On 24 May 2026, the South African tech outlet Stuff published a feature tracing an unlikely lineage: today's bans on do-it-yourself repair of phones, printers and tractors descend directly from 1980s Hollywood's panic over the VCR. The studios lost their fight to ban home taping — the U.S. Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax decision held that recording broadcasts for personal use was fair use — but they won the longer war. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 criminalised circumventing the "technological protection measures" that manufacturers now embed in everything from games consoles to combine harvesters.
The consequence is that a copyright statute written to stop film piracy has become the world's most powerful anti-repair law. John Deere uses software locks to stop farmers from accessing the diagnostic code needed to fix their own tractors; printer firmware rejects third-party cartridges; a cracked phone screen can brick a paired sensor. South Africa has no DMCA. But because the locks travel inside the products themselves, the country imports the effect of the DMCA without ever debating the law.
The case for the locks — and where it stops
The strongest argument for anti-circumvention rules is real and worth stating plainly. Digital locks protect legitimate intellectual property, fund the research that makes devices better, and in safety-critical systems — medical devices, vehicle braking software, avionics — they prevent untrained tampering with code that can kill. A blanket "right to break any lock" would be reckless.
But that case justifies protecting copyrighted content and safety-critical code. It does not justify using copyright to control who changes a battery or reads an error log. When a manufacturer encrypts a diagnostic readout purely to force owners back to its own service centre, the lock is no longer protecting creativity — it is foreclosing a competitive aftermarket. That is the disproportion at the heart of the modern repair fight, and it is one South Africa is well-placed to correct because it has already done so in another sector.
South Africa already built the template
In its Guidelines for Competition in the South African Automotive Aftermarket, which took effect on 1 July 2021, the Competition Commission established exactly the proportionate model that the electronics sector now lacks. New-car owners may service and repair their vehicles at an independent provider of their choice, fit original or non-original parts, and cannot have their warranty voided for doing so. Manufacturers must give independent workshops access to the technical information and tooling required to do the work.
Crucially, the auto guidelines did not abolish manufacturer IP or mandate that anyone hand over source code. They drew a narrower line: you may protect your proprietary technology, but you may not weaponise it to monopolise repair. That is the analytically correct boundary, and it maps almost perfectly onto the electronics problem.
Why electronics is the more urgent gap
The absence of an equivalent framework for phones, laptops and appliances is not a theoretical inconvenience. As Patricia Schröder of Circular Energy told TechCentral, regulations on the repairability of electronic devices in South Africa are "virtually non-existent," leaving lower-income consumers with little choice but to "pay and throw away." The environmental cost is measurable: South Africa generates roughly 360,000 tonnes of e-waste a year, of which only about 7–12% is formally recycled, with the rest heading to landfill — a stream growing several times faster than it is processed.
A functioning repair market is the cheapest available intervention against that waste, and it is jobs-positive in a country with structural unemployment. Independent repair is exactly the kind of small-enterprise, historically-disadvantaged-owned activity the Competition Commission cited as its motivation for the auto guidelines in the first place.
What proportionate looks like
The wrong move would be to copy the EU wholesale or, worse, to import American-style anti-circumvention rules and then bolt exemptions onto them — the approach that forces U.S. campaigners to re-petition the Copyright Office every three years just to keep repair legal. South Africa can skip that mistake. The EU's Right to Repair Directive (2024/1799), adopted on 13 June 2024, is a useful reference point rather than a template: it obliges manufacturers to repair common goods and extends the guarantee period by 12 months when a consumer chooses repair, but it is calibrated to a wealthy single market.
A sensible South African path is to extend the Competition Commission's proven aftermarket logic to consumer electronics: guarantee owners and independent shops access to spare parts, diagnostic information and tools at fair terms; bar warranty-voiding for independent repair; and treat software locks whose only function is to block competition as an abuse of dominance under existing competition law, while leaving genuine content protection and safety-critical code untouched. No new criminal liability, no source-code disclosure mandate, no triennial-exemption treadmill.
The Stuff feature's lesson is that repair was never really about piracy — it was about who controls a product after it is sold. South Africa answered that question correctly for cars five years ago. The locks on its phones are waiting for the same answer.