Law

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1306984

Yes, it is batshit crazy that this happened, and that municipalities actually stripped people of Belgian nationality that they already acquired.

Even more puzzling is how flimsy Belgian nationality is -- that you can lose Belgian nationality so easily and without even any kind of wrong-doing.

The Federal Ombudsman says the “Immigration Office is exceeding its powers.” But AFAICT the immigration office is just making a request -- one that can and should be ignored.

Very bizarre that the municipality has these powers. Sure, the muni has the power to grant nationality. Fair enough. But I find it a bit disturbing that the muni has power to strip nationality. Such a serious assault on someone’s human right to self-determinism should be a federal procedure, no?

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1289285

I think I may have found a gem here:

EN (machine translation, emphasis mine):

Article 3/5.[¹ The communication of federal administrative authorities is clear and recognizable. Federal administrative bodies communicate in a politically and commercially neutral manner. The obligation to communicate in a politically neutral manner shall not apply to the administrative bodies referred to in the second paragraph of Article 1(f). ]¹

What about that exception? We have:

1°[¹ administrative instance:
…
(f) the federal government's strategic bodies referred to in the Royal Decree of 19 July 2001 on the installation of the federal public services strategic bodies and relating to the personnel of the federal public services designated to form part of the cabinet of a member of a government or a college of a Community or Region; ]¹

I’m not going on a chase to dig that up. But I would like to know if this means all “SPF …” agencies (SPF Economy, SPF Mobility, SPF Finances, SPF Foreign Afairs, etc) are exempt from commercial neutrality.

I also wonder if this apparently accidental legal effect is also accidentally nullified by this clause:

Art. 9. Where the application for advertising relates to an administrative document of an administrative [¹ instance]¹ [² ...]² including a work protected by copyright, the authorization of the author or of the person to whom the rights of the author were transferred is not required to authorize the on-site consultation of the document or to provide explanations about it.

Because I suspect that shitty corps like Facebook have a clause that transfers copyright to Facebook, in which case a request to liberate FB publications by a public service can be brushed off. But then that raises another question. In Belgium, copyright holders cannot transfer their copyright (which is actually to protect the human creator). E.g. the creator of the Smurfs cartoon retains copyright ownership. But then if my understanding is true, does that mean Belgian law is catoring just for the corner case of copyright being transferred outside of Belgium?

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/1289254

This is the 2024 update to the “Law of 11.04.1994”:

EN (machine translation):

Art.3/1.[¹ Federal administrative bodies inform citizens of federal regulations and, in particular, of the rights and obligations arising therefrom. This information includes at least the federal legislative and regulatory standards for the jurisdiction of the administrative body concerned. It is at least published on the website of the administrative body. ]¹

---

(1 Inserted by L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; Effective: 15-07-2024)

FR (original):

Art.3/1.[¹ Les instances administratives fédérales informent les citoyens de la réglementation fédérale et en particulier des droits et obligations qui en découlent. Cette information porte au moins sur les normes législatives et réglementaires fédérales relatives aux compétences de l'instance administrative concernée. Elle est à tout le moins publiée sur le site internet de l'instance administrative.]¹

---

(1 Inséré par L 2024-05-12/18, art. 5, 007; En vigueur : 15-07-2024)

The official website for federal statutes is https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/, which is an access restricted website that blocks people on the Tor network.

It’s interesting that roaming charges were eliminated in the EU when roaming from one member state to another. In principle, this could be great for consumers so that competition sufficiently suppresses unreasonable GSM costs.

But then the EU brought in what they call a “fair use” law. This blocks continuous roaming. Which effectively denies consumers the benefits of competition.

In Belgium we have only 3 real GSM carriers. The rest are MVNOs. So we get shitty deals on prepaid service.

www.iot-sim.tech has a quite interesting deal: 1gb for 10 years for €10. The raw price per gig is bad, but the credit persists for 10 years which is quite generous compared to all options in Belgium (use-it-or-lose-it in 1 year).

So as a consequence, iot-sim.tech has a rule that the comms can only be used IOT or M2M, perhaps due to some strange exception. But that’s a bit of a perverse outcome because it really should not matter whether the signal is “personal” or not.

IIRC, Belgium bans the anti-competitive practice of banks forcing other services to be bundled with current accounts. As I understood the law, a bank could not force you to open a savings account (for example) as a pre-condition to opening a current account. Although the reverse was always possible. That is, you ask for some kind of account that is not a current account, and the bank forces you to open a current account.

At some point “basic” accounts became a thing.. an EU mandate whereby banks cannot refuse you a bank account unless you already have an account. These basic accounts are generally shit. Trully basic, feature poor, nannied, and costly. There are no gratis basic accounts.

So recently a friend tried to open a retail current account and the bank tried to force them to open another account of some kind along with it. When my friend refused the other account, the bank said: “we can accommodate but only if the current account you open is your only current account”. This implies that the bank is only granting stand-alone current accounts if they are basic accounts. Strings are now attached to retail accounts.

This seems like an unlawful (and obviously shitty) practice. It means they are abusing the basic account mechanism to impose service bundling on their retail current accounts. This completely defeats the purpose of the anti-bundling law because there already is an obligation to open basic accounts with no extra conditions anyway. Am I missing something? It’s as if the existence of “basic” accounts has given banks the idea that they can arbitrarily refuse access to retail accounts.

EU Directive 2019/1 defines cartel this way:

“(11) ‘cartel’ means an agreement or concerted practice between two or more competitors aimed at coordinating their competitive behaviour on the market or influencing the relevant parameters of competition through practices such as, but not limited to, the fixing or coordination of purchase or selling prices or other trading conditions, including in relation to intellectual property rights, the allocation of production or sales quotas, the sharing of markets and customers, including bid-rigging, restrictions of imports or exports or anti-competitive actions against other competitors;”

“(12) ‘secret cartel’ means a cartel, the existence of which is partially or wholly concealed;”

A cartel is quite harmful to consumers as I understand it, and as that definition suggests. But I find no prohibition on cartels in EU Directive 2019/1. There is a huge amount of text about giving leniency to secret carels. Leniency implies there is a prohibition to begin with. The anti-competition prohibition seems to be wholly in the TFEU arts.101—102, though nothing about cartels specifically. That’s also just strictly regulating cross-border competition. So IIUC, the EU is unconcerned with anti-competitive scenarios falling wholly within a member state, correct?

I’m ultimately trying to work out whether this trend of ATM cartels is lawful. It seems to have started in NL but the shitshow is spreading out from there. I get the impression the ATM cartels would not be considered cross-border anti-competition, thus not an EU concern. From there, it’s down to just national anti-competition law, correct?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35169642

When some garbage legislation is enacted (like this or this), democracy requires knowing who did that shit so we know who to vote out of office.

When a relatively good piece of legislation is enacted, it’s obviously also conducive to democracy to know who we need to keep in office, as well as who cares when a good law is not being upheld.

Why is this info buried or non-existent? I don’t think the EU is entirely incompetent about recording things. I seem to recall coming across a meeting minutes document that detailed who said what. But that shit is buried. It’s nowhere near the publication of the law. You fetch a PDF of the law in your preferred language, and this is all the attribution you get:

Done at Brussels, 27 April 2016.
For the European Parliament
The President
M. SCHULZ

For the Council
The President
J.A. HENNIS-PLASSCHAERT

That’s at the end of the GDPR. It’s mostly useless. I want to know who in the end voted to pass EU Reg.2016/679 and who opposed it, for example. I also want to know their parties. Not just yay and nae, but also I want to know who were significant key proponents of the law and who were the biggest opponents. It’s all good for praising and shaming. And it’s good to know who your allies are when taking action against offenders of a good law.

In principle, there is no reason lawmaking bodies cannot be competent enough to trace a single word or phrase in a statute to an individual lawmaker who is most responsible for it.

A US republican voter made the mind-boggling statement “I’m voting Trump because Biden will take away my social security” (WTF- are you fucking kidding me?, I thought) He thought the hell-bent anti-socialism candidate was best for protecting a social program that was literally invented by socialists (in Milwaukee Wisconsin). Indeed, voters are clueless about who supports what. And it’s not exactly their fault. I believe right-wing politicians would be far less popular if more readily accessible transparency were established.

Speaking of the US, there was only ONE person in Congress who was wise enough to oppose the anti-terror bill: Senator Russ Feingold. He said something brilliant:

Excerpt from Russ Feingold

“Of course, there is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists. But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.”.

When I download a law, I want to know not just the proponents and opponents, but significant quotes from the outspoken lawmakers would be nice to have as well.

I would then want to go further, and then take a list of politicians who I regard as mostly detrimental, and collect stats on which corporations fed their campaign war chests by what amounts. Then that info would help direct my boycotts. This particular aspect would be more relevant in the US than Europe, but anyway.. just an example of potential use of the info.

The UK has effectively scrapped visa-free travel from Europe. They still call it visa-free, but it’s bullshit.. you have to pay money and do a background check. That’s as shitty as applying for visa. We have lost some of our freedom of movement due to this enshitification of the world that the US has started.

Canada did the same shit.

So the question is, if petitioners want to travel to the UK and Canada without the cost, security theatre snooping, hassle, and stupid risk of ruined vacations, would it be viable to petition the EU to negotiate to have the UK and Canada end their shitty border treatment of Europeans? Most likely it would amount to reciprocity (Europe not pulling the same stupid shit on Canadians and Brits).

But in the end, we just want a negotiation to happen. Is a petition the right mechanism?

The linked article:

FATCA: Top EU court to decide if Belgium can share 'Accidental Americans' tax data with US

The article implies accidental Americans will get some protection that intentional Americans will not. Yes, I know what accidental American means in layperson’s terms. I am surprised there is a legal distinction and wonder how the law defines it.

A utility bill came on paper using:

• black text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, orange, gray..)
• white text (on a variety of different backgrounds- blue, green..)
• very light grey text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, intermittent light green imagery..)
• blue text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, intermittent light green imagery..)
• 2 kinds of bold text (extra heavy black and dark green)

I’m not blind. I can see it just fine. But when I try to scan this thing into a bi-level doc, it’s impossible because of this shit-show of color combinations. There is no possible level by which all the text can be made clear. As soon as a level is used to eliminate the colored backgrounds, a lot of the light gray text goes white. This forces me to scan it as color, which wastes file space.

So I thought-- what about blind people? Aren’t they fucked in this situation? If I were blind, I would scan, OCR, then use a screen reader on the text. Some OCR tools can work on color docs but I don’t think all OCR software has that.

Reaching the accessibility law is itself a shitshow in the EU now that the EU blocks Tor. Indeed, only clearnet users are permitted to be aware of the law. I had to pull directive 2019/882 from the archives, where the most recent capture was bad but an old capture was fetchable.

Directive 2019/882 seems to only address “products and services”, and documentation for that commercial category. I see nothing about paper bills. That seems bizarre, no?

I found this Color Contrast for PDF Accessibility: Why Does It Matter?, but that’s not exactly relevant.

So is the utility company legally compliant with this shitty unscannable invoice design?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/30909420

According to the linked leaflet, the EU’s payment services directive ensures that “You can no longer be charged extra costs by a merchant when you pay using a card issued in the EU.” But they neglect to extend reciprocity to cash payers.

Incidentally, this exacerbates adversely discriminatory treatment of Americans who face uniquely poor treatment by banks. Cash is the sole notable refuge from shitty banks.

Upcharging cash payers violates human rights. This is not only attributed to banks discriminating on the basis of nationality. We have a human right to:

• self-determinism
• autonomy
• consumer protection
• privacy

Penalising cash payers is an assault on any consumer who exercises their self-deterministic right to live autonomous and independent from banks.

No consumer protection is more important than the right to opt out of a transaction. It’s the only consumer protection that one can give themself without relying on others. Surcharging consumers who opt out of banking is an attack on that option. It puts a price on consumer protection.

Banking inherently entails abuse of privacy. The digital footprint is huge and undermins data minimisation rights.

Does anyone know of any EU case law for anti-repair situations? I am most interested in a legal theory that kill switches can be treated as anti-competitive, in principle on the basis of monopolisation of the repair business.

I saw the video where the Dragon Sector hacker team presented their findings whereby a Polish train had a kill switch to block repairs by anyone other than the manufacturer. I believe the victim is not the train maker -- it’s the train owner who is trapped in anti-repair shenanigans. I don’t know anti-competition law, but intuitively the train maker Newag abusively uses kill switches to secure a monopoly on repair of their trains.

My Beko washing machines have the same problem. They are kill-switched to block me from repair. Beko charges €200 to unlock them (more than the machine is worth). So I thought: what about that train hacking case? Surely by now the victims would have sued the train maker for anti-competition offenses, and by now I would have some favorable case law to cite. I’m so disguested with what I’ve found.. I wonder what am I missing? The lawsuit is the other way around. The train maiker is suing the train owner and hacker group for “unlawful competition”.

Can someone please explain why the lawsuit isn’t the other way around? Are Europeans really fucked in this circumstance?

I use very unreliable email forwarding services for protection and control. Rationale:

• to detect data leaks (every email address I disclose is unique to the recipient)
• to disable an ephemeral address when it is abused

I pay no fees. My forwarding providers are likely running in some kid’s mom’s basement. Lots of messages get lost. It’s usually the worst kind of a loss: a blackhole. Which means the sender successfully connects and receives a well-sent status. The messages are lost after the sender is left with the false idea that it was delivered. I have no idea if the messages are lost by the forwarding provider or the email server of the ultimate destination.

In one case I discovered that a forwarding provider was silently dropping all messages no matter what email service I use. It’s a gratis service, so the idea of suing or taking action against the shitty provider would be controversial and likely unsuccessful. It could have been happening for months or even years before I discovered it was happening.

Email is inherently unreliable. It is what it is. But at the same time, Belgium has decided that sending an email carries the legal weight of a registered letter. Yikes! Indeed, something officially important for which my attention is critical and has legal consequences has a good chance of going to a black hole without my knowledge.

To worsen matters, the post service charges ~€10 to send a proper registered letter. That extortionate cost sufficiently drives senders to use email instead.

(crossposted from !exclusive_public_resources)

The Council of State is a court that handles appeals, often to challenge non-court decisions like that of a public enforcement body. E.g. you report to SPF Mobilité that an airline or rail operator did not compensate you for a delay or cancellation, and they give you a flippant rejection, the Council of State is your recourse.

The Council of State will not open a case unless you pay a few hundred euros to their bank account. They do not accept cash.

So you might think: I’ll just hire a lawyer with cash and the lawyer will open the case. Nope. Belgian lawyers are prohibited from accepting cash.

The linked article suggests looking at the “explanetory memorandum” of an EU law to do a deeper dive on it. Searching for it is a shit-show. The page showing a particular law shows the full text and a large selection of language and format (pdf, text, html), which is good, but nowhere on these pages is there a link to an “explanatory memorandum”. The advanced search page makes no mention of it. I actually had to do a general web search from a non-EU site and sort through a lot of garbage to dig up a link. The URL was cryptic and date-specific, so no way to simply reform an URL to get an explanatory memorandum for any given law.

BTW, what exactly is the explanatory memorandum? Is it always just a proposal before a law is created, or is it ever a post-enactment analysis with further detail?

It seems like the recitals in the preamble already exist to give rationale so the original proposal would be a bit redundant.

(update) I just realised the web hit goes to www.europarl.europa.eu, not eur-lex.europa.eu. But the search tool is blunt and non-intuitive.. not sure which filter to use.

(update 2) woah, more of a shit-show than I thought. The parliament site had the explanatory memorandum in a cryptic URL, but then when I search on that site for the doc there is an overview page that has a buried link to the explanatory memorandum on eur-lex.

(update 3) woah! what a shit show! The PDF links on the eur-lex site are fake. The *.pdf file is actually JavaScript! If you run the JS, it’s like a shitty download manager that presents another HTML page. Then /those/ PDF URLs are also fake. The only way to reach the PDF is using PDF.js inside a gui browser.

The EU is most certainly not adhering to its own open data policy.

A consumer protection agency advises individual consumers to take legal action against an anti-competitive enterprise. This seems really off to me. Is the advice good? I would generally expect either the government to prosecute anti-competitive corporations or perhaps other corporations who are damaged by the anti-competitive practice. Consumers are damaged of course, but for one consumer to ad-hoc “take a hit for the team” and sue essentially ensures a “diffusion of responsibility” where no one wants to finance a case that costs more than it’s worth to the individual.

I am getting quite mixed results with speaking English in court.

Some court clerks tell me speaking English in court will be disaster -- that non-French speakers must hire an interpretter who is certified for court. Cannot bring a friend for this purpose. Even social interpretters who work gratis in a public service capacity are useless for court proceedings. Certified interpretters tend to charge €200/hour (more than some lawyers).

A clerk who works for a particular judge said “the judge is not hard and will speak English”. And it turned out to be true. There was no resistence to English.

In another situation, the judge/magistrate/mediator (not sure which) spoke to me in low near-whisper and said they are not supposed to speak English, but then spoke English, somewhat insinuating/implying that it was a favor to me.

Another situation: a judge/magistrate/mediator/lawyer (no idea what capacity) said it’s a French process and French will be spoken. I was sure I would be stuffed if I knew zero French. Using my dysfunctional French seemed to be essential for things to move forward but slowed down the discussion to a point where they conceeded and spoke English briefly at moments then went back to French.

Someone with no legal background said (with confidence) that if you do not speak the official language of the court, judges actually have an obligation to speak to you in your language if they can. Of course if a civil court judge cannot speak your language, you’re naturally stuffed.

So in Belgium, clerks are in contradiction, rumors are in contradiction, and actual experiences are inconsistent.

Investigation needed.. but apparently the English and German versions of a directive materially differ. And it might explain why many German ATMs do not give receipts.

Is it safe to assume the original version of an EU directive is in English?

Hello. I've been trying to find genuine legal advice in Berlin for a month now, but every single lawyer I have emailed has refused to take the case, citing their lack of capacity. Or, I simply do not hear back.

I purchased a defective product from Dell for 2,000 euro and now they're refusing to give me a refund after 2 failed repair attempts. I tried to educate myself as best I could about German consumer law, and from what I understand, when a defect is discovered within the first year, it is automatically assumed to be manufacturer defect unless definitively proven otherwise. This defect was discovered at month 6, and resulted in total system failure by month 9.

I also read that the customer gets to decide whether to replace or repair. I chose replace, Dell refused.

I also read that they are legally obligated to make the customer whole within a reasonable amount of time. It has been 3 weeks since their 2nd failed repair attempt, and have not acknowledged that I demanded a refund or made any substantial attempts to offer replacement, repair, or refund. They just tell me they're "Still working on it." every other day. When I ask what that means, they just repeat the statement.

I submitted the issue for arbitration, but Dell refused to participate.

I don't know what else to do. I've tried contacting lawyers, I've tried getting arbitration, I've tried asking around, but Dell is ignoring me while keeping my money. And I can't find anybody willing to help me. I don't know where to go to ask for help. I'm out 5% of my annual wages and I don't know what to do about it!

Various hosts in the *.europa.eu domain have block Tor, and some do not. Tor users have always had access to legal statutes, which IMO is the most important most basic info to have access to. Today this host suddenly demands execution of several 3rd-party JavaScript programs. And if you give up and let that shit run, it just pushes a 403 error anyway.

They are likely targeting Tor users for this discrimination but we cannot know for certain because the 403 page they throw back at us gives no information.

This is the site:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/

We really need an open data law that prohibits having access restrictions on the law itself (the statutes) -- especially if it’s arbitrary and undocumented/non-transparent.

(crossposted from !brussels)

How are unbanked people and those with cashless bank accounts expected to pay lawyers if the money they have for the lawyer is in cash?

Why are lawyers of all people not trusted with cash? Can’t lawyers be disbarred if they do something dodgy?

The EU’s ecodesign law (reg 2024/1781) has “Article 3 - Free movement” which has paragraphs like this:

2. Member States shall not prohibit, restrict or impede the placing on the market or putting into service of products that comply with the performance requirements set out in delegated acts adopted pursuant to Article 4 for reasons of non-compliance with national performance requirements relating to product parameters referred to in Annex I covered by performance requirements included in such delegated acts.

So suppose Beko complies with the ecodesign rules, and they also have kill switches the force early obsolescence (which sadly does not violate the ecodesign rules for washing machines). If Germany were to quite sensibly say: “we respect a right to repair, so no kill switches.. kill switches can fuck off.” IIUC, Germany would be violating EU law with such a ban.

The kill switches block our right to repair. And at the same time, every single member state must allow washing machines with kill switches in their marketplace. Or am I misreading something?

This is an EU Directive for which I want to find the Belgian transposition:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/NIM/?uri=CELEX%3A32009L0125

The EU links are useless.. no txt. So I go here:

https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/

and search based on the publication date (to and from 27.07.2011). There are 4 pages of hits. I cannot see how to narrow that down to directive 2009/125/EC.

This is a common problem.. I always struggle to find the Belgian transposition of EU directives. Any ideas on something that works generally? I tried searching “2009/125/EC” on the Belgian site as well as “32009L0125”, and nothing is found.

From EU regulation 2019/2023 (emphasis mine):

(1) availability of spare parts: (a) manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives of household washing machines and household washer-dryers shall make available to professional repairers at least the following spare parts, for a minimum period of 10 years after placing the last unit of the model on the market: — motor and motor brushes; — transmission between motor and drum; — pumps; — shock absorbers and springs; — washing drum, drum spider and related ball bearings (separately or bundled); — heaters and heating elements, including heat pumps (separately or bundled); — piping and related equipment including all hoses, valves, filters and aquastops (separately or bundled); — printed circuit boards; — electronic displays; — pressure switches; — thermostats and sensors; — software and firmware including reset software;

I’m first of all disgusted that only “professional repairers” get this entitlement. But as well, there is little excuse to put a 10 yr time limit on software. It’s not like they have to maintain large parts-making machinery to maintain copies of software. Also shitty: no mention of source code. Broken closed-source software is not repairable.

The next paragraph shows how much confidence the EU has in end-users’ abilities:

(b) manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives of household washing machines and household washer-dryers shall make available to professional repairers and end-users at least the following spare parts: door, door hinge and seals, other seals, door locking assembly and plastic peripherals such as detergent dispensers, for a minimum period of 10 years after placing the last unit of the model on the market;

WTF, that’s it? That’s all we get? The EU’s nannying is so fucking disturbing. They block end-users from repairing their own appliance by denying them the right to access parts.

Maybe I want to buy the parts myself and then pay a pro to do the labor. Maybe I want to buy spares before they stop making the spares at the 10 yr mark. You also cannot rely on pros to find good prices. If you enter a pro builder supply shop in Europe, they often don’t even bother putting price tags on anything because pros don’t care. They just pass the price on to the client, whatever that comes out to.

The mention of “reset software” is interesting. It suggests EU lawmakers are aware of the kill switches. But instead of banning the practice, they let the swindle continue by only giving pro repairers access to the reset software.

(2) maximum delivery time of spare parts:

during the period mentioned under (1), the manufacturer, importer or authorised representative shall ensure the delivery of the spare parts within 15 working days after having received the order;

in the case of spare parts concerned by point (1)(a), the availability of spare parts may be limited to professional repairers registered in accordance with point (3)(a) and (b);

It gets worse:

(3) access to Repair and Maintenance Information:

after a period of two years after the placing on the market of the first unit of a model and until the end of the period mentioned under (1), the manufacturer, importer or authorised representative shall provide access to the household washing machine or household washer-dryer repair and maintenance information to professional repairers in the following conditions:

(a) the manufacturer’s, importer’s or authorised representative’s website shall indicate the process for professional repairers to register for access to information; to accept such a request, the manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives may require the professional repairer to demonstrate that:

(i) the professional repairer has the technical competence to repair household washing machines and household washer-dryers and complies with the applicable regulations for repairers of electrical equipment in the Member States where it operates. Reference to an official registration system as professional repairer, where such system exists in the Member States concerned, shall be accepted as proof of compliance with this point;

(ii) the professional repairer is covered by insurance covering liabilities resulting from its activity regardless of whether this is required by the Member State;

(b) manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall accept or refuse the registration within 5 working days from the date of request;

(c) manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives may charge reasonable and proportionate fees for access to the repair and maintenance information or for receiving regular updates. A fee is reasonable if it does not discourage access by failing to take into account the extent to which the professional repairer uses the information;

(d) once registered, a professional repairer shall have access, within one working day after requesting it, to the requested repair and maintenance information. The information may be provided for an equivalent model or model of the same family, if relevant;

(e) the household washing machine or household washer-dryer repair and maintenance information referred to in (a) shall include: — the unequivocal household washing machine or household washer-dryer identification; — a disassembly map or exploded view; — technical manual of instructions for repair; — list of necessary repair and test equipment; — component and diagnosis information (such as minimum and maximum theoretical values for measurements); — wiring and connection diagrams; — diagnostic fault and error codes (including manufacturer-specific codes, where applicable); — instructions for installation of relevant software and firmware including reset software; and — information on how to access data records of reported failure incidents stored on the household washing machine or washer-dryer (where applicable);

The maintenance information apparently does not have to include how to reverse a kill switch, unless, IIUC, the reset function is carried out by running software on an external device of some kind. If reseting is a matter of pressing a secret sequence of buttons, that does not seem to be covered here.

It’s quite vague because the law does not even define what “reset software” means. Software, firmware, and reset software are listed as a required “spare part”, but no mention of how the software gets to where it needs to be.

The maker must: “ensure that the spare parts mentioned in points (a) and (b) can be replaced with the use of commonly available tools and without permanent damage to the household washing machine or household washer-dryer;”

Can I take that to mean my commonly available linux laptop can be used for the software replacement?

(3) the user instructions shall also include instructions for the user to perform maintenance operations. Such instructions shall as a minimum include instructions for:

…
(g) identification of errors, the meaning of the errors, and the action required, including identification of errors requiring professional assistance;

Useful that we at least get to see the errors in the future. But if the error is “unbalanced load” and the machine is trapped in the error state even with an empty drum (as my machine is), we’re still fucked without having a way to escape the error.

I’m glad makers are required to tell users how to disable networking, but then they write “(if applicable)”. That could either mean: 1) if there is no network feature; or 2) it’s not disablable. That’s important. I’d be damned if I buy some Internet of Shit garbage and I cannot force it offline. Not to mention there is no requirement to make all the functionality available w/out a network. A maker could put bare minimum functions on the control panel to push you to use an app.

Want to complain? A 5 yr review of this law is in ~2 months.

From Article 8:

Review
The Commission shall review this Regulation in the light of technological progress and shall present the results of this review, including, if appropriate, a draft revision proposal, to the Consultation Forum by 25 December 2025.

Plz folks, write to your EU rep. And collaborate in this thread on ways to fix this mess so we can fix our shit. Redundant complaints to the EU might start to resonate collectively.