著者

橘 雄介

出版者

福岡工業大学

雑誌

福岡工業大学研究論集 (ISSN:24350222)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.55, no.2, pp.79-96, 2023-02-28

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The “right to repair” is defined as the user’s right to decide on her products, but current legislations take forms of obligations to provide repair parts and repair manuals from authorized product manufacturers to the users or the independent repair service providers. In other words, the current “right to repair” legislation does not address the prevention of the repair by the manufacturer’s intellectual property rights. Then, what measures can be taken to tackle that situation? In this respect, in EU design law, the “repair clause” which legalizes repair using spare parts has existed since before the “right to repair” was discussed. This paper follows the discussion of the repair clause through the leading case, the Acacia case, and explores whether the clause contributes to the “right to repair” and the pros and cons of such clauses. As a conclusion, the repair clause of EU can support the “right to repair”. On the other hand, the extensibility of the clause may differ depending on whether the rational of the exception provision is considered as the competition law and the exhaustion doctrine or, beyond the traditional those theories, given the meaning of an “environment-oriented” right to repair to promote the circular economy.