Louis Rossmann Wants More People to Care About the Right to Repair

I love my old iPhone 14, but I’m starting to face the facts: It’s going to die. The battery is about to go; apps take longer to load than they used to. Some of it I can fix. I can go to the Genius Bar and swap the battery. Maybe I could even do it myself; that’d buy me some time. But eventually, Apple won’t support this wildly expensive device at all, and there’s not much I can do about it. Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, but it involves renting nearly 80 pounds of equipment and requires you to use official parts. When all is said and done, it doesn’t save you that much money versus just going to the Apple Store. But if I buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there's a chance my iPhone is gonna lock me out of certain features because it doesn't recognize it. This problem goes far beyond iPhones. Manufacturers have put similar locks on all kinds of gadgets, from video game consoles to cars to smart home devices, making them hard to modify and even harder to restore after some firmware update renders a certain feature unusable. Not surprisingly, a lot of people think this isn't fair, that there should be a better way to do it. I think at this point it's safe to say it qualifies as a movement, one that unites under the banner of “right to repair.” Built around the radical idea that when you buy something you should be able to truly own it, right-to-repair advocates believe consumers have the right to maintain, fix, or modify any piece of hardware they’ve purchased. The movement has gained even more traction now that AI makes it even easier to hack the software powering consumers’ devices. To find out what’s next for the right-to-repair movement, I went straight to the source: Louis Rossmann, a YouTuber and consumer rights advocate who recently organized the Own Your Shit tour, which went around the US earlier this year to call for the death of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits users from bypassing digital restrictions put on devices by manufacturers. Rossmann and I talked about more than just Section 1201. We also discussed the US midterm elections, putting out bounties to find product fixes, and what will happen as the right-to-repair movement collides with the rise of AI. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. BRIAN BARRETT: Louis, thank you so much for being here. You're someone who spends a lot of time not just evangelizing over “right to repair,’ but I would imagine introducing it to people who don't know what it is. How do you do that? LOUIS ROSSMANN: I try to avoid talking about it, and I try to show people. So instead of telling people, “Here’s why you should care about this issue,” which sounds like lecturing, what I’ll do is if I’m done fixing something for a customer and they say, “The Apple Store told me $2,000," and we could do it for $200, when they’re giving me the hug and saying, “Thank you for getting back all of our baby pictures” or something, I’ll say, “Here’s how close you were to this never happening.” I like to tell them, “This is the document that I used to fix your device.” When they ask me what was wrong with it, I’ll tell them, “By the way, you should know that Apple tells the company that makes this chip not to sell it to me, and if everybody in that chain listened, I would not be able to fix this, and you wouldn’t have any of your data back.” So I always try to show people and get them excited about what it is I’m doing. Got it. I have over 1,000 repair videos on YouTube where I show people how to do what I do, and there are people that say, “I was working at Walmart for seven bucks an hour, and I picked up a soldering iron and started fixing boards on eBay, and now I make triple what I did before.” There are people that fix their own things, so not just making careers for people, but maybe somebody saved themselves some money by doing a repair themself. Or when I fix something for somebody that otherwise wouldn't have been fixed or that they were told couldn’t be fixed. I always try to get people personally invested because lecturing people about it just doesn’t make it very fun. Your organization has a wall of shame, almost, of examples of things that companies have done to take away the ownership of a product. Because that’s really what it is, right? It's like you buy something, you expect to be able to own it and do what you want with it, but that's not always how it plays out. To your mind, what are some of the more egregious instances of companies not letting you know what you want? Some of my favorites are some of these thermostat companies. One of them sent out a firmware update after the company went bankrupt that required that you pay $117 a year to get some of the functionality that you had beforehand. So it’s not even necessarily when a company has a device that has a specific date when it’s gonna turn off. It’s when they realize, “We need to make more money, so we’re gonna change what it is we’re offering you after the sale.” When I started doing this, I was just talking about right to repair for Apple devices, which is what my small shop worked on. I saw it from my small lens. I focused on the items where I knew exactly what was going on, and I really thought, “This is a problem that only affects me.” It wasn’t until about 2017 when I went to Nebraska for this legislative hearing that I realized that it really is not just something that affects my small field. I was in a room filled with farmers that were talking about all the problems they were having with their tractors, and I remember going, “Where’s the right-to-repair?” And someone says, “This is the right-to-repair room. Everybody has this problem now.” And that’s when I started opening my field of view up to everybody who has this issue. As time went on, my channel stopped just discussing right to repair, and it started discussing how right to repair is a small element under this umbrella of ownership. And ownership being taken away is, in my opinion, the real problem. Your inability to fix what you own is one thing, but also the fact that everything is turning into a subscription, that the things that you buy must connect to the manufacturer’s server in order to work, which means that they can disable your product at any time. It’s all small things under this large umbrella of ownership, and that’s slowly being taken away from people over the past 10 to 20 years. I wanna go back to the farmers because they have been on the vanguard of this. They have been in a years-long struggle with John Deere specifically, trying to get the right to repair their own tractors. But there have been some breakthroughs recently. Do you mind talking through wins like that, like how either that movement or other movements have actually been able to make changes happen? I think a lot of the change so far has been change that occurs at the cultural level more than the legislative level. Some of these changes have been memorandums of understanding where the company says, “OK, we won’t do this particular thing.” When I speak to farmers, it’s very much the same version of what I deal with in my business, where you’ll see a headline where a company says they’re supporting repair, and then you actually look into the details of it, and it’s really very surface level. One of the examples I have of this is with Samsung. They had released this independent repair program, and they made screens and batteries available, so you could buy a battery. But the battery cost over $200 because they glued the battery to the screen, and if you wanted to buy it, you had to buy both of them together. A $200 to $250 battery is pretty useless to a lot of people who have a phone that’s worth $200 when it works. And one of the issues that I’ve found when I'm speaking to farmers is, at the end of the day, they still have the same problem that they did. They’re still using cracked Ukrainian software to be able to work on their tractor themselves without having to take it back to the dealer. So there’s still a lot of work to be done. Right to repair is in the news more frequently than it used to be. Some outlets, like WIRED, have covered it for a while. Our writer Boone Ashworth has talked to you before and covered it quite a bit. But it seems to have reached national prominence in the last year or so. Is there an inflection point that you can point to? I think it’s been a slow burn for the past 12 years. CBC News did a piece on Apple in 2018. That was a really fun one for me. I remember the producer came to me and said they wanted to do a piece on how Apple is bad with upgrades. I remember saying, “Upgrades are not very fun, but also the piece is starting with the conclusion. You’re starting with doing a piece on Apple being bad, and there’s no fun in that. What if you do this: Find a broken machine, take it to Apple, record what they say, take it to me, record what I say, and let the story write itself.” And they said, “Well, what if they give a good answer?” I’m just smirking like, “Just let the story write itself. Have faith.” They took it to Apple. They said, “We gotta do the motherboard,” all this other stuff. I see that it’s a bent pin in a screen cable because whoever had worked on it before had likely tried to misroute the screen cable when they were plugging it into the board, so they were stretching it, and they shorted pin one to ground, which caused the backlight to go out. So I take a tweezer, bend it back, and it works. It was featured on national news. There’s some other inflection points, like in 2016 when Apple had asked if I would take down one of my videos showing where a fuse was. There was a video I did showing you how to fix a MacBook Air if you get some liquid around the trackpad, and your trackpad and keyboard stop working. There’s a zero-ohm resistor. It’s kinda like a fuse that will blow in that area so that the entire machine doesn’t die. So I showed how to replace this thing. At 55 seconds in the video, I’m showing where the fuse is in the motherboard, and they asked me to take the video down, and I’m like, “I don’t want to. File a DMCA claim.” That got some attention. I started a nonprofit to try and do this more professionally and push this forward in a more organized manner. I think a lot of people might say, “That sounds good, and I’m behind it,” but the idea of a fuse, a motherboard, those are things people aren’t always comfortable messing with. It sounds intimidating to someone who’s not steeped in tech. Is that so in practice? Has it become easier to fix stuff even as companies make it harder? The right to repair doesn’t mean that you have to fix something, nor does it mean that you have to go incredibly deep to fix the issue. If you’re the type of person that wants to pay somebody else to fix it, I respect that. If you wanna replace the entire display assembly, meaning the entire lid on the laptop because that’s easier for you, and you’re willing to pay an extra $100 or $200 to buy the screen preassembled, go for it. If you wanna replace the LCD cell, which is just the front layer that makes the picture, which is absolutely miserably difficult to do—but you can buy that part sometimes for 30 to 50 bucks—do that too. I am not telling people that they should have to fix anything, and I’ll never shame somebody because they decide to buy something new or have somebody else fix it. Right to repair simply means that you have the right to fix it if you want, or send it to the manufacturer, send it to a third party, or buy something new if you don’t want to fix it. Ironically, most of the devices in my house that don't work, I don't wind up fixing them. I wind up buying something new, because after 12 or 15 hours a day of fixing other people’s stuff, I just don’t have it in me to fix my own. The wall of laptops I see behind you are a testament to that. So recently, for instance, my air conditioner broke, and I was willing to pay somebody to fix it, and he ghosted me three times. And the company said, “We don't fix them. We can give you a new one for $10,000.” And I look at the cost of the unit that I have and it’s $2,500, and I’m just like, “What?” So I opened it up and I realized the contactor, which is a relay, it’s the thing that every time your thermostat says “turn on the AC” it sends 24 volts to this thing, and then that turns on the 240 volts going to the AC. It was filled, absolutely filled, with fire ants. I don’t know why fire ants love 240 volts. They really love it even though it’s not good for them. And that was kind of fun for me. So at that moment, I wanted to fix it because I was boiling hot, and it was taking forever for somebody else to. Now in this case, there was not a lot that was stopping me. My unit is so old that I was actually able to find the schematics for it online, so if I wanted to buy parts for it, I could. And that's really all most people are asking for. I'm not saying that you have to do a motherboard repair yourself, but it would be nice if somebody who's qualified to do so is not blocked from being able to do so. Now, it’s not Apple’s job to make it easy for me. It’s not their job to design their product in a way where I have a more luxurious experience while I’m doing the job. My job is gonna be difficult, and that's part of the game. Technology is consistently evolving. Where right to repair comes in is when I try to talk to the electronics distributor that sells all these chips, and I say, “I wanna buy this,” and they say, “You’re not on the list. We can’t sell to you.” That’s where right to repair comes in and says that’s not OK. Companies will say—and I know this because they say it to us all the time when we go to them with stories about this—that, fundamentally, a lot of this is about quality control. If we let you use an unauthorized part, we’re not gonna guarantee that the device is gonna perform up to our standards. If we let you tinker around with this, you might break it. We want to guarantee a certain level of quality with the experience of our devices. How does that reasoning sit with you? If the issue is quality control, then why does my store have a better rating on Google Maps than every single Apple Store in the country? What is right to repair asking for? Right to repair very often asks for the ability to buy the same part that they are using. I want to be able to buy the parts that go into the device. We’ve seen stories in recent weeks where now that people have Claude Code they can use it to check their smart TVs and get rid of all the bloatware and all the adware and have a more streamlined smart TV experience. I think those tools also give them access to guides to figure out how to replace all kinds of things, how to fix software in all kinds of ways. Is part of the future of owning our things also making it easier to not just tinker with the hardware aspect of it, but to get into the software and make it more in line with what we want out of our experiences and give companies less control over the advertising, the spyware, whatever it is? I love it. I love seeing people being able to use AI in that way. I love the idea of it being used to break digital locks, that you could just get access to what the company has taken away from you. I think that that is a great use of AI. The only issue there is when you’re talking about ownership, when people are using these frontier models, when they’re using Claude Code or Codex you’re using a model that runs on somebody else’s computer, and if you type the wrong thing, it’s easy to get around some of Claude Code’s guardrails, and sometimes I’ve done some experiments to have fun with it. But there are a lot of guardrails on it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the future, enough of these companies started saying, “Hey, people are using Claude Code to actually free themselves from our bullshit. Can you stop that?” And them stopping it. This is where it’s nice to see that it’s not just the US leading in this. Many other countries are creating their own AI models that can run on your system. I’m very excited to see what happens, as time goes on, when models that can run on a standard laptop like this have the ability to actually do this. You know, when people are remaking Adobe Suite with Claude Code, I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two years from now they can’t do that at all because it’s able to detect, “Hey, you’re actually trying to free yourself from Adobe.” But what I’m hoping to see happen is that there are enough local models that run on your system that you don’t have to worry about some company that gets to tell you what you can do, being able to help people get around all these types of digital locks and bullshit. I don’t think that that’s gonna happen in the next year or two, but I think it’s coming, and I’m excited to see it. This does lead us to the fact those digital locks and bullshit are in legally murky territory sometimes, right? Or at least companies can claim legal defenses. I’m talking specifically about Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, something that you do not like, and I think it’s fair to say you want to see it gone for good. Do you mind telling us a little bit about what Section 1201 of the DMCA is and how it ties into this conversation and makes it a little bit more fraught to do that unlocking? Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a technical protection measure, otherwise known as a digital lock, to gain access to a protected work, even if it’s for the purpose of repair. It was put in place to try and stop piracy, and it was put together in one of the most corrupt ways possible. Congress repeatedly said no to this law. No, this is way too restrictive. So the architect of it, Bruce Lehman, decided to try and get it negotiated into an international treaty. Then he came back to the United States and said, “Look, we signed this treaty, so now you have to pass this law. We’re going to be out of step with our obligations to the international community.” So he’s potentially sidestepped Congress in order to get this law passed that says that you cannot bypass a digital lock, even if it’s on something that you own. Now, I can’t go to your house and break into your home. That’s illegal. I should not be allowed to do that. But if I spend $600,000 on a house, and I notice that there’s a locked closet in the house, once I’ve paid $600,000 for the house, I should be able to break that lock to get into that closet, because I own the house. The problem with this law is that it allows companies to lock you out of things that you have already paid for. And the way that you see this being abused now is when you see companies taking away features from you or sending out firmware updates that stop features from working on the device after the company has gone bankrupt and they figure out, “Oh, wait, we need more money.” I’ve had companies that failed before, and I really wish I had the ability to say, “You know what? I realize that I sold it at a price that’s a little too low. I’m gonna need to take $5 from every customer I had in the past year.” I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t stop my customers’ products from working. But because I was selling a physical good that did not have any sort of firmware on it that connects to the internet, I’m not able to do that. Section 1201 of the DMCA is a law that came out in the late 1990s. This was before most normal people even had the internet, much less had their washing machine, their television, their dryer attached to the internet like they are now. That law was, in my opinion, horribly put together for the world of the mid- to late-1990s, and it is way worse built for today. The architect of the law also said that the purpose of it was to try and fight piracy, and he admitted in 2007 and 2013 when he was looking back on it that it didn’t do that at all. It’s very easy right now. I was able to show my 79-year-old father how to pirate television, movies, music, and it took me less than 10 minutes to show him how to use something like SoulSeek or Usenet to be able to get whatever he wants. These laws fundamentally have not worked, but what they’ve done a very good job of is making it much more difficult for people who wanna follow the law to be able to use their media. Right. If I want to rip my legally purchased Blu-ray and be able to play it on my legally purchased phone, I have to break the digital lock inside the Blu-ray disc to do that, which is illegal. What I’m actually supposed to do is I’m supposed to buy another version of it that’s only gonna work on here, and it makes it much more difficult for people who actually want to obey the law. I think people are now waking up to this, but software is copyrightable. So when you buy a book on Amazon Kindle, say, and you have a Kindle book, what you’re actually doing is you’re signing an end-user licensing agreement that gives you the right to access that book. You don’t own that book in a technical way, even though it feels like you should and feels like you do. So we’ve had cases where Amazon has actually removed books from Kindles after you bought them, and there’s no recourse for that. I think the idea of ownership in the digital age is informed by so much of Section 1201 and the way that we approach copyright and software. Do you see any progress towards changing that? Instead of every single year going back and asking for an exemption, what we’d really like to do is we’d like to pass durable legislation that doesn’t require that we ask for an exemption. We’re starting with the area that is the most reasonable, which is repair. If you want to be able to fix what you bought and paid for, that should not be a crime. You should be able to repair what you own, and you should be able to show other people how to repair what they own without that being considered a copyright crime. We’re not even saying, “Can I please rip my legally purchased Blu-ray so that I could watch it on my legally purchased portable media player?” Right now, we’re simply saying, “I would like to fix what I bought and paid for.” The problem that I’ve experienced throughout this process is there’s always an issue that people find more exciting, that’s more accessible, because you can only focus on so many things at once. If people are concerned about the economy, culture-war issues, if somebody’s concerned about immigration or Covid or policing—there’re so many issues that resonate far more with the voting public than this. The right to repair is this really abstract issue, and when you start talking about digital locks—my job, as I see it, is to get ordinary people to understand why this acronym and set of numbers directly ties into your thermostat saying it’s not gonna work anymore unless you give them $10 a month. I don’t think that I’ve done a good enough job of that over the past 12 years to get it on par with all these other issues that people face every day. Admittedly, if you’re paying like $5, $6 a gallon for gas, you’re probably gonna care about that before you care about this. So we’re talking not long after the midterms, and Democrats have won control over the Senate and the House. You do have a couple of politicians who actually have been speaking out about the right to repair who are in office now: Josh Turek in Iowa; Jake Johnson in Minnesota looks like he’s gonna get a seat. Is it encouraging that it’s even an issue people are talking about, or is that still not enough? It’s encouraging to see that they’re talking about it, but I also realize that, especially going into this next Congress, there is going to be so much work and so many things that they’re going to want to do. I remember somebody asking me, “Like, no offense Louis, but I’d rather see them spend time on, I don't know, getting rid of Pete Hegseth.” I never tell people my issue is more important than your issue, and everybody votes according to what is important to them. But there’s so many things that I imagine this Congress is going to want to do when they get elected that my job is gonna be making sure that there’s enough of a base of support and showing that there’s enough people that care about this, that if you spend the 20 minutes to do something about this, that it will actually work in your favor. And that’s part of what we’ve been trying to do with the FULU [Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users] Own Your Shit tour over the past few months. We’ve traveled around the country to 13 different cities, and in every one of these cities, we are trying to bring people together. We had one of the ex-FTC commissioners show up, which was really cool. He gave an inspiring speech in San Jose. We’re also inviting their congresspeople to say, “Yeah, this is an issue that I will actually be more likely to vote for. This is as important to me as the other issues.” And our job is showing the people that are elected that we care about this. Because what’s their job? Their job is to represent us. If people are not talking about this issue or it's only being talked about on a couple of subreddits or on the fringes of the internet, I almost don't blame the representative for not prioritizing it. But our job is to show them that if they prioritize it, they'll be rewarded for it. So I am happy to see that there are people talking about it. I remember when right to repair was put into an executive order by Biden in summer of 2021. I was excited, but there wasn’t a lot that came from it. I’m hoping for something different here. So FULU is your organization that supports right to repair. You also have bounties that you pay out for people who can disable these digital locks. How is that going? Have you successfully paid out bounties yet? Can you talk about that program a little bit and why you're sort of taking matters into your own hands here? That program came out about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I was doing a video on Futurehome after somebody who works there, or used to work there, sent me information on what they were doing. He was talking about this thermostat that when it got a firmware update after the company went bankrupt, it stopped you from being able to use some of the features you could use before. I did the video going over it, and I’m just sitting there at, like, 2 am editing this and thinking, “This is not enough.” And I said, “I'll give $5,000 or $10,000 to whoever makes this thing work again.” I was thinking back to what I was doing when I was doing all these repair videos showing the schematics. Now you have hundreds of people doing repair videos that are way better than mine every single day on YouTube, and I love it. But back in 2013 and 2014, I didn’t see anything like that, and that’s because at the bottom right corner of the screen, it has this little message on the schematic. It says, “Proprietary property of Apple Inc. Keep confidential. Do not share.” Most people don’t like getting sued or having their livelihoods destroyed. For me, that’s like a Tuesday. I find it fun. I enjoy going to court. I encourage my employees to go to court. Got it. So I was thinking, “How do I get more people to start poking at these things? How do I get more people to start saying, ‘No, this is not enough. You can’t do that.’” So we came up with this bounty, and you could see in that video that most of it was done during the day, and the part with the bounty was done at 3:00 in the morning in some corner of my house when I’m dead tired. I said, “5,000 bucks to whoever makes this work again.” And there was an employee that emailed me with a solution shortly thereafter, and he said, “Louis, I appreciate this. I would’ve done this for free, but here I made a Home Assistant integration,” and people were able to use the thermostat again. So what we’re trying to do with the bounty program is we’re trying to show people that, A, this is a problem, and B, we’re trying to incentivize people to start making things work again so that we can point to how bad this law is. We can also point to things that tangibly work again. The reason that the right-to-repair stuff with Apple that I was doing was successful is because I wasn’t just saying, “Here’s why you should care about this.” Millions of people probably have working MacBooks again because of those videos that I was doing back in the day. So when somebody personally saves $1,000, when they personally get their data back, they are now invested in my cause in a way that no Twitter hashtag and no bumper sticker is ever gonna make happen. What’s a gateway drug into right to repair? If you want to get into repairing your own stuff, what is an easy thing? Is it an iPhone battery replacement or a trackpad upgrade? What do you point people to and say, “This is something that you can actually do. This is something you can manage. It’s gonna make your life better. It’s gonna make your experience better”? I don't have a very well-packaged answer for that. For me, it it has to be something fun. It has to be, It's 103 degrees in Texas this week, and my asshole air conditioning technician has stiffed me three times. Let me open it up and, oh, I just used compressed air on the contactor and I blew out the fire ants, so now it works again. That’s what’s gonna get people excited about this. I get excited about repair not because of the repair that’s being done, and admittedly not even the money, it’s the story that’s involved in it. So anytime you’re fixing something because I need this to work right now, or I don't have the money to make this work again, anytime there’s some sort of story attached to it, it’s going to be something that gets you excited. Some people may feel incredibly excited about replacing the battery in their phone. Some people are really just gonna hate it. But I think there has to be some sort of story behind it that makes it worth it. I actually don’t find repair fun. I don't think that putting 96 solder balls back onto a chip that's the size of my pinky fingernail is fun. I don’t do it for that. I do it for the hug that the customer gives you when you get back all their baby pictures, or when you do this for the police and they're able to catch the murderer because of it. I don’t find taking a battery out of a phone, using a heat gun, and using a little spudger to get all this off, but not breaking the screen—that’s not fun. It’s fun if you can’t afford a new one. That makes it a lot of fun. It’s fun if you’re doing it to get something back. But there has to be a story. There has to be a reason that makes that particular repair exciting to you, and that's gonna be different for everybody, and it’s usually gonna be based on whatever your circumstances are at the time. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.