Actually this is probably the best way to ensure that price gouging does not happen. The fixed and NRE costs are already included in the price of the original device. Charging those again for replacements would be double-dipping. And the law still leaves it up to OEMs to decide how to cost the replacement, so there's some wiggle room there. This is an intelligently crafted bill.
I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.
The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.
The razor blades thing is a problem specifically with the patent system.
The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.
The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.
This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.
Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.
One proposal I keep mentioning for copyright and patent reform is they can never apply to data formats or digital/physical interfaces. Also, an exception to reverse engineer those for compatibility. That combination might combat a lot of problems.
Comparing consumables like blades to replacements like screens is intellectually dishonest. Those two are not the same thing and there is no merit to your argument.
