What began as a dream in 2012 has finally blossomed into reality. Today, June 3, 2022, New York passed Asm. Patricia Fahy and Sen. Neil Breslin’s Fair Repair Act, making it the first state in the country to pass an electronics Right to Repair Bill.  

Everyone in New York is going to benefit from this landmark legislation.  We’ll all be able to fix the stuff we like, stop being forced to buy new things we don’t want, and it will be possible for the secondary market to provide high quality options for reuse.  
 
The New York bill that just passed is a huge first step that covers a lot of ground—including cell phones, tablets and IT equipment.  The future looks bright for more state legislatures to pass similar legislation and take up some of the equipment categories that didn’t get taken up in NY. We know that legislators like to advance bills they know are winners, and a vote of 145 to 1 in favor is a clear endorsement of a winning bill.

Our entire team and superb bill sponsors Asm. Pat Fahy, Sen. Neil Breslin and their staff deserve a big round of applause.  Getting legislation passed is hard work – and even harder when the biggest tech oligarchs in the world are fighting hard and dirty.  But today we did it. And we’re not stopping here.

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Gay Gordon-Byrne
Gay Gordon-Byrne is one of the founding members of The Repair Association and is currently directing legislative advocacy as their Executive Director. She is a frequent speaker and writer on technology repair, reuse, secondary markets, and sustainability topics. Gay is a repair policy expert in her own right with over 40 years of experience as a vendor, lessor, and used equipment dealer for large commercial IT users. She is the author of “Buying, Supporting and Maintaining Software and Equipment - and IT Manager’s Guide to Controlling the Product Lifecycle.” To learn more, or to volunteer to help, visit repair.org, connect with us @repaircoalition on Twitter, follow #righttorepair on Twitter, @repairdotorg on Facebook, Repair.org on Linkedin or email us info@repair.org.