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Yes, it's a little more complicated than that.
Every three years the Copyright Office can be petitioned for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to allow people to fix things that they own that are locked behind flimsy digital shields to ensure the maker gets a tithe whenever things need repair. The current round has the DOJ and FTC asking for four exemptions, for: "commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT."
The reason for the McDonald's ice cream machines is pretty simple. Corporate requires that franchisees buy one specific brand of machine. Not only is it prone to breaking down, the company that makes them and services them is notorious for taking its time to fix them - sometimes up to NINETY DAYS according to letters of complaint! THAT is a lot of lost revenue for a franchise! It's so bad that there is a web site that you can check to see if the ice cream machine at your local McD's is working or not.
The problem is that the maker has put the diagnostic codes behind a ridiculous digital encryption system and locked them in a DMCA claim. If you break them, you risk being sued. Which, of course, they have been hacked and decoded. A company made a decoder and is involved in a legal battle with the maker. A DMCA waiver exempting the machines would nullify the battle, make the decoder legal, and mean that any decent commercial/industrial appliance repairman with the decoder could repair the machines, greatly reducing downtime.
Is the machine special? Not particularly. The only thing unique about it is that it has a pasteurization system so that the franchises can use non-pasteurized milk. Me, personally, I'd much rather pasteurization take place at the dairy, not at a local McDonald's. But that's just me. I can just picture a teenager accidentally dropping a big carton of milk, it splitting open, and now you have unpasteurized milk all over the place.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-dmca-ifixit-ice-cream-machines
Every three years the Copyright Office can be petitioned for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to allow people to fix things that they own that are locked behind flimsy digital shields to ensure the maker gets a tithe whenever things need repair. The current round has the DOJ and FTC asking for four exemptions, for: "commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT."
The reason for the McDonald's ice cream machines is pretty simple. Corporate requires that franchisees buy one specific brand of machine. Not only is it prone to breaking down, the company that makes them and services them is notorious for taking its time to fix them - sometimes up to NINETY DAYS according to letters of complaint! THAT is a lot of lost revenue for a franchise! It's so bad that there is a web site that you can check to see if the ice cream machine at your local McD's is working or not.
The problem is that the maker has put the diagnostic codes behind a ridiculous digital encryption system and locked them in a DMCA claim. If you break them, you risk being sued. Which, of course, they have been hacked and decoded. A company made a decoder and is involved in a legal battle with the maker. A DMCA waiver exempting the machines would nullify the battle, make the decoder legal, and mean that any decent commercial/industrial appliance repairman with the decoder could repair the machines, greatly reducing downtime.
Is the machine special? Not particularly. The only thing unique about it is that it has a pasteurization system so that the franchises can use non-pasteurized milk. Me, personally, I'd much rather pasteurization take place at the dairy, not at a local McDonald's. But that's just me. I can just picture a teenager accidentally dropping a big carton of milk, it splitting open, and now you have unpasteurized milk all over the place.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-dmca-ifixit-ice-cream-machines
