What can a bustling electronic components bazaar in Shenzhen, China, tell us about building a better technology future? To researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, it symbolizes the boundless motivation, excitement, and innovation that can be unlocked if people have the rights to repair, tinker, and create.

Huang believes that to truly unleash innovation that betters everyone, we must replace our current patent and copyright culture with one that truly values making products better, cheaper, and more reliably by encouraging competition around production, quality, and cost optimization. He wants to remind people of the fun, inspiring era when makers didn’t have to live in fear of patent trolls, and to encourage them to demand a return of the “permissionless ecosystem” that nurtured so many great ideas.

Huang speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how we can have it all – from better phones to cooler drones, from handy medical devices to fun Star Wars fan gadgets – if we’re willing to share ideas and trade short-term profit for long-term advancement.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

How “rent-seeking behavior” stifles innovation.
Why questioning authority and “poking the tigers” of patent law is necessary to move things forward.
What China can teach the United States about competitive production that advances creative invention.
How uniting hardware and software hackers, fan fiction creators, farmers who want to repair their tractors, and other stakeholders into a single, focused right-to-repair movement could change the future of technology.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is an American security researcher and hardware hacker with a long history in reverse engineering. He's the author of the widely respected 2003 book, “Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering,” and since then he served as a research affiliate for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and as a technical advisor for several hardware startups. EFF awarded him a Pioneer Award in 2012 for his work in hardware hacking, open source, and activism. He’s a native of Kalamazoo, MI, he holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, and he lives in Singapore.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod301

Find the podcast via RSS, Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. You can find an MP3 archive of all our episodes at the Internet Archive.

EFF is deeply grateful for the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, without whom this podcast would not be possible.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Nat Keefe of Beatmower with Reed Mathis. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703

CommonGrond by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Ft: simonlittlefield

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/59729
Probably Shouldn’t by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Mr_Yesterday

Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

Dyscalculia, more than “bad at math”

Related resources