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What just happened? Few things in life stay the same, but one reassuringly familiar sight is the broken ice cream machine in your local McDonald’s. However, that looks set to change after the US Copyright Office granted an exemption that gives restaurants the right to repair the machines.
McDonald’s ice cream machines often seem to be permanently out of order due to the password protections put in place by their manufacturer, Taylor. When they break, and they break often, understanding the error codes and accessing the secret, locked service menu requires calling an expensive ($315 per 15 minutes, according to iFixit last year) Taylor service technician. As McDonald’s has a service contract with Taylor, franchises have to buy the company’s equipment and use its service techs.
The problem is that creating a tool that reads the error codes and fixes the machines would be a violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes bypassing software locks on devices a crime.
In August last year, iFixit and consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge petitioned the Copyright Office to allow people to repair consumer devices as well as commercial equipment, including soft-serve ice cream machines. iFixit had performed a teardown on one of the ice cream machines and found it contained “lots of easily replaceable parts.”
McFlurry fans received good news last week when the Copyright Office responded to the petition by granting a narrow exemption for commercial-food equipment.
“Now, with the exemption, you can get around that digital lock with something other than the Taylor-sanctioned key,” said Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, noting that there are examples of how to perform this procedure online. “You can lock-pick your way in through whatever means you happen to have on hand.”
“There’s nothing vanilla about this victory; an exemption for retail-level commercial food preparation equipment will spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers,” Rose said in a statement.
According to mcbroken.com, a website featuring a map that tracks all the ice cream machines not working at around 10,000 different US McDonald’s restaurants, almost 15% are currently broken. New York has the highest number of out-of-order machines at 32%.
In 2022, McDonald’s and Taylor were sued for $900 million by a company called Kytch, which sold a phone-sized device designed to be installed inside McDonald’s ice cream machines to alert franchise owners about breakdowns. McDonald’s sent out emails asking all franchises to remove Kytch’s devices as they violated the machines’ warranties and intercepted “confidential information.”
Kytch ceased operations after the McDonald’s warning. The lawsuits are in settlement discussions.
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