Do Americans have a right to fix their own stuff?

Surrounded on all sides by blinking screens, Jim Moore helms the deck of his computer fix-it shop, MotherBoards Tech. 

Here from his home-based workbench the self-described “total geek” has steered his business for nearly 25 years. Meanwhile, the small repair shop – once a staple of American life – has all but vanished around him.

The reason, he says, is a question of whether independent shops like his even have a right to exist in an era when proprietary software is embedded in nearly every possession.

“Companies now control their own products,” says Mr. Moore. “You don’t own nothing.”

Mr. Moore’s living-room control deck in the Savannah suburbs is in the vortex of a growing effort in the United States to wrest power back from corporations by establishing a fundamental right to repair your