[schoen]

A challenge about journalistic summaries of court decisions is that the court decisions usually address only the application of one area of law. (Also, they are often not even making a final decision, although this particular decision is final on this issue.) Here, the Supreme Court was considering whether a patent holder can assert that a patent lets them prevent some activity with respect to a patented product even after the product has been sold (in this case, when a consumer sells a patented printer cartridge to a remanufacturer who refills it with fresh ink and resells it to another consumer). The court said that existing patent law does not, in fact, include a right to prohibit this activity.

However, this is not the same as finding a blanket right to repair things; there might be other legal reasons why manufacturers can try to restrict repairs. The court did not decide whether any of those other reasons are or are not valid. One example that comes up a lot and that some of my colleagues are actively working on is software copyrights, and particularly §1201 of the DMCA as applied to embedded software.

It's also worth remembering that most U.S. court decisions that examine parties' legal rights are interpreting statutes or contracts (whose text can potentially be changed in response to the court decision), not evaluating constitutional rights (which are difficult to change). So a lot of decisions that say a party has a right to do something mean to say that a particular law or contract did not prevent the party from doing it. But another law or contract—including a future revised version of that same one—might conceivably still prevent it.