 I'm going to start. Thank you for the introduction. Let me share my presentation, hopefully it will be working okay. A key issue is right to repair is starting to be a topic that people understand about, that people are talking about. We've been as organizations working on the ground. We've been working on this for a few years now, but it's starting to become one of those catch phrases and part of this is excellent because it accelerates perceptions and potential opportunities for coming reality. But at the same time there is also a risk that with right to repair, governments, legislators, policy makers end up understanding something different from the real right to repair that campaigners have been fighting for for many years. And I will talk about a little bit of this in the presentation. So first I'll just introduce the European right to repair campaign. My name is Hugo Valauri from the restart project in London. We are one of the co-founding members of a European right to repair campaign. And the campaign starts from the perspective that there is a really high unsustainable environmental footprint of all the products that we use and that we keep buying and manufacturing. And therefore we need to change this and ensure that products can be used for longer before becoming waste. And this has to do with the embedded energy that they have and all of the materials and the energy impact that the materials have in order to mind them, assemble them, create the products and then all the way to shipping them to us. And the right to repair is a way for us people, citizens, consumers, communities to regain control over the things that we own and make sure that we can decide until when it is okay to use them and not be told that we can't use them any longer. The campaign features members of various kinds across most of Europe. We already have 89 member organisations in 18 European countries and that includes community repair groups, sustainability activists, academics, environmental NGOs and other including professional repairs and companies increasingly interested in this as an important space whether they supply spare parts or whether they're interested in their reuse economy as platforms for example. And I'm presenting the campaign here because I think there might be some of you in the audience today and among the other speakers that might want to consider how you might be able to contribute to the campaign in the future and how we might be able to bring together the issues that we are campaigning for with the issues related to free software as they're much more closely interlinked than we might think. So the key pillars of right to repair until now have been the importance of good design and so products that are possible to disassemble for repair and products for which there is fair access to spare parts and repairing formation and looking into the future the importance of informing consumers so that people can make a good decision with all the information available to them at the point of sale for when they're buying a new product and to know whether how that product is actually repairable or not or how long might software support be guaranteed for that product for example. Things that are currently sorely missing although there is a little bit of hope that in the future this might be a little bit better. So this fits into a wider context of policies at European level although the campaign also engages with countries and national policy level beyond the EU specifically but there's the bulk of work that's happening in the EU. There was a circular economy action plan approved last year and eco design repair requirements that were approved in 2019 and finally came into effect I'll mention them in more detail in March this year and then there's a series of initiatives on empowering consumers for a green transition and more work happening on future regulations that might become into effect in the next two three years. And the big milestone for all of us has been this new regulations on energy labelling and eco design that have been approved in 2019 and that finally came into effect this year in March across Europe so that for a range of products and we're talking about not the most obvious products that we normally think about when we think about the free software movement but this we had to start somewhere TVs, fridges and freezers, washing machines, dishwashers but servers as well and for the first time there are some repair related requirements for some of them and these requirements are that for the first time there is a series of key parts that need to be made available and need to be available when taking apart the product so improving the design so that it's easier to repair them and these parts need to be available in legislation for seven to ten years after a product is removed from the market so this starts giving people a better understanding of what is the projected lifetime of products not just when a product is stopped being sold but actually there is an afterlife which I think is particularly important from the context of pushing for free software in the future then there's other aspects on making repair information available and with some caveats unfortunately that for the first two years since the product is put on the market manufacturers wouldn't be required they could choose to do this but they wouldn't be required to make the information nor the spare parts available widely on the market but there are still a lot of important barriers in this legislation and some of that is obviously it only applies to a certain number of products and there is a big distinction between the amount of information and spare parts that will be available to everyone as opposed to those made available to professional repairs there's a bit of potential conflict on the definition of who is a professional repair which could leave up to manufacturers the opportunity to limit provisional parts to some professional repairs closer to their official networks but not necessarily as much to all professional independent repairs and like key aspects you'll see them in this last six seven and eight points but these are really the key aspects that are the heart of our future campaigning is that these legislations come from a perspective of eco design so on limiting energy consumption in use or energy consumption in manufacturing increasing and so because of that pricing was not really a criteria but it's obvious to everyone that pricing needs to be a criteria taken in consideration for for all of this to happen otherwise people might not find it particularly attractive or convenient or even possible financially to keep repairing things if it costs too much and crucially the pricing is kept virtually high artificially high by binding some key parts of this spare parts together so that even if you have a fault on a small spare part occasionally in that part might be sold packaged together with other parts which really limit well increases artificially the price and software remains virtually unaddressed and I'll go into a little bit more detail shortly on this so what needs to happen we need more product groups to be taken in considerations there's when people talk about right to repair people think about a much wider range of products it's not that you only care about your washing machine being repairable but you want your laptop being repairable your coffee maker being repairable your wearable products to be a repairable your smartwatch and so forth and we need more inclusive repair markets so that whether it's a firmware update whether it's a spare part or a piece of repair information on the schematics of a product they should be made available to everyone universally and not just to professional repairers which is a useful start but it might drastically limit the range of impact environmental and otherwise that we can make with all of this and also we campaign for a European wide repair index that might make it easier for people to understand when they're buying products what it is that they're buying and whether that product there are some trade-offs with regards to length of software update support provided or otherwise but indeed the big elephant in the room and you're probably wondering well why are you telling us about all of this about spare parts and repair information and the real topic of this talk is software i've kept it a bit frustratingly as such because the truth is that software has been neglected drastically neglected until now when it comes to right to repair and there's various ways in which this has happened and there's also some misunderstandings about what has been already included in the current regulations on this initial product categories and i'll go now a bit more into that but also there is some rays there are some rays of hope so don't don't don't lose hope halfway through so existing regulations only require manufacturers to make available the most recent software update up until the end of product support so but what this means is that let's say you are a manufacturer of a product and you release a product and like a connected product that has an underlying piece of software embedded within it and you realize a month later that that product needed one update because there was a bug or a security threat currently once you publish that first update as long as you make that update available for seven to ten years depending on the product categories until the end of the projective support period you will be compliant with the regulation so this regulation does not require manufacturers to keep support in products with additional updates to the software or to the security packages for for long at all and there's been some misunderstandings in the wider community thinking that actually this was a good start but it's actually quite meager and seems a very light touch way of saying that if you are a professional repairer and for whatever reason you have to reset a product and then you'll be still able to access the support patch released maybe five or six years earlier but that doesn't mean that the product will continue to be supported unfortunately but there is there are some useful opportunities coming up we are currently in a series of rounds of feedbacks on a draft regulation for eco design for smartphones and tablets and we expect this to be approved in the next year by 2022 notwithstanding a lot of tensions between different agendas of manufacturers and the organizations that represent them and environmental organizations and campaigners such as ourselves why is this interesting because for the first time actually software is mentioned more prominently and there we there is an understanding that bringing minimum support for a number of years for software and security updates is necessary in order to reduce unnecessary fast recycling and upgrading cycles across Europe and this is could be game changing also because such regulations approved in Europe could really change the future of how manufacturers start thinking about this for other countries as well beyond Europe I left it at X because currently this is still in negotiations we are hoping to see a five years support at least for software and security updates but we would love to see a lot more than that and why so specifically smartphones this is a picture from a model that was very popular a few years back but I chose this one because unfortunately it's not changed the proportion of how much of the environmental impact of a device like a smartphone occurs before you've ever switched it on is staggering it's approximately 80 percent for the vast majority of models so that means that that very first time you switch it on and you do your first software updates well the vast majority of its environmental impact has already occurred so the only way we have to increase the efficiency and reduce our footprint on the planet is to keep this product in use for as long as we possibly can which unfortunately often is a long more than the manufacturers themselves are prepared to support them so as part of our work as a campaign we've launched a provocation with a european right to repair campaign in and with a 10-year phone campaign which you can still visit and that looks at some key criterias and one of them is well if phones need to last 10 years then we need 10 years of software and security updates why not why has does it have to seem like too much to support a phone for 10 years it's just been so ingrained in our lives that smartphones are products that we keep upgrading every other year that even the thought of thinking that 10 years support many people have even questioned whether we understand that technology does change and improves but um critiques of such campaigns don't necessarily understand that the full lifetime of a product is not necessarily just um in the hands of people that are very technology savvy and my need for whatever reason to upgrade for specific extra functionalities but there is a secondary market and a third year marketer and people can continue to benefit from these products particularly if security and software are kept up to date the biggest problem that we see and i'd love to hear from you how can free software could help is that of part pairing now part pairing some of you have probably heard of this maybe called serialization and it has to do with how manufacturers some more upfront than others are more and more considering using pairing at software level of device with specific spare parts so that even if you are able to disassemble a product and replace one part that part might lose functionality some or completely unless the manufacturer repairs it using the serial number of that specific part that makes it working again this is huge because it could kill any independent repair industry destroy jobs of independent repairs and prevent anyone from doing any diy repairs we are fighting against this asking the EU to not make it to not make it to not allow manufacturers to include this in future regulations but there is a lot of pushback and we were far from seeing a positive ending on this so free software sadly it's currently absent from any of the regulations so when we campaign for a 10-year phone we don't necessarily expect manufacturers to provide 10 years worth of software updates software could be free software could be the solution we could be requiring as the free software foundation Europe is campaigning about for software to become to be released in in free and Libre format when a manufacturer stops supporting the product other options could be that users should always have all the freedom to uninstall and replace the software that come with that product with software that are unable to compile themselves or to access from source trusted sources that can extend the life of product of course there have been plenty of cases of this in the smart phone world but the fact that some of these options do exist isn't enough because they are widely out of touch for for the vast majority of consumers like the vast majority of people that we see a community repair events and not even mentioning them like people at large are not able to really do this software this move to free and open source software completely it's still complicated artificially so because of all the barriers that manufacturers are putting so we see a real opportunity to change this but in legislative terms this is still extremely weak and we don't see enough awareness for policymakers to to to do this so we see an opportunity to combine the campaigning on from organizations that work on digital rights those such as a free software foundation europe that are working on pushing for more access to free software and campaigns such as the european right to repair campaign to bring together an agenda that doesn't necessarily create a friction between providing longer term support for all products with software and security updates but at the same time creating an opportunity for more freedom for everyone to use the software they want so that you know if we talk about a 10-year phone well maybe for seven years manufacturers could support it directly but they should not create barriers from earlier on for extending that support further anyway i think this is an introduction to this and i'd love to hear your thoughts your questions your challenges and i hope we can be a beginning of a joint pathway towards reaching that goal together with all of you thank you very much these are our contacts and i'll be happy to discuss and take your questions i would be in particular also since you mentioned it interested in what do you think like what would from from the reparability factor of devices what would be more beneficial having an extended support like five years seven years ten years of of an obligation of supporting a device with software updates or that for example manufacturer can decide after two years or three saying okay there's no let's say economic benefit anymore in the device i stop the support but i give like i i publish the source code under a free and open source software license so what do you think would be from more practical for repairs it's it's a really good question and i think we are concerned that allowing manufacturers to in a sense wash their hands after two years and just say oh here you go here you have your source code might not necessarily benefit the vast majority of users that will still like to continue use their device but might experience some barriers when it comes to moving from an open source alternative operating system for the product if that's what you're hinting at because it could work in other ways but it would be important to understand if provision for example of software and security updates to an existing version of an operating system as it was provided by the manufacturer could happen with a trusted independent provider that would take over support without requiring to everyone to change completely operating system in order to to get there so that's why our campaign has focused on extending the requirements for manufacturers as a first step because we don't want the benefits of additional repairability or like continuing to expand the durability of a product um to be reserved to those that might have the skills to install an alternative operating system using some of the source code that was released but the choose again i think that the key aspect is avoiding a situation where these movements that ultimately want to empower users to keep ownership of the products that they buy for much longer than they are allowed to today it's really crucial that these movements work together and find a good synthesis that kind of satisfied both agendas and not an aren't seen as like a contradiction so kind of allowing manufacturers to sort of do as little as possible over the job and and then moving on because the key aspect is that they for many years they've been very keen to keep releasing more and more products at all times and not so keen on supporting the product that they are already putting on the market for long enough and that and that is what really needs to change thank you i also think that we can combine the two demands easily and i also have a question for you from someone from our online audience that i would like to share it's julio roman who asks do you think it would be possible to stimulate the adoption of repairable products by easing the import of products manufactured outside the EU for example lowering taxes it's i wonder um what what's the whether you see products that are more repairable being harder to access because of taxation at the moment what we are seeing and you know it'd be interesting to see where that comment comes from and if you'd like to follow up further i'd love to hear more what we're seeing is the regulations at the moment the eco design regulations are set up to prevent manufacturers that don't respect minimum standards from flooding the market with products that might be um either not energy efficient or uh not repairable um and so that sets like minimum basic criterias to to avoid that um i would be surprised that there's some products that are very highly repairable but currently hard to bring to the market because of existing taxation but i'd love to learn to learn more i think what we need to do is increasing the level of consumer information particularly through an EU wide ambitious approach to a repair index score some of you might be familiar with the work that's happened in France where an initial repair score index has come to fruition for some product categories and for the first time its course products such as washing machines, smartphones, lawnmowers and televisions and a few others in terms of their repairability giving us score between one and ten and the price of the key spare components is included as well as the price of well as well as some points about software support however this doesn't sufficiently in our view make it transparent for anyone to check what are the underlying statements statements that manufacturers are making and it also doesn't sufficiently differentiate between products that are extremely repaired and actually supported for long software-wide and those that might be only partially repairable so it's a good first step but it needs to be followed up at European level by a better standard that actually focus a lot more on the affordability of repair as well as on long-term software support and having access to free software should be giving a lot extra points to any product because it might lead to strong communities that can support and well beyond the intended duration