If you like to repair things around the house like appliances, cars, and personal electronics, and find it harder to do so, you trace the blame to the debut of the videotape.
That’s the link found by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, teaching professor of American studies in the Department of global and intercultural studies at Miami University.
WYSO’s Mike Frazier spoke to her about her research on how Hollywood's reaction to the videotape made it harder to fix consumer products.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy: Video recorders allowed for the first time consumers to record entertainment from TV and to copy tapes of movies with very little to no control from those who had created that content. So this ability of the technology, which in some ways empowered consumers to do whatever they wanted with their content, represented a financial threat to Hollywood, which then started thinking of ways to protect this interest, and that led to discussions around what copyright meant in the late 1970s and 1980s when this new technology emerged.
Mike Frazier: And how does that link to today's problem, at least with some people, of the difficulty of repairing consumer products?
Godeanu-Kenworthy: First, they tried to outlaw the technology.
So in 1976, a group of Hollywood studios took Sony to court on the grounds that the video recorders encouraged consumers to break copyright laws. The case made its way through court, and when the Supreme Court decided that videotaping content from TV did not infringe copyright law and fell under the fair use exemption to copyright laws, then as content became digital and moved online, the industry turned to other forms of control.
So that's what we have step two: the digital rights management stage in the story. Those are technological tools that the industry developed in order to control user access to content. It can be encryption software, or different types of authentication or enforcement software, which limit what kind of digital activities we can perform with our content.
The third step in the story was legal protection: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998.
This legal document also reflected the new alignment and interest between the entertainment industry and the kind of budding software industries in the US and it really marks the moment when these legal obstacles to repairs are born because the DMCA increased existing penalties for copyright infringement online and criminalized any technology used to bypass technological locks.
Frazier: Did you want to talk about how this is contributing to the rise of the right to repair movement?
Godeanu-Kenworthy: So this inability to repair items leads to all sorts of absurd situations where to have something repaired is almost as expensive as buying something new. It will cost slightly more to buy new. But for a consumer who is given the choice between paying slightly less for a repair and purchasing a new item, which is marketed aggressively and presented as being superior to older models and in many cases comes with a warranty, they will tend to just throw in the trash the old item and go for the new one.
If repairing was cheap, people would keep things longer and fix them instead of always going to buy things.
This has an impact on the pocketbook of ordinary consumers. It also has a significant environmental impact. Americans are the second largest producers of E-waste in the world after China. I think it's 43 pounds per person per year. And the materials that go in our electronic waste, from rare minerals to metal to copper, all of that is wasted every time we throw away an item in the trash because less than a quarter gets recycled.
Ohio currently has a Right to Repair bill pending, SB 176, that would require manufactures to provide tools, parts, and documents to repair digital equipment.
Frazier: Is that something you would tell people who are, like you said, frustrated with the inability to fix something that would be cheaper and restore its functionality than having to go out and buy a new item?
Godeanu-Kenworthy: Yes. There are two things you can do: call your representative, but you can also try to learn to repair things.
Or shop from companies that provide or demonstrate that their products have information about how to repair simple things yourself would also be an option if those types of companies and products exist. But also being aware of this type of legislation, which may not be very glamorous, but does have an impact on everybody's pocketbook and on the environment.
That was Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, teaching professor of American studies in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University.
