I agree. But you have to start somewhere. The guideline has been converted into legislation in Belgium since last week.

Do you have more detail on what was implemented? I could only find this repairability index, which I suspect won’t be much more useful than energy indexes and nutrition indexes.

This is why I said at the local level. City council cannot change federal laws.

The EU has been grappling with right to repair laws for over 10 years now. It’s a complete shit show.

At the moment, a washing machine maker in the EU is only required to release repair documentation to professional repairers who are insured, not consumers. And they only have to do it in the 1st 10 years, not in the time period that things actually break. At the 10 year mark, they automatically lose the docs and stop making parts.

The law you reference is not yet in force AFAIK. But when it comes into force and each member state eventually legislates, look at what we are getting-- from your reference:

A European information form can be offered to consumers to help them assess and compare repair services (detailing the nature of the defect, price and duration of the repair). To make the repair process easier, a European online platform with national sections will be set up to help consumers easily find local repair shops, sellers of refurbished goods, buyers of defective items or community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

That’s crap. It’s fuck all. Consumers are not getting service manuals. They are just being told where they can go to get someone else to do the work. We can of course already find repair cafes because they publish their own location. But repairers at repair cafes are just winging it. You cannot bring them a large appliance like a washer. They don’t even have water and drain hookups. And even if one repair cafe made an exception for large appliances, their repairers are not insured and thus cannot legally get access to service manuals.

Everything at the state/fed/intl levels is a total shitshow. This is why I asked in the OP what can be done at the local level.

I should have linked the parent thread. Federal laws are a shit show. In the US, most states have paltry R2R protections typically only covering cars, wheel chairs, and farm equipment.

This is why I am collecting ideas for what we might petition LOCAL govs to do, like city councils.

I don’t think that is true. I never heard of a creativity test or measurement as a precondition to copyright protection. As I understand it, anything you write (regardless of artistic creativity) is automatically protected under an all rights reserved copyright unless you explicitly state otherwise.

So email is actually fine, but some companies which offer email services are highly problematic and should be avoided.

“some companies” includes MS and Google, which likely covers at least 75% of the world’s email recipients. While most of the other ESPs pull the same shit as MS and Google.

So no, email is not fine in any general sense. You can carve out an exceptional case where it’s fine if you can twist your correspondent’s arm to use a rare non-problematic service, but that’s unsurmountable in most situations. You cannot demand that your gov switch to Disroot email to contact you using non-problematic email.

I don’t want to imagine using fax and paper for distributed software development.

I don’t want to imagine a world where everyone is forced to share sensitive information with an ecologically harmful surveillance advertiser.