Thread: Texas Law to Jail Computer Repair Owners?

http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_ ... Itemid=129

Texas Government-mandated Computer Repair License Does Not Compute

The Issue in a Nutshell

Mike Rife runs a successful computer repair business in Austin, Texas. Now the government wants Mike to close his business and complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator before he can continue solving his customers’ computer problems. The state of Texas now demands that computer repair companies obtain private investigators’ licenses. To get that license, the manager or owner of every computer repair company must complete either a criminal justice degree or a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator.

If Mike continues working without a private investigator’s license, he risks criminal penalties of one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. The government can also charge Mike with civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation—just for examining computer files and telling a customer what went wrong.

Computer repair companies are not the only ones at risk under the new law. Consumers who knowingly take their computers to unlicensed companies are subject to the same penalties. Like the companies they use, consumers are faced with a difficult choice: risk punishment for having the work performed by an unlicensed company or pay much higher fees to one of a small group of computer forensics companies around the state.

Computers are frequently unreliable. When something goes wrong, people call a computer repair company to examine the computer, tell them what went wrong and fix the problem. Computer repair shops are everywhere. They represent the friendly, entrepreneurial, human face of an increasingly complex technology industry. The state of Texas is now telling computer repair shops that they had better watch their back, lest any of them diagnose a computer problem in a way that runs afoul of the licensing law.

Texas claims to be working hard to bring technology innovators to the state. Yet at the same time the government is telling technology entrepreneurs that their chosen profession will be highly regulated and subject to the same licensure requirements as P.I.s and private security guards. Texas is saying—to Mike Rife and others—that technology entrepreneurs are not welcome in the Lone Star State.

The regulation of computer repair is an example of how a declining cartel (in this case, private investigators) can capture new profits by asking the legislature to regulate its competitors out of business. The pattern is consistent: capture a lucrative business area by making it illegal for your competitors to perform the same work without complying with burdensome licensing requirements.
Introduction

Computer repair shops highly value their independence. Mike Rife has run AustinPCTech for more than a decade. David Norelid operates Citronix Tech Services in Houston, a business he started when friends and family encouraged him to put his knowledge of computers to good use. David uses the money he makes at Citronix to pay for his bachelor’s degree in information technology management. Business is so good that David and his business partner plan to expand Citronix after David graduates.

Mike and David have hundreds of happy customers between them. The jobs those customers ask Mike and David to perform run from the mundane (installing anti-virus software) to the enormously complex (reconstructing the data on a hard drive after complete system failure). But no matter how big or small a job is, it always involves accessing files on the computer.

The state of Texas, however, now wants Mike, David, and others like them to obtain a private investigator’s license before they access data on the computers they work on, or else risk a year in jail and a $4,000 fine,[1] and civil penalties of up to $10,000 every time they fix a computer.[2] Since 2007, anyone who accesses non-public computer files to gather information about the “causes of eventsâ€

That is just wrong. It sounds like somebody is lobbying to get this passed. I wonder if big money is involved?

How is this immigration related?

If it's in other topics it doesn't have to be.