New Yorkers: Support the Product End of Life Disclosure Act

You buy a smart speaker, a thermostat, a baby monitor. A year or two later it stops working, because the company that made it turned off a server or stopped sending updates. The hardware never failed. You are holding a working machine the manufacturer decided to retire.

New York has a bill one floor vote away from making companies disclose that expiration date before you buy. It is alive right now, and the State Senate can pass it in the final days of this session if enough people ask.

The bill is S.8507-B (sponsor Sen. Patricia Fahy) and A.10132-B (sponsor Asm. Steven Otis). The Assembly passed A.10132-B on June 2, 2026; the Senate companion is now before the Senate Rules Committee.

In plain terms: a company selling an internet-connected product has to tell you, before you buy, a specific date for how long it will get updates and support, and say what stops working after that date. It has to warn owners six months ahead of the end of support and again the day support ends. The date can move later but never sooner, and the company cannot sell the product in the last year before its own cutoff. Leased or service devices have to be replaced for free when support ends. The Attorney General enforces it. It covers products made or sold after January 1, 2027; the only carve-out is FDA-regulated medical devices. It does not let you repair or bypass anything. It just forces the expiration date onto the table before the company takes your money.

If you live in NY, do this in five minutes

The people who decide whether the Senate votes are the majority leadership and the Rules Committee. You do not have to hunt for them.

Step 1: Email the leadership and Rules Committee. Paste this line into the "To" field:

scousins@nysenate.gov, smayer@nysenate.gov, persaud@nysenate.gov, gianaris@nysenate.gov, skoufis@nysenate.gov, cooney@nysenate.gov, senatorjbailey@nysenate.gov, lkrueger@nysenate.gov, stavisky@nysenate.gov, grivera@nysenate.gov, addabbo@nysenate.gov, comrie@nysenate.gov, fernandez@nysenate.gov, gonzalez@nysenate.gov, harckham@nysenate.gov, myrie@nysenate.gov, parker@nysenate.gov, sepulveda@nysenate.gov

Every one is the senator's own official @nysenate.gov address. The full directory is below.

Step 2: Find your own senator. Use the Senate Find My Senator tool. A message from a senator's own district counts more than one from a stranger. If your senator is on the list above, that single email is the most useful thing you can send. Say you are a constituent.

Step 3: Say something real. Use the draft below, then add one sentence of your own: the connected product you own, and why you want its expiration date disclosed before you buy, not discovered after it bricks. That one sentence keeps your message out of the junk pile.

Subject: Please move S.8507-B (End of Life Disclosure Act) to the Senate floor

Body: I am a New Yorker asking you to bring the Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act to the Senate floor for a vote, and to vote yes. The Assembly passed its companion bill on June 2. It is in the Senate Rules Committee now.

[One line: the connected device you own, and that you want its support expiration date disclosed before you buy, not discovered after the company shuts off the server.]

Please move A.10132-B to the floor and support it.

[Your name, your town]

If your senator is on the list, change line one to "I am your constituent in [your town]." Only say constituent if it is true. Out of state? See the bottom of the page.

Why your message has to be informed, not copy-paste

We just handed you a draft, and now we are telling you not to paste it word for word. Both are right. Staffers sometimes bundle identical messages and log them as one line. A short, on-topic note that is clearly from a real local person gets counted on its own. The skeleton is fine; the one sentence you write yourself is what makes it real. Short and specific beats long and angry.

The best parts of the bill

Here are the lines that matter, in the bill's own words.

1. Tell people the death date up front. Section 399-mm(2)(a):

"The manufacturer shall clearly and prominently disclose a minimum guaranteed support time frame to prospective buyers ..."

The bill defines the term in § 399-mm(1)(d) so it cannot be weasel-worded:

"'Minimum guaranteed support time frame' means the minimum amount of time for which a company has publicly committed to providing all necessary updates and support for a connected consumer product, expressed as a specific date for the end of the time frame."

A specific calendar date, not "a few years" or "as long as it is feasible."

2. Spell out what you lose. Section 399-mm(2)(d):

"The disclosures described in paragraph (a) of this subdivision shall also include a detailed account of the features and functionality that will be lost or compromised when the connected consumer product reaches its end of life."

3. Tell owners how to keep using it. This points straight at the Section 1201 problem, in § 399-mm(2)(g):

"Notification about the connected consumer product's end of life shall include clear information about actions consumers can take if they want to continue using the connected consumer product in a secure and effective manner, disconnecting such product from the internet and shall provide a list of features lost in, and vulnerabilities and security risks that are likely to result from such product's end of life."

New York tells the manufacturer to explain how to keep the product alive after abandonment, while 17 U.S.C. 1201 can make those exact steps a federal offense.^[3] The bill assumes a right that 1201 takes away.

4. No selling something you are about to kill. Section 399-mm(2)(h):

"The manufacturer shall not sell, lease, or otherwise distribute the connected consumer product after the date that is one year before the minimum guaranteed support time frame end date for such product."

This is not hypothetical. On July 10, 2025, Belkin announced it would shut off the cloud service behind most Wemo smart-home devices on January 31, 2026, then kept selling those devices on Amazon, with the listings still advertising the Alexa and Google Assistant support the shutdown would break.^[4] Belkin kept selling a product it had already scheduled to kill. That is what clause (2)(h) bans: selling inside the last year before the support cutoff. (See Wemo discontinuation of service.)

5. Attorney General enforcement. Section 399-mm(4):

"Any violation of the provisions of this section shall constitute an unlawful practice under section three hundred forty-nine of this chapter. All remedies, penalties, and authority granted to the attorney general therein shall be available for the enforcement of this section."

Section 399-mm does not give an owner a new right to sue; it names the Attorney General as the enforcer. The lever now is the legislature: this is not law yet, so it passes by floor vote or not at all.

Why we support it

A connected product that loses support is almost never broken hardware. It is working hardware the manufacturer decided to stop standing behind. What died is a server in someone else's data center, or an update pipeline someone shut off.

Spotify's Car Thing is the clean example. Spotify sold it as an in-car streaming device, then announced in 2024 that it would shut off the servers on December 9, 2024, and told owners to throw the device away.^[5] The hardware did not fail. The company flipped a switch and turned a thing people paid for into e-waste on a date it chose. (See Spotify Car Thing.)

Section 1201 is what makes a dead product stay dead. The device is usually still fine; it is the software lock, the dependency on the manufacturer's server, and the federal ban on circumventing them that turn no more updates into no longer owning a working thing.^[3] S.8507-B does not give anyone the right to bypass that. It forces the manufacturer to admit the abandonment date up front and say what dies with it. That is the disclosure half of the fight. The other half, the right to keep the thing running after abandonment, is still locked up by 1201. (See also Right to repair and Planned obsolescence.)

Disclosure is not ownership. A label saying the device dies in 2030 is progress; a law that lets you keep it alive past 2030 is the goal. But you cannot make people angry about planned obsolescence until it is written on the box, and this is a strong version, not a token one: a specific date, no shortening, advance warning, free replacement for leased devices, AG enforcement, one narrow medical-device exemption. It is worth backing.

Who to email

These are the seats that decide whether the bill gets a floor vote: the Senate majority leadership and the Rules Committee. Ordered by what counts most.

The directory

Email is simplest, but a call can be most impcatful. Each senator also has an Albany office line; use the Albany office, not a district office, for statewide legislation.

When to send it

Today. The Senate is in the final stretch of its 2026 session; the published calendar shows its last scheduled days in June 2026. If the Senate gavels out without a floor vote, the bill dies and starts over in 2027.

A 20-second video script

For camera, if you post:

New York has a bill that would force companies to tell you the expiration date on your smart devices before you buy them, instead of after they brick. The Assembly already passed it. It is sitting in the State Senate right now. If you are in New York, email your state senator and the Senate leadership today and tell them to bring A.10132-B to the floor and vote yes on the End of Life Disclosure Act, before this session ends.

If you are not in New York

You are not a constituent, so do not email the senators pretending to be one; that gets the message tossed and makes real constituents' mail look worse. Share this, post the bill number, and point New Yorkers at the Find My Senator tool. The vote count that matters is New York Senate seats.