Some days it feels like nothing changes, but the best thing you can do is learn to tolerate mediocrity. Today is not that day. Public Knowledge reports that the U.S. Copyright Office has granted an exemption request from nonprofit public interest organization and DIY repair site iFixit, allowing McDonald’s franchise owners to hire third parties to repair their McFlurry and soft-serve ice cream machines. announced that it had been approved.
Because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the franchise owner could not legally hire an outside company to work on the machine. McDonald’s soft serve ice cream machines have digital locks, and Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent the locks on copyrighted works, even if no copyright infringement has occurred. . Only the original manufacturer of the machine can repair a copyrighted device with a digital lock. The latest exemption overturns the Digital Lock Act.
If you’ve ever pulled up to a McDonald’s drive-thru window and not been able to buy a McFlurry-like ice cream, it probably wasn’t out of the ordinary. Franchisees had to wait for McDonald’s to send approved repair personnel to repair the machines. The issue will be addressed in a federal transaction in 2021 following President Joe Biden’s direction to draft new regulations that will allow consumers to legally repair their devices themselves and have them repaired by third parties. It caught the attention of the committee. The FTC contacted McDonald’s franchise owners to learn more about their ice cream machines and the challenges of repairing them.
iFixit disassembled a McDonald’s ice cream dispenser last year and found that it had “a number of easily replaceable parts” but could not be repaired without incurring the wrath of federal copyright law. This teardown led the company to work with Public Knowledge to obtain a copyright exemption for the restoration. The repair website also puts together a video that explains the inner workings of the machine in more detail.
