France’s planned-obsolescence offence

A defined intentional practice

France’s 2015 energy-transition law introduced a specific planned-obsolescence offence into consumer law.^[3] Its placement and wording later changed. The current text, Consumer Code Article L441-2, prohibits planned obsolescence and defines it as techniques, including software techniques, through which the person placing a product on the market deliberately aims to reduce its lifespan.^[1] The legal focus is therefore neither a product’s age nor a buyer’s dissatisfaction alone. It is a responsible party’s deliberate aim and the means used to achieve it.

Article L441-2 expressly includes software techniques.^[1] A product’s useful life can therefore be affected by code as well as by its physical parts. The inclusion does not make every update unlawful: the provision still centers on a deliberate aim to shorten life.

Repair information and broader lifespan policy

The rule emerged from concern about waste and the difficulty of judging durability, repairability, and software support at purchase. A 2015 European Parliament report called for measures against planned obsolescence and for information that would facilitate repair, reuse, and informed buying.^[2] Those wider aims matter, but they are not the same as the French offence. Repairability scores, spare-parts availability, guarantees, and consumer-information duties can address related problems without, by themselves, proving the intent Article L441-2 requires.

The ministry places lifespan policy alongside repair, reuse and better product information.^[3] Those measures can help a buyer assess likely maintenance without proving a producer’s hidden intention. A durability or repairability policy therefore serves a different purpose from prosecution for the defined offence.

Connecting failure to intent

That distinction is most useful when reading headlines about complaints. A complaint, investigation, settlement, and court finding are different things. Early failure, a safety withdrawal, ordinary wear, a design trade-off, or discontinued software support may harm users yet still fail to prove a deliberate plan to shorten life. A court would need evidence about the technique, the decision-maker, and purpose. France’s innovation was to make lifespan a question for consumer law and environmental policy, while retaining that demanding evidentiary threshold.

A short lifespan is an outcome. The offence also requires a deliberate purpose attributable to the person placing the product on the market.^[1] Evidence about design choices, software behavior and internal decisions would have to connect that purpose with the technique, rather than merely show that customers replaced products.

The offence and its environmental purpose

The result is more precise than the slogan that France ‘banned obsolescence.’ It prohibited a defined intentional practice. The real test is not whether a product became obsolete, but whether evidence shows that someone deliberately made it so.

Longer use can reduce replacement and waste, which explains the offence’s place in the energy-transition debate. That policy rationale does not determine whether a particular failure violates the law. Keeping the environmental objective and the elements of the offence separate makes complaints and judgments easier to assess.