-installing Tik TOK on a customer phones two months after he accused independent repair shops of installing Tik TOK and customer phones, they're doing it by default.
Speaker 2:These people really don't understand technology and they're being asked to live to just figure out the thing you have to say to make the people like Lewis go away and I, and going to go away, it's going to like you're going to pay the bill later. If you don't listen to people like us now. I can't tell you exactly how, but it will happen. People will become tired of being abused, tired of products that don't last, tired of not being able to fix them, tired of their products being taken away, and I think that listening to your customers to some extent and putting in a little bit of effort right now, even if it's painful or okay, who do I have to get a release from in order to be able to provide the schematic? Whose intellectual property is in here, where, when we make a deal for making this next motherboard, I have to say are you okay with us providing it to our customers? They would have to start having some difficult conversations now rather than just seeing us as like a fly to be swatted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great point. Seeing us as like a fly to be swatted, and, yeah, great point. And if you care at all about the environment and e-waste, this is a huge issue. On recyclability and recycling, um, the impact must be enormous. Uh, I just see those machines behind you and that's, you know, a drop in the, in the ocean, what, what? You know? What's your thought on that? On the environment, you don't have to be an environmentalist to not want a landfills full of, uh, electronic waste well, the thing is I can use these things.
Speaker 2:That's the that's the part that bothers me is that, like apple has talked about how they are reclaiming as many of the metals as possible from all these items through their recycling programs, and like there are like they will literally take boards like this and they'll have them ground up before a repair shop like mine can buy them to be used as donor parts and there's no amount of recycling, there's no amount of trying to get the bare metals out of this. That will make as much use out of these products as I can. When this chip and this chip dies, but the rest of the board is good. Like I'll use this and this and this and this and this and this and this to fix every other customer's board here. So when you're talking about this, there's like a repair, reuse, recycle. So repairing stuff is great. This is not worth repairing. There's too much wrong with it. I don't even know what's wrong with it. It's possible most of these boards have likely fractures in the center or just too much stuff going on, but there are a bunch of components that I can use. So allowing us to have access to this stuff is great.
Speaker 2:Like I don't have them anymore because we've used them up, because my employees are absolute scavengers and I'm proud of them for that but, like we used to start, we used to get be able to buy donor boards. There were these boards that would come on a pike like this, like they would be missing the cpu, they'd be missing the ram, but like there were defects, and they would just show up on a like with a hole through them and we would be able to get all the pieces off of it. And then, at some point, we stopped getting the ability to buy these. We were buying boards that were like the wing, the thigh, the breast. It was like going to KFC and I was asking why, how did this happen?
Speaker 2:And there was this article in the Information in 2018 that was very interesting. It was talking about how people were taking these boards. They were breaking them up into pieces, putting them in underwear and then sneaking them through underground tunnels so that, instead of them being cut up, instead of them being ground down to dust, which is so wasteful, I guess, to reclaim like 0.1% of what's in it that we could use them to actually get the chips that we can't buy off of any website. And so my reaction to that. The first thing was okay, I'm going to wear gloves before I ever touch one of these exhibits again and I'm gonna clean them off very, very well. But secondly is that that's insane. I'm a nerd when you think about the amount of like they built underground tunnels, broke things into pieces and snuck it in their underwear. I mean, this is, this is how you smuggle heroin and cocaine. Why are we doing that? To be able to tell somebody whose device doesn't have a backlight or is not charging that we can fix it. So I don't focus on the environmental aspect as much as others, simply because I've noticed through, nobody cares about anything related to activism unless it personally affects them.
Speaker 2:So when I focused on rights to repair, I've always focused on three things. Here is how you can fix something that you don't have the money to fix yourself. So if they say it's $1,500, I'll show you how to do it with replace the $5 chip or whatever's wrong with it, so you can fix it for yourself and not have to waste money. Second is here's how. If you have a repair company and you only do basic repairs, here's how you could do really advanced repairs and make a lot more money. And three, look at how much fun it is when you figure it out. So the banner on my channel is fan spin and the reason what that represents is the kick of dopamine that we get when we see the fan spin. Like modern MacBooks okay, they don't have a fan anymore, so that banner hasn't aged well, but before I would even test if everything else on the board worked. When you're fixing it and you just see if it's an iPhone, you see the Apple logo pop up like that's iPhone fan spin. Or you see the fan spin when you first plug it in. It's so exciting that I went through this diagnostic troubleshooting process and I came out the other end of it with something that works.
Speaker 2:So I try to get people excited about rights of repair, not because, like you should care about the environment and you should care about this, that and the other, you should care about people that can't afford to fix, because nobody I mean just for lack of a better nobody cares. Nobody cares about what affects other people. Nobody cares even about what affects themselves. If it affects them tomorrow versus today. I've always tried to focus on what affects you right now so that I can get people personally invested.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you're right, there is a an insane amount of environmental waste that comes with all of this, and most e-waste recyclers in my experience don't recycle e-waste. They contract it to somebody who has a little certificate that says that they will do it, who then gives it to somebody else, who gives it to somebody else and then it ends up in some tire fire in Africa ruining. And again, that that's the problem is that's bad for the environment as a whole. We live on the same planet, but because it's happening somewhere else where people don't have as much money, nobody cares. They should care, but they don't. And when? No matter how much recycling you do, you will never reclaim as many of the metals out of this or do it as economically viable as a technician does when they are um, steve wozniak was, you know, one of the legendary engineer co-founder at apple has been, you know, very pro right to repair.
Speaker 1:Why aren't his colleagues listening? I mean, he's, he's, he's a great one and yet he seems to be, uh, like the rest of us, just talking, uh, they're not his colleagues.
Speaker 2:I don't think like he's. He he quit apple in what like the mid 80s, early 90s. I mean he's. They're not his colleagues. I don't think like he's, he quit apple in what like the mid 80s, early 90s. I mean he's. They're not his colleagues. It's a fundamentally different company. I mean, most of these companies are fundamentally different.
Speaker 2:It's weird when you look at how many of these great american companies started with somebody with an idea working out of their garage they would like. Modern companies would have you think that you shouldn't do that. That's dangerous, that's illegal. You're breaking you're. You're breaking this. I mean, I'm sure there's something that steve wozniak did that probably broke section 12 out of the dfca during his teenage years. But yeah, they're not. I don't see them as his colleagues. There it's. It's.
Speaker 2:The times have changed so much since then and when you read, even people who are diehard apple fans will say, yeah, I mean, steve wozniak just doesn't understand how things are designed well, or doesn't understand how to design anything anymore, and they'll talk down to this person that probably has some engineering chops that they don't. But he represents a different era, he represents a different age, and I have to give credit to an old friend of mine, anna, who had that idea of you, know there's this website called. What was it called? It's a website where you, it's a website where you can find celebrities and you can just ask them to say happy birthday or, you know, merry Christmas to your friends and I.
Speaker 2:Just we have a hundred, 50 or a hundred characters and I just said, what do you think of the engineering ladder that you climbed, success being pulled up behind you by companies who are anti owner, uh, anti right to repair that like or where? That would stop people from taking the path you did in life? And maybe I threw away five hundred dollars I didn't know five, five hundred or a thousand, whatever it was, but I had a feeling I would plant a seed there and get something. And it definitely planted a seed and got a reaction, because he did not just give me the standard, you know, thank you, happy birthday, that you get when you go to that website. What?
Speaker 1:a great story. So what's one thing listeners, viewers can do to support your work and the mission?
Speaker 2:Right now, with Hulu Foundation, one of the things we're trying to do is we're trying to create a database that includes as many different instances of these anti-ownership practices as humanly possible, and one of the biggest ones is ConsumerRightsWiki. It's a wiki website that anybody could edit. You don't have to have an account to log in, and we want to create a database every time a company does something that's anti-ownership. So if you're able to contribute in any way, shape or form I'm not even saying financially, I'm saying make an edit If you see a typo, add a citation to something. If you buy a product and then it gets a firmware update that disables functionality and now wants you to subscribe, log it.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I used to do is I used to travel the country, take this camera and film legislative hearings. And one of the things you'll hear from lobbyists over and over again when they're reading off of a script and they always are reading off of a script they do not think that's what they're paid for. They'll say that this is a solution in search of a problem that does not exist. And one of the things that I did with one of these lobbyists is I looked through their personal Twitter, I found out that she actually had a problem with her phone. She couldn't get it fixed and she was throwing it away. So, like, if this is a problem that doesn't exist, then why? You know, wouldn't it be great if somebody had access to a schematic to this device? Maybe they'd be able to fix it for you. I wonder who's keeping that from happening. But I want to show that this is a problem. It's not. When we talk about this law being an issue to a legislator and they say this is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist, I could say well, here's 13,000 devices that got disabled that could otherwise be able to be made working again If this law did not create a chilling effect that caused engineers to not try and reverse engineer the hardware. Like I want to be able to have a database that goes over this.
Speaker 2:So anytime you encounter a company that takes part in any of the anti-ownership practices that I talk about, go to consumer rights, that wiki, and try to contribute. It doesn't have to be a great article. Somebody wrote an article that was two sentences. It was barely a stub, and now it's eight pages of site. It's beautiful. He wrote an article on how Netflix doesn't give you 4k unless you use a very locked down platform and they don't disclose everything. Somebody came in and said here are all the items. Netflix does this close. Here's all the stuff they don't disclose that you need, that. If you don't do this, you'll still get a one megabit per second 720p stream, even if you do 4k, and so they don't give you any of these things anymore. But uh, they don't give you all the information, but you won't say well, what can I get for you? Oh, cool, okay, sorry, okay, the only place that's quiet in my store is right next to where we have inventory.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for the amazing work. I can't wait to participate in the mission and I look forward to sharing this episode. Thanks for what you do and thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Thanks for taking the time. Oh, the last thing I forgot. If somebody asks, like what can I do? Anytime in your personal life you have the ability to push back against these things. Try it, even if you just work at a. If you work a minimum wage job at a grocery store and you realize that you're that you consistently buy products from a vendor. They always break. They don't give you any of the tools to fix it and they always just tell you to buy a new one. Like tell you, ask your just poke, ask your manager Do we always have to buy from them or why do we always buy from them? I realize it's weird, but anytime in your own personal life you have the chance to just ask a question or push back against it in any small way. If you get millions of people doing that, you get real change. So yeah.
Speaker 1:Real change is what is needed. Thanks for joining. Appreciate your unique insights and the work you do. Take care everyone Thanks for watching and sharing this episode. Take care.