The Copyright Office just handed down a big Right to Repair win: we can now legally repair commercial food preparation equipment, including McDonald’s machines.
This is a nice win for self-repair hardware rights.
Ah this bit is sad. The exception only covers bypassing DMCA protections to fix your own stuff not distributing the tooling for it.
It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame. The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.
If you run a franchise, you have to get the machine from a specific vendor. That vendor makes a killing charging for their techs to come over to fix those machines. There's some videos on YouTube that explain how the scam works.
This company sure has been making the rounds on the internet. I estimate maybe 1-2 years before they decide to cash in on their goodwill with some kind of monetary product
That's great, but I'm sure Taylor (ice cream machine manufacturer) will still void your warranty, and McDonald's corporate will still tell you you're required to have Taylor service it. There were blackboxed control bypass devices for these machines that let them run longer and self-clean better, but McDonald's sent out a memo requiring all franchisees to remove them and only allow Taylor to work on those machines.
Repairing things helps reduce the endless resource expediture and trash creation. Ice cream machines are just a random example. As you can read in the article they were going for much more, and more significant stuff, but got denied.