There are days when it feels like nothing will change and the best thing you can do is learn to put up with the minimum. Today is not one of those days. announced that the US Patent Office has granted an exemption to non-profit public interest group and DIY repair site iFixit to allow McDonald’s franchise owners to hire a third party to repair their McFlurry and soft serve ice cream machines.
Franchise owners legally could not hire an outside business to operate the machine due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). McDonald’s soft serve ice cream machines have a digital lock and make it illegal for anyone to bypass the lock on a copyrighted work even if no copyright infringement occurs. Only the original manufacturer of the device can repair a copyrighted device with a digital key. The latest release bypasses the digital lock rule.
If you’ve ever pulled up to a McDonald’s drive-thru window and couldn’t find an ice cream treat like a McFlurry, it probably wasn’t unusual. Franchisees had to wait for the McDonald’s company to send an authorized repair person to repair the machines. The problem caught the attention of the 2021 underwriting of new rules to allow consumers to legally repair their devices and hire third parties to repair them. The FTC contacted McDonald’s franchise owners to learn more about the ice cream machines and the difficulty of repairing them.
conducted a teardown of a McDonald’s ice cream cone last year and found that it had “many replaceable parts” but could not be repaired without incurring the wrath of federal copyright laws. Inventory reduction has enabled the company to work with it Public Information getting a copyright release to edit them. The repair website also included a video that explains the inner workings of the machine in detail.
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