The ability to repair your increasingly sophisticated gizmo—a coffee maker, vacuum cleaner, cell phone, car — without being forced to rely on the manufacturer is a subject that fascinates Leah Chan Grinvald, the new dean of the William S. Boyd School of Law.
Grinvald, an intellectual property scholar who is also the school’s Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, has most recently studied the seemingly irreconcilable conflict behind consumers’ right to fix products they’ve purchased and manufacturers’ concerns about protecting their IP rights.
“We should be finding a balance,” Grinvald said. “While I’m nervous about overreach, over-enforcement of intellectual property rights and over-interpretation of intellectual property rights, I have always been a supporter of balanced rights.”
Intellectual property — copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets—can foster an innovative economy. But consumers want the autonomy to make a relatively easy repair themselves with an easily accessible repair manual or take the product to a repair shop in an open and competitive market.
“Manufacturers are utilizing their intellectual property rights in a way that has stymied repair,” Grinvald says. “In some cases, they’re using their rights in a manner which wasn’t really intended in the grant of rights.”
Vigorously pursuing IP protection and enforcing those rights that make repairs so expensive or onerous to push consumers to buy new products form some companies’ business strategy.
“Some business models are based on trying to sell to consumers newer and newer products. This then comes at the expense of our environment, at the expense of our consumers’ wallets, and not saying, well, ‘Let’s give [you] options. You can easily repair it for x dollars. If you want a new one, then it would be y.’”
It’s a subject that hit home for Grinvald, or more specifically her kitchen counter, about a year and a half ago when she was whipping birthday cupcake batter for one of her children: Her relatively new (but no longer under warranty) high-end mixer sputtered and stopped. Rather than being forced to take it to an authorized repair shop or invest in a new machine, her husband used a YouTube video to assess the problem, bought a motor component online, and made the fix.
“That’s an example of where repair can happen because the parts are available and the information is available,” Grinvald says.
From an immigrant family with many small-business owners, Grinvald traces her passion for IP rights and business law in part to the struggles she witnessed. A pro bono case in which she helped a nonprofit navigate the trademark process was also enlightening. And as TaylorMade Golf’s global corporate counsel, she advised the company about enforcement strategy of IP rights as well as copyright, trademark, contract, and employment law. This interest in enforcement is what led her to her current research in repair.
Grinvald, a faculty member at Suffolk Law School in Boston since 2013 and its associate dean for the past six years, has written extensively about IP law, including enforcement of such rights at the domestic and international levels.
