Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The Librarian of Congress said it was okay to bypass the DMCA lockdown on McDonald's machines and similar machines in all restaurants.

Which is a good thing. But it's not nearly the win that was needed.

The DMCA is the Digital Millennia Copyright Act, passed in 1998, and was used to lock down a variety of technologies to prevent copying, even when people have Fair Use Doctrine rights to make copies. It allows manufacturers to charge exorbitant repair fees, and if the makers are slow to respond to repair calls, well there's FA that the owner/renter/lessee of the equipment can do. They are completely encumbered by the digital lock - it is a felony to bypass it and make repairs on your own.

For example, John Deere has screwed over farmers by charging high prices for repairs and being slow to respond to repair calls, in many cases causing crop loss.

In this specific case regarding McDonald's ice cream machines, I've written about this before. The machine isn't your typical ice cream machine in that it contains a pasteurization component. The store receives its milk, dumps it in, it's pasteurized, then churned. And the machine breaks regularly. AND, like Deere, the company is slow to respond to calls. AND because the machine is locked down under a digital system, it's pretty much impossible for the franchise operator to know what went wrong, much less fix it and clear the codes.

Fans of McDonald's ice cream went to the extreme of putting up web sites that would tell you when a particular location's machine was down so you could reroute and get your frozen dessert elsewhere.

The Librarian of Congress has said this is pretty stupid and carved out an exemption for such machines from the DMCA law. I love this line from the article: "Manufacturers opposed the exemption, but it received support from the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration."

But here's where it all falls down. The tools needed to bypass the DMCA lockdown are NOT exempted, both the physical and electronic/digital tools. So iFixit can't sell a McDonald's Fixit kit. Theoretically each franchise will have to figure it out for themselves and can't share that information.

But we know that isn't what's going to happen. Forums will pop up and share the information. And get swatted down by the machine's maker. And re-emerge with even more information.

Very short-sighted of the Librarian of Congress to not authorize the tools to effectuate the actual repair process.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

https://www.404media.co/it-is-now-legal-to-hack-mcflurry-machines-and-medical-devices-to-fix-them/

A little background to those not familiar with Scientology.

When you become a Scientologist, or whenever you commit an infraction that the management doesn't like, you go through "auditing" with an E-Meter. These devices supposedly reveal things about your past lives, your possession by 'thetans' which are responsible for all the bad things in your current lives, or something like that. Popular belief is that the E-Meter is a crude polygraph and is measuring galvanic skin response or something: you're holding a copper cylinder in each hand and an "auditor" is questioning you about yourself and your past.

Well, if the copyright office opens up the Right To Repair, people who have obtained E-Meters (apparently there's a thriving market on Ebay and channels on YouTube) can take them apart and figure out how they work. The software for doing updates to the later models is tightly locked down and requires a license and your Scientology membership ID number.

The Scientologists say that devices that are only intended for sale to professionals should be exempted from right to repair, and that these are religious artifacts. One counter-argument that I see here is look at the pandemic. Thousands upon thousands of ventilators across the country/world were broken and couldn't be repaired because of a lack of manuals and DMCA threats from manufacturers. These were devices sold to processional medical installations, but they couldn't fix their own gear for reasonable costs. Eventually the copyright office caved in, and repair manuals were collected and published online, quickly followed by 3D printer models for replacement parts.

https://www.404media.co/scientologists-ask-government-to-make-hacking-e-meters-illegal/

Apparently, like Disney wanting a trademark on the phrase Dio de los Muertos, Fox wants nothing else to exist that might confuse people.

It would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that to file a DMCA takedown notice that the filer must affirm under penalty of perjury that all the facts are true. Considering that there is no way Doctorow's book could be confused for the TV series, that person committed perjury because they clearly had no clue.

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/22/fox-sends-fraudulent-takedown.html

When the DMCA was passed in '98, part of the law stipulated that the Library of Congress would review possible exemptions every three years. They just concluded that allowing jailbreaking of iPhones was a valid exemption to allow people to thwart Apple's monopolistic iTunes store and allow them to install apps not approved by Apple.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/

They also approved the following:
*allow the unlocking of mobile phones to change carriers.
*allow the cracking of video game digital rights management controls to probe security flaws.
*allow the breaking of DVD encryption by professors, students and documentary makers so the clips can be used for education and commentary.
*allow the blind to circumvent locks on e-books to enable read-aloud features.
*allow the bypassing of broken or irreplaceable dongles.

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/07/26/1552249/Jailbreaking-iPhone-Now-Legal

Gee, it seems like it was only two days ago that this bit of ugliness reared its head.

Oh, wait. It was two days ago.

Motorola claims that the post was, indeed, FUD. They say "If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. ."

This seems reasonable to me. It will make it almost impossible to install custom chips into the phone, which isn't a problem for most users. But according to Big M, it won't permanently brick the phone.

I'm sure we'll see a lot of hacker reports as soon as this phone is in broad distribution trying to independently prove these assertions one way or another.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/motorola-responds-to-droid-x-bootloader-controversy-says-efuse/

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/17/037259/Motorola-Says-eFuse-Doesnt-Permanently-Brick-Phones

Fed up with the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), India hopes to whip up an anti-ACTA chutney so spicy that negotiators have no choice but to purge every trace of the loathed agreement from their systems.

Though countries like Morocco are involved, rich countries have driven the ACTA process. The World Trade Organization—ignored. The World Intellectual Property Organization—bypassed. Instead of using the very fora that they played such a role in establishing, countries like the US, EU, Canada, Japan, and Australia formed a coalition of the willing. ACTA has been negotiated in secret, though the recently released negotiating draft text envisions a permanent secretariat that will receive new members.

In other words, existing international institutions, where countries like Brazil, China, and India have recently acquired some real power, will be bypassed to create the tough new restrictions in ACTA.

India raising hell, I think, is a good thing. India's objection is not over media anti-piracy and copyright, but over pharmaceuticals. There's some very nasty patent protections that extend even if country X doesn't recognize country Y's patents or have different term limits or such.

But what really ticks me off is the secret negotiating aspect of this treaty, and as the article points out, bypassing WTO and WIPO to institute it. It's like the USA trying to get everyone to sign on to DMCA, but not being very above-board about it. DMCA is now crawling out of the grave in Canada again, so we'll see what happens there. In Canada, currently, if you buy an iPod or Music CD-Rs, you pay an additional tax that supposedly helps reimburse artists for losses due to piracy, but that money never seems to trickle down from the studios for some strange reason.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/india-vows-to-sabotage-acta.ars

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/02/2157252/India-Attempts-To-Derail-ACTA?art_pos=12