Madam Speaker, do we have the right to fix the things we buy, or do we have the obligation to bring those things back to the person who sold them to us and pay them to fix them for us? That is a long-standing question.
Many sellers build into their business model or their engineering plans a system that requires buyers to come back to pay for maintenance and repair at the place they bought the product or service. This can generate a stable stream of income for the seller and also allow the seller to continue to improve his or her products. On the other side, it prevents the buyer from shopping around and finding a better deal for repairs. There is a conundrum.
Sellers typically use two different ways to maintain their exclusive rights over the repair of products. One way is to build it right into the warranty or into the sales agreement that, for example, buyers can buy an automobile at a set price, but for the warranty to apply, buyers must bring it back to the seller and the seller alone for servicing. They can write into the contract, or the purchase agreement, that, if buyers want to buy this tractor, the seller will offer this original price, but customers are obliged by contract to give them the contracts to repair it. That is one way, through the use of contractual arrangements.
The other way is through technological protection measures. This is a particularly new phenomenon in the case of most products because, 30 or 40 years ago, those products did not have a lot of digital technology baked into them that could be encrypted or made exclusive through coding techniques. Today, almost everything we buy has some sort of a technological component to it. The future of automobiles, washer and drying machines, toaster ovens, basically anything we buy will mean less about the hardware, the tin, iron or aluminum in it, and more about the technology that operates it. Therefore, businesses have become very clever in embedding technological protection measures that encrypt the ability to maintain and repair the equipment.
There are two major extreme positions on what to do about this tension between the buyer who wants to repair his own product or the seller who wants to repair it for him. I will go through them very quickly. On the one hand, some argue that the government should force sellers to stop using technological protection measures or exclusivity clauses in sale and maintenance agreements. On the other hand, some argue that the status quo should continue, which forces buyers to respect technological protection measures and continue to go back to the seller in order to have repairs and maintenance done. Both of these solutions require government forcing one side on the other.
I believe in the free enterprise system where government applies as little force as humanly possible. Having read Bill C-272, right of repair, that the member for Cambridge has offered, I conclude that he is of the same view. His bill neither bans technological protection measures nor bans efforts by buyers to circumvent those measures. What he simply does with the bill is that it would legalize the practice of developing technologies to get around those technological protection measures so that buyers have the ability to try and repair a product for themselves.
For example, if someone were to buy a tractor and the tractor manufacturer put in a technology that prevented the buyer upgrading and maintaining that tractor, under the law today, the buyer could not buy a circumvention product that will allow them to get around the protection measure.
That is the way the law is written under the Copyright Act in section 41 today. If one does that, one is breaking the law. However, the bill proposes to remove that prohibition, so the manufacturer of the tractor could still put in a protection to prevent the buyer from maintaining the tractor themselves, but the buyer would have the legal right to buy another product that would allow them to get around that technological protection.
In other words, the bill would basically open the matter up to buyers and sellers to sort out how they are going to arrange their contractual agreements on their own. It would continue to allow companies to put in place measures to try to retain their exclusive right to repair the products they sell, but it would also allow the customer to try to get around and circumvent those protections. I believe this is the right solution, because we should leave, as much as possible, decisions in commerce to the buyers and sellers involved and minimize the involvement of government in between their voluntary decisions.
For example, if a car dealership wants to write in a requirement that a car buyer must come back to the dealership for maintenance as a condition of the warranty, that should be legal. However, if the car buyer does not want to follow that edict, he can go and buy a car somewhere else. That is the genius of the free market system.
A buyer can say, “I do not want to be stuck going back to the dealership for maintenance. I want to go to Jane's Mechanics because she does a better job. I am bringing my car to her, and if the dealership is not going to allow my warranty to stand when she maintains my car, then I will not buy the car from that dealership. I will to go to another dealership where they do not have that requirement as part of their warranty.”
This allows the buyer to make an informed decision about the trade-offs involved when purchasing a product, whether it is a smart phone, an automobile, a washer and dryer, or a farm tractor, the buyer will be able to decide whether or not he or she will buy a product knowing that the seller has a requirement for a product to be maintained at the seller's business.
At the same time, if the seller wants to put some kind of technological method to prevent others from maintaining and repairing the product, well, he or she can do that. There is nothing in this proposed law that would prevent them from doing that. However, if the bill passes, the state would not enforce that technological protection, and I believe that is as it should be.
We should live in a free and open market system where people get ahead by having the best product rather than the best lawyer, and where the voluntary exchange of work for wages, product for payment and investment for interest allows everyone to do well by doing good, which is the genius of the market system. If someone has an apple and wants an orange, and I have an orange and want an apple, we trade, and we still have an apple and orange between us but we are both better off because we each have something worth more to us than what we had before.
What is true of that simple transaction of apples and oranges is also true in more complicated products, such as software-enhanced agricultural equipment, smart phones or other devices. We, as consumers, do our research. We find out the terms involved in buying a given product, and then we decide for ourselves. If we do not like the arrangement that the seller has put into the purchase agreement, then we shop elsewhere.
I congratulate the member for Cambridge. I believe he has found the optimal solution in federal law to allow buyers of goods and services to try to maximize their utility when buying a product, and he removes unnecessary intervention by the state so that the buyers and sellers can do commerce and achieve the best possible outcome for themselves.