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thewayneA little background to those not familiar with Scientology.
When you become a Scientologist, or whenever you commit an infraction that the management doesn't like, you go through "auditing" with an E-Meter. These devices supposedly reveal things about your past lives, your possession by 'thetans' which are responsible for all the bad things in your current lives, or something like that. Popular belief is that the E-Meter is a crude polygraph and is measuring galvanic skin response or something: you're holding a copper cylinder in each hand and an "auditor" is questioning you about yourself and your past.
Well, if the copyright office opens up the Right To Repair, people who have obtained E-Meters (apparently there's a thriving market on Ebay and channels on YouTube) can take them apart and figure out how they work. The software for doing updates to the later models is tightly locked down and requires a license and your Scientology membership ID number.
The Scientologists say that devices that are only intended for sale to professionals should be exempted from right to repair, and that these are religious artifacts. One counter-argument that I see here is look at the pandemic. Thousands upon thousands of ventilators across the country/world were broken and couldn't be repaired because of a lack of manuals and DMCA threats from manufacturers. These were devices sold to processional medical installations, but they couldn't fix their own gear for reasonable costs. Eventually the copyright office caved in, and repair manuals were collected and published online, quickly followed by 3D printer models for replacement parts.
https://www.404media.co/scientologists-ask-government-to-make-hacking-e-meters-illegal/
When you become a Scientologist, or whenever you commit an infraction that the management doesn't like, you go through "auditing" with an E-Meter. These devices supposedly reveal things about your past lives, your possession by 'thetans' which are responsible for all the bad things in your current lives, or something like that. Popular belief is that the E-Meter is a crude polygraph and is measuring galvanic skin response or something: you're holding a copper cylinder in each hand and an "auditor" is questioning you about yourself and your past.
Well, if the copyright office opens up the Right To Repair, people who have obtained E-Meters (apparently there's a thriving market on Ebay and channels on YouTube) can take them apart and figure out how they work. The software for doing updates to the later models is tightly locked down and requires a license and your Scientology membership ID number.
The Scientologists say that devices that are only intended for sale to professionals should be exempted from right to repair, and that these are religious artifacts. One counter-argument that I see here is look at the pandemic. Thousands upon thousands of ventilators across the country/world were broken and couldn't be repaired because of a lack of manuals and DMCA threats from manufacturers. These were devices sold to processional medical installations, but they couldn't fix their own gear for reasonable costs. Eventually the copyright office caved in, and repair manuals were collected and published online, quickly followed by 3D printer models for replacement parts.
https://www.404media.co/scientologists-ask-government-to-make-hacking-e-meters-illegal/
