SB5795 – Requires manufacturers of portable flat screen digital electronics to provide independent repair providers and owners access to the documentation, parts and tools for repairs that they make available to authorized service providers.
Prime Sponsor – Senator Hasegawa (D; 11th District; Seattle) (Co-Sponsors Keiser, Pedersen, Saldaña, and Stanford – Ds)
Current status – Referred to Environment and Energy.
Next step would be – Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Comments –
This bill addresses the same issues as HB1810, and makes many of the same provisions in slightly different language. However, it adds an alternative way to comply with many of the requirements for access to information and tools, through aftermarket providers, which isn’t clearly written and doesn’t seem to include any requirements about the extent or quality of that access. This bill would only apply to “handheld or portable devices” with a microprocessor and flat screen, like laptops and smartphones,  that were originally manufactured for distribution and sale in the United States for general consumer purchase.

Summary –
The bill would require original manufacturers of digital electronic products sold in the state on or after January 1st 2012 to make the same diagnostic and repair information that they make available to authorized repair providers available to independent repair providers in the same format, and for no charge or the same charge, including corrections to embedded software and safety and security patches.

Manufacturers would be required to make them all available for purchase on fair and reasonable terms. It would require them to make equipment or service parts for these, including any updates to their embedded software, available to owners of those products and independent repair providers for purchase on fair and reasonable terms (unless the parts were no longer available to the manufacturer or authorized repair provider). If manufacturers sold any diagnostic, service, or repair documentation any independent repair provider or owner in a format that was standardized with other original manufacturers, and on terms and conditions more favorable than those under which authorized repair providers obtained the same things, they would be prohibited from requiring authorized providers to continue purchasing those in a proprietary format, unless that included diagnostic, service, or repair documentation or functionality that was not available in a standardized format. A manufacturer of digital electronic products sold or used in the state would have to make any diagnostic repair tools it makes available to its own repair or engineering staff or any authorized repair provider available for purchase with the same capabilities and at fair and reasonable rates by owners and independent repair providers.

The bill says that manufacturers could fully satisfy all the obligations above by providing “diagnostic repair documentation to aftermarket diagnostic tools, diagnostics, or third party service information publications and systems” and would not be responsible beyond that for the content and functionality of those.

Equipment or parts sold or used in the state to provide security-related functions would not be allowed to exclude diagnostic, service, and repair information need to reset a security-related electronic function from the information provided to owners and independent repair facilities. The bill also says that if information necessary to reset an immobilizer system or security-related electronic module is excluded in the sub-section it “may be” obtained by owners and independent repair facilities through the appropriate secure data release systems, but there doesn’t seem to be an exclusion in the current version.

The bill would prohibit manufacturers of digital electronic products sold in the state on or after January 1, 2023, in Washington state  from designing or manufacturing them in a way that prevented reasonable diagnostic or repair by an independent repair provider, including  attaching a battery in a way that made it difficult or impossible to remove. They’d be prohibited from establishing end user license agreements that restricted the legal uses of a product after purchase, and from dictating the venue for legal disputes in them.

The bill would make a violation of the requirements an unfair or deceptive act in trade or commerce and an unfair method of competition under the Consumer Protection Act, and would create an additional civil penalty of $500 for each violation of its provisions.