Right to repair is not a contract fight, it is an architecture fight. Manufacturers design repair out at the silicon and protocol level — parts pairing, telematics lockout, signed firmware — and the law is only now catching up. Here is the honest 2026 picture across cars, tractors, and phones, the mechanisms underneath the politics, and what owners actually get.
Law & Standards
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Right to Repair Honestly: The 2026 State of Play -
Chip Export Controls: Why You Can't Buy an H100 in Shanghai How US export controls turned the AI compute supply chain into a theater of geopolitics: the TPP and performance-density thresholds, the A800/H800 workaround, ASML's EUV monopoly as the real chokepoint, China's domestic scramble, and why the rules keep flip-flopping under your feet.
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How Standards Bodies Actually Work The protocols you use every day were written by committees with wildly different rules, incentives, and failure modes. A tour of IETF rough consensus, IEEE 802 working groups, the ISO pay-to-read problem, the WHATWG/W3C fork, USB naming disasters, FRAND patent pools, and how an individual engineer can actually get in the room.
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Open-Source Licensing, Actually Explained What you can ship and what you must share: permissive versus copyleft mechanics, the linking question, why SaaS broke the GPL and created the AGPL, the relicensing wars of Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and HashiCorp and the forks that answered them, source-available versus open source, CLAs versus DCOs, and a practical compliance checklist.
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Software Patents for Working Engineers What is actually patentable after Alice v. CLS Bank, how to read a patent claim like a boolean expression, the economics of patent trolls, defensive strategies from prior art to the LOT Network, what your invention assignment agreement really says, and what to do when a demand letter arrives.