In April 2026, the 3D printer manufacturer Bambu Lab sent a cease-and-desist letter to an independent developer named Pawel Jarczak. Jarczak had written an open-source software fork that let owners of Bambu printers bypass a piece of middleware called Bambu Connect, restoring direct printer functionality that shipped with the hardware before a 2025 firmware update locked it down. Louis Rossmann saw the cease-and-desist, pledged $10,000 of his own money toward Jarczak's legal defense, and when Jarczak declined to keep fighting, mirrored the code on his own GitHub and invited Bambu to come sue him instead.
The Bambu story illustrates a pattern Rossmann has been naming for more than fifteen years, through increasingly broad examples. The word "own," he argues, has been redefined across consumer markets one firmware update and one terms-of-service revision at a time. A buyer pays for a thing once, in full. The seller keeps the keys to what the thing can do, and the seller can adjust those keys at any point after the sale.
What Rossmann has been building
Rossmann is an electronics technician who founded Rossmann Repair Group in New York in 2008 with $268 in startup capital. The shop's specialty is component-level repair of Apple logic boards, often on MacBooks that Apple itself has quoted customers four-figure replacement prices for. His YouTube channel, which has around 2.5 million subscribers, began in 2012 as a library of repair tutorials and shop footage. Around 2015, it became the primary place he documents how manufacturers make repair intentionally difficult and, since then, the broader pattern of how the same companies erode what their customers own. He has testified at right-to-repair hearings in Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, and Nebraska, and the work has been covered in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the CBC, the BBC, CNN, and Vice.
In June 2025 he co-founded the FULU Foundation with Kevin O'Reilly, a longtime right-to-repair campaigner now serving as the foundation's executive director. FULU is a U.S. non-profit whose mandate is to advocate for consumer ownership rights in the digital era. The name spells out the goal: Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users. Earlier the same year his team launched the Consumer Rights Wiki, a community-edited public database documenting specific cases of corporate behaviour that erode product ownership: smartphones that brick themselves when third-party screens are installed, e-readers whose USB-export feature was switched off years after purchase, subscription services with cancellation processes engineered to be impossible to navigate, smart-home devices that turn into paperweights when a manufacturer ends its cloud service. Each entry names a company and a change the company made after purchase.
Rossmann puts the argument in five words. "You bought it, you owned it," he said in his video about the Bambu Lab situation. The seller doesn't get to keep rewriting what the buyer can do with the thing after the money has changed hands. His examples come from hardware and software because those are the markets he knows. The point isn't specific to electronics.
What this has to do with where you keep your money
Most Canadians have no ownership stake in their primary bank. They've spent meaningful portions of their adult lives at the institution that holds their chequing account, their mortgage, and their retirement savings. None of those years has earned them a vote, a share of the surplus, or a seat at the AGM.
Royal Bank of Canada is a publicly traded company. Its owners are its shareholders, not its account holders. The board of directors is elected by, accountable to, and incentivized to deliver returns to those shareholders. A depositor is the input on the revenue side, and the fees and interest spreads the depositor pays are the output to shareholders. The depositor cannot vote at an annual general meeting, cannot run for a board seat, cannot direct any portion of where retained earnings go, and cannot share in any year-end profit distribution. The same arrangement holds at TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and every other Schedule I chartered bank in Canada. Big Five Bank CEO pay is the sort of thing you get when your financial institution is not member-owned (Hint: it's as high as $23.76 million).
A credit union runs on a different model. When you open a chequing account at Vancity, Coast Capital, Servus, Meridian, or any of the 173 credit unions listed across the country, you are more than a customer. You're a member and part-owner of your own financial infrastructure. Membership typically requires purchasing a small share, usually $5 to $25, which carries one vote regardless of how much money is in the account. The board of directors is elected by the members. Surplus, the credit union equivalent of bank profit, stays inside the cooperative rather than flowing out to external shareholders. Different institutions handle it differently. Some pay distributions or share profits directly to members in good years; others reinvest in operations or fund community grants; many do some mix of all three. The Bank Act codifies the one-vote rule for federally regulated credit unions in section 47.13: each member has only one vote, on all matters.
The Canadian Credit Union Association puts credit union membership at more than 11.3 million Canadians, and most of them didn't join out of ideology. They joined because a mortgage rate came in 50 basis points better than the bank, or because a personal-loan officer looked at the file instead of declining via algorithm, or because the chequing account didn't carry a monthly fee. Without external shareholders to satisfy, the spread between what the institution pays depositors and what it charges borrowers isn't being extracted out of the system. How much of it returns to members in a given year varies by institution.
What credit unions can and can't deliver
The cooperative model has known limits. Member turnout at annual general meetings is often low. Some of the larger credit unions have grown enough that the day-to-day customer experience can feel similar to banking with a small regional bank rather than with a cooperative. Some credit unions charge fees that rival the big banks on individual products. Voting rights mean less when only a few hundred members out of tens of thousands show up to use them.
Those problems are operational. The setup underneath is different from a bank's: members vote, members elect the board, the surplus stays inside the cooperative instead of leaving it as shareholder returns, and when something goes badly wrong, the recourse loop runs through the membership instead of through a corporate investor relations department. Whether any individual member shows up to exercise those rights is a separate question from whether the rights exist.
The same answer, already built in Canadian banking
Rossmann's case against Bambu Lab, against Apple's parts-pairing locks, against John Deere's dealer-only tractor diagnostics, against Adobe's punitive cancellation fees, and against Amazon's February 2025 removal of Kindle USB downloads is one consistent argument repeated across many product categories. Across all of them, the manufacturer keeps control after the sale, the owner's options narrow over time, and the product stops being something they own and becomes something they're permitted to use.
The financial-services version of this argument has been settled in Canada for the better part of a century. Credit unions have operated across the country since at least the 1930s, in every province, with deposits insured by provincial deposit insurance corporations or, for federally regulated credit unions, by the CDIC. Canadians who choose credit unions often do so because the math on a specific product worked out better at the time. The more durable difference is the one Rossmann's argument is about: the people who own the institution are the same people who use it.
If Rossmann's framing of consumer ownership lands for you when it's applied to your phone, your printer, your software, or your tractor, it applies equally to your chequing account, your mortgage, and the institution holding your retirement savings. The cooperative alternative he's pushing for in consumer hardware exists in Canadian banking already, accessible to most Canadians through credit union membership. Owning where you bank doesn't change everything in your financial life. It changes the answer to one question: whose interests does the institution serve?
FULU and the Consumer Rights Wiki, Rossmann's main projects today, document the cost to consumers when ownership of what they paid for gets hollowed out. Canadian credit unions are one institutional model where the people using the service are also the people who own it.
Related reading: 7 Overlooked Benefits of a Local Credit Union Membership
Sources
Tom's Hardware: Louis Rossmann tells 3D printer maker Bambu Lab to go (bleep) yourself (May 2026) Tom's Hardware: Louis Rossmann taunts Bambu Lab by hosting banned firmware fork (May 2026) Fight to Repair: The storm brewing over Bambu Lab's lockdown (May 2026) PC Gamer: Bambu Lab controversy coverage (May 2026) Jeff Geerling: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract (May 2026) Rossmann Group: Louis Rossmann founder bio and advocacy history FULU Foundation: U.S. consumer ownership rights non-profit, co-founded June 2025 Consumer Rights Wiki: Community-edited database of anti-consumer corporate practices WinBuzzer: Rossmann launches FULU Foundation (June 2025) Mostly Media: A hard look at consumer rights and the right to repair (May 2025) Chris on Crypto: Consumer Action Taskforce Wiki launch coverage (February 2025) Canadian Credit Union Association: Credit union membership in Canada Bank Act: Section 47.13, federal credit union voting rights Moya Financial: Patronage distribution mechanics at an Ontario credit union Hardbacon: Canadian credit union guide Savvy New Canadians: Credit unions in Canada guide Ratehub: Banks vs credit unions in Canada CDIC: Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, federal deposit insurance reference
