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Score another win for consumers under the Biden/Harris administration. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission and the Dept. of Justice took on a cause that’s near and dear to many of our hearts: the broken ice cream machines at McDonald’s. McDonald’s ice cream machines are so notorious for breaking that there’s an entire website called McBroken that’s dedicated to tracking broken machines in real time. The issue was McDonald’s policy of making restaurants wait for one of their own “authorized” technicians to fix the machines instead of letting franchise owners fix the machines themselves or hire a third party to fix them. The typical wait time for an authorized Mickey D’s tech is 90 days. That’s a long-ass time to not be able to sell a McFlurry and owners estimated that they were losing thousands per month.
In March, the government ruled in favor of franchise owners having the right to use a device called Kytch, which was created by two innovators as a code-reader to help troubleshoot ice cream machine issues. But, there was still one more hurdle. The machines are made by a company called Taylor, which owns the copyright. Under a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, only Taylor’s repair people are allowed to fix the machines. Enter the U.S. Copyright Office. Last week, they issued a set of exemptions that now allows restaurants like McDonald’s to repair their own equipment.
A broken ice cream machine is a familiar inconvenience to McDonald’s customers. Franchise owners have complained about difficulties fixing the machines, McDonald’s itself has poked fun at how often the machines are seemingly broken, and there is even a dedicated independent site for customers to see when and where they might be denied a McFlurry.
Those worries may soon be a thing of the past, after the U.S. Copyright Office issued a new set of exemptions last week that allows restaurants to repair equipment used in “retail-level commercial food preparation,” which includes those soft-serve ice cream machines used to make McFlurrys.
Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, and e-commerce website iFixit petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office for the exemption, which went into effect Monday.
“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,” said Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge.
Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for third parties to bypass digital locks on any copyrighted material, including software used in commercial devices like those McDonald’s ice cream machines, even for repairs.
What that has meant for McFlurry fans until Monday is that every time an ice cream machine in a McDonald’s location breaks or has any kind of technical problem, it can only be repaired by the manufacturer and copyright holder.
Since 1956, McDonald’s has partnered with the Taylor Company, an Illinois-based manufacturer, for its ice cream machines, leaving only the Taylor Company with the “right to repair” them. According to iFixit, which looked inside a McDonald’s ice cream machine last year, the devices contain “lots of easily replaceable parts.”
Rose called the new exemption “an overdue shake-up of the commercial food prep industry.”
This is great news! I am absolutely all for creators maintaining the right to their own work, but within reason. If you’re going to be greedy or use it to create a monopoly and stifle competition then you’ve lost me. McDonald’s and Taylor screwed themselves over by making easily-breakable machines and constantly dragging their feet on fixing them. The system wasn’t working for business owners, and they were losing out on a lot of money. It also wasn’t working for customers who really just wanted some soft-serve vanilla ice cream blended with tiny M&Ms after a hard day’s work. I’m glad the FTC/DOJ/USCO stepped in to solve the problem. So, to conclude, the next time someone in your life asks, “What did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually do?” You can tell them that they fixed the McDonalds ice cream machines, lol.
Photos credit Getty, Patrick Rich on Flickr via Mcdonalds.Fandom.com and via Instagram