<i>...I am also not aware of any laws that prevent you from fixing things you own.</i><p>There are numerous examples where intellectual property laws have been abused for this purpose.<p>Token encryption on most physical media means that building anything that can play that media without the appropriate licensing arrangements is illegal in many places, for example, and suitable terms may or may not be offered by the IP rightsholders. That led to dumb things like not being able to buy a DVD&#x2F;Blu-ray player that would skip the pointless junk at the start and just play the movie, because no-one was legally allowed to make such a machine and compete for business with the ones everyone hates.<p>It also meant that when my PVR failed, the manufacturer wanted the whole box back and couldn&#x27;t let me swap out the (apparently fine) hard drive with all the programmes I&#x27;d recorded (that data being the <i>entire point of the device</i>) because, they claimed, of some terms in their own agreement that let them manufacturer a device that could play OTA HD content.<p>Onboard electronic and diagnostic systems in cars is another field where manufacturers are very cosy with their franchised dealerships in a lot of countries and plenty of shady things happen to prevent otherwise perfectly competent local garages from competing for servicing and literal repair business.<p>Exactly none of these things are in the customer&#x27;s interests, and exactly none of them have anything to do with whether a third party has the technical capabilities to produce or repair the equipment as required. It&#x27;s just huge corporations and special interests abusing laws intended for very different purposes to lock up their markets against otherwise normal (and obviously likely to be successful) competition.