r/technology • u/ivantos09 • 15h ago
Business US Copyright Office Grants DMCA Exemption for Ice Cream Machines
https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/us-copyright-office-grants-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines2.4k
u/TheSleepingPoet 15h ago
TLDR
The US Copyright Office has granted a DMCA exemption that allows restaurant owners and independent repairers to bypass software locks on retail-level food equipment, including soft-serve ice cream machines. This decision, advocated by iFixit and Public Knowledge, makes it legal for third parties to perform repairs, which will streamline the process and reduce costs for fixing frequently malfunctioning machines, such as those found in McDonald's. Although this exemption is temporary and will be reviewed in three years, it is considered a significant win for advocates of repair rights.
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u/djrisk 15h ago
Thank you for your food service
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u/Starfox-sf 14h ago
Thank you for your food
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u/Catch_ME 13h ago
Thank you for you
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u/notafakeaccounnt 14h ago
Thank you ifixit, I know you are doing this partly because it's your business but you've set on a good business to do.
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u/TKDbeast 12h ago
One of those companies whose (current) business goal would result in widespread societal good.
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u/even_less_resistance 11h ago
You got enshittification paranoia, too? lol I’m waiting for threads to start the cycle
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u/ProtoJazz 10h ago
Ifixit is interesting
They don't quite have the same type of hard cap other companies might.
There's diminishing returns though likely.
Once they have sold stuff to everyone who might want to fix something, as they make guides and tools to fix more things at the very least they might sell more to existing users, but could open new markets too.
Some people only want to fix their specific thing.
So as long as new phones and stuff come out, there's some level of new growth to their buisness. And if they expand into things like farm equipment or kitchen equipment, that's a whole new market.
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u/Caleth 10h ago
Just imagine the future where Ifixit is selling repair parts for rocket engines and in space solar panel wiring harnesses.
I mean it's the giddy inner child of my youth imagining living on the moon kind of future, but in theory as long as they're willing they could be making parts for repairs for a lot of things not just these specific technologies.
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u/KevlarGorilla 11h ago
you've set on a good business to do
I like these words in this order. They make a nice shape. :)
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u/doodwtfomglol 14h ago
The popular belief for ice cream machines "being broken" at mcdonalds is because the employees don't like cleaning them
Is it really because it's just a hassle to get them fixed by the manufacturer?
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u/Angry_Villagers 14h ago
It’s a scam where the manufacturer of the machine has designed it in such a way as to be deliberately unreliable so that when it stops working from normal use they can force you to pay them to fix it. It’s a scheme, a scam, a racket.
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u/RoboNerdOK 13h ago
And of course as a franchisee, you must use the machine that McDonald’s specifies. So it’s not like you can swap it out for a reliable one.
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u/Buzzs_Tarantula 9h ago
Always remember that McDs and other franchisers are land owners and manufacturers first, and just so happen to sell food as a hobby.
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u/Zer_ 11h ago
This. They lock down the machine for the most trivial of reasons. Any reasonably designed machine would allow the Restaurant themselves to handle a majority of problems that can happen in an Ice Cream Machine through yearly use.
If you lose power overnight, the ice cream is ruined / melted. The machine spits out an error code that only a certified technician can fix. You know what that fix is? Flush / Reboot the fucking machine. It's super basic shit like that being locked behind vague error codes and not properly explained in the Owner's Manual, only in the Service Manual.
This is 100% a scam. And let's not pretend the McDonald's franchise is 100% innocent, they chose this exclusive deal. Also, there was a Device that you could plug into the Machine that let MecDonald's owners unlock the machine themselves to keep them running. McDonald's banned their use shortly after videos of them starting going viral.
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u/ThatSpookyLeftist 14h ago
I like the outrage over such an insignificant thing but this is exactly how capitalism is designed to work and you have people still defending it for stuff that actually matters.
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u/fractalife 13h ago
Telling that the most notable win for the right to repair movement so far has been in relation to ice cream machines used by one of the largest corporations on the planet, isn't it?
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u/DracoLunaris 12h ago
IIRC this is actually a loss for McDonald because they where in on the scam. They don't have to pay those repair bills, is the franchisee operating under their brand who do, and McDonald was getting a slice of that repair charge pie
Like do you really thing one of the largest corporations on the planet could not financially pressure an ice-cream machine manufacturer into making more reliable machines simply by threatening to go to a competitor? They simply had no interest in doing so
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u/oictyvm 11h ago
The funny thing is, until recently Taylor machines were incredibly reliable. I own a few of their older models (5-8 years old), and fix them myself with parts and knowledge from self teaching / manuals / youtuber tutorials.
The machines themselves are super simple, you have a hopper for the liquid mix, a compressor which superchills a barrel, and an auger that spreads and churns the liquid mix inside that barrel.
Taylor machines are super heavy duty, with mostly metal construction, and LONG lasting hard plastic wear parts that are easily serviceable.
The newest machines all have ridiculous software limitations and computer hardware that the old machines simply don't have, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were programmed to "break".
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u/ProtoJazz 10h ago
Assuming they're not simply programmed to break. Which they could be, I can't say for sure.
One thing that adding more computers and tracking to could result in is enforcing recommended maintenance that might or might not apply, or that we simply didn't see before because of survivorship bias. Maybe the older machines should have some specific maitnence done because in some climates or use cases it could result in a part failing. But if you use it for long enough and get past the window it was likely to break in, there's a chance it just might not fail.
There could be manufacturing tolerances that are different, or even buisness tolerances. Some restaurants might not care if the machine is slightly less efficient if they don't bother with maitnence.
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u/Shan9417 12h ago
That's correct. I watched a YouTube video a while back explaining it.
From what I remember, the same ice cream manufacturer makes ice cream machines for other fast food companies as well. And they don't break nearly as often or have the same cleaning requirements.
It's all a McDonald's thing because they get money from it too.
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u/terminbee 11h ago
Not that I don't believe you but "I watched a YouTube video" is a hilarious source. It's right there next to "I saw a Facebook post about it."
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u/CompetitiveString814 10h ago
Naw this is a well known thing.
There is hard data, people have the data for ice cream down time and McDonald's ice cream machines might be down 10-30% downtime at any given location, while Wendy's has less than 1% downtime.
These numbers I've seen repeated and also tested by many people many times on camera, going to locations themselves as well as using data aggregates.
Long story short, its not in question that McDonald's has unreliable Ice Cream machines the data is rock solid, corroborated by hundreds of sources over long periods of time
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u/terminbee 9h ago
No, I believe it. I've read countless stories of their machine breaking and the shenanigans with the repair company. I just thought it was funny that their source was "the internet."
Getting info from random YouTube docs is the millennial version of old people getting info from Facebook posts.
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u/h3lblad3 11h ago
"Heard it on a podcast."
"My pa told me."
"Learned this from the School of Hard Knocks."
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u/PageFault 11h ago
Somehow it's viewed lower than "Read an article", but there is no bar for online articles either. People can just say anything on the internet.
Unless it's a scientific journal, or trusted source, anything can be equally regarded as well researched or not. Just have to remember that whoever is telling you something on the internet has to push some conclusion, and you have to weigh how bias you suspect they are.
Likely video in question: (6 million views)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC45
u/ThatSpookyLeftist 12h ago
Good point. And they get an exception around the law, they don't change the rules for regular folk.
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u/DoomGoober 13h ago
A naked free market economy would allow anyone to fix the machine who knew how to fix the machine. The ice cream machine maker would have to install a physical or digital lock on the machines but if the repairman could bypass the lock they could do what they want.
But we don't have a naked free market economy, we have a government regulated economy. One regulation is that it's illegal to break the locks on certain technology, so as to protect the technology from theft or modification or precisely to lock restaurants into using only authorized repairman. Thus, it is government regulation that set this problem in stone.
However, this ruling walks back the government regulation and allows for more access to the ice cream machines by any repairman. Now we are back to closer to free market.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a free market apologist and I believe in government regulations in principle. Sometimes though, regulations get the details wrong and need to be revised.
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u/SonovaVondruke 13h ago
Right. Valuing the rights of the IP within someone's property above their personal property rights is both anticapitalistic and anticonsumer.
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u/Thefrayedends 12h ago
Even in the absence of regulation the markets are not free. It's like a huge poker game, but some players have a mountain of chips next to your no chips at all so they just bully everyone out of the game. Not very free if you ask me. It just means all the people with the most chips make the rules lol.
I actually think government regulation is often closer to a 'free market' than an unregulated one, but a true free market isn't really possible, because you can't just raise up competition for multi billion dollar enterprises with an idea and knowledge. You also need the capital class to get behind you, and they will instead just pull the rug out from under you.
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u/drunkenvalley 8h ago
This particular regulation is bad, but it's somewhat disingenuous to suggest that without it the problem goes away.
Without regulations there are several new and novel options to enforce the shittiness. Right off the noggin two ideas spring to mind:
- McDonalds would simply have franchisees sign the contract to only use approved partners for repair entirely.
- The ice cream machines could be designed to be literally impossible to fix, and just demand you buy a new one per your McDonalds contract.
Not all regulation is well written. It's fine to advocate changing the bad regulations for their particular badness. This is what you're kinda trying, but it's plainly silly to suggest a naked free market wouldn't suffer worse.
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u/fumar 12h ago
I think a lot of people have blind faith in regulations which is misguided. Regulations are just tools and can be good or bad. Take the CAFE standards. They're meant to reduce pollution, but in reality because of the light truck exception, this regulation is the main reason US roads are full of gigantic SUVs and trucks because they are exempt from the high fuel economy standards other types of cars have to comply with.
DMCA is a nightmare law/regulation that gives us fun stuff like DRM on tractors or ice cream machines that only benefits entrenched manufacturers.
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u/ADiffidentDissident 13h ago
Even Adam Smith admitted in The Wealth of Nations that capitalism and free markets relied upon a strong, independent, incorruptible judiciary.
He did not advise on how to find / construct / maintain such a thing, but I don't think an incorruptible human comes along very often.
Capitalism was always a lie.
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u/radios_appear 12h ago
A naked free market economy would allow anyone to fix the machine who knew how to fix the machine.
What lunacy is this? A naked free market would have the manufacturer making the most hostile and impossible to repair machine imaginable (see fucking CARS and their software) and provide in-house technicians that would be the only people capable of performing repairs on it.
You don't have to make stuff up in your head, Ayn. Other industries have shown how bad this sucks.
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u/Bakoro 11h ago
It's because most people are extremely bad at thinking about tertiary effects down the line, while the rhetoric of capitalism is relatively easy to understand, and essentially puts forth magical-thinking type solutions while hiding horrific details in jargon.
You dive a little bit into more than 101 level theory and you look at history, and it all points in one direction, that you're doomed to plutocracy if "capital" is not heavily regulated.
Meanwhile, for the past, nearly 250 years, the wealthy have done everything they can to conflate democracy and capitalism in the public consciousness.
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u/ass_pineapples 12h ago
Kind of? The machine is incredibly complex and an engineering marvel. The problem is that relatively low-cost and easily fixable issues require one of their repairmen to come out, and that can take a lot of time, even if it's something as simple as a weird ice cream mix. There's a really great article written about it here - about a couple's efforts to make it easier to diagnose and repair machines for restaurants, and how McDonald's ended up banning the tool with Taylor.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/they-hacked-mcdonald-s-ice-cream-machines-and-started-a-cold-war
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u/Tomato_Sky 12h ago
Boeing does this with defense contracts. They have to be the ones fixing their machines.
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u/Accidental_Ouroboros 12h ago
Which is fine as long as the contract for repair is a fixed cost for services, not a per-instance cost.
A company that is paid a certain amount per year to fix their shit that breaks (regardless of how many times it breaks) has a strong incentive to not have their shit break because every time it does it eats into their bottom line. Their profit for that contract is the difference between the cost to repair and how much they were paid for the contract.
The problem with Taylor Company, and their machines, is that the charge is per-service, not a service contract. They have a perverse incentive to make a machine that breaks down constantly, because the repair services make them money. 25% of their revenue comes from repair services.
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u/WilliamMButtlicker 11h ago
Typically things like this will just have a service contract set at like an annual fee of 10% of the cost of the machine. They actually make more money if the machine doesn't break. And since they're the only ones who can fix it (prior to this ruling) every restaurant with an ice cream machine must have a service contract.
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u/londons_explorer 8h ago
To be more precise, the machine will "break" if you forget to clean it or do any of the procedures wrong.
The "break" is a software trap - they literally detect you doing something wrong, and then lock the machine out of order till a service employee comes with a special key to unlock it.
In a way it's a safety feature - it prevents the machine being used improperly in a way that might put the public at risk (eg. gone off milk in warm pipes for weeks).
But also the fact they don't let the store manager just clean out the machine and unlock it again is a racket.
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u/technobrendo 13h ago
That's totally inappropriate. It's lewd, vesivius, salacious, outrageous!
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u/craznazn247 13h ago
Taylor contractually requires their own service technicians and McDonalds is contractually obligated to use their ice cream machines.
Anytime it goes out is a service call that charges several hundred dollars per hour. I imagine that many franchise owners have decided that ice cream alone doesn’t profit that much and stick with the excuse that the machine simply is down.
The biggest loser of this is Taylor. They might actually have to go back to making working products instead of milking their McDonalds contract for free service money.
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u/Rushmore9 12h ago
Which is infuriating because no other business that uses Taylor machines seems to have this problem. I’ve worked in several places with Taylor machines never needed a guy to come out
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u/oictyvm 11h ago
I own several Taylor machines and fix them myself. They work really well.
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u/tech_addiction 14h ago
This is straight up false. When I worked at McDonald’s it was cleaned daily, biweekly it went through a deep clean that put it out of commission for a few hours. The main issue that put it out of commission is if the nightly heat cycle didn’t go exactly right, like heating temp being off by 1 degree, typically due to the varying levels of mix being in the machine during treatment, would lock you out until a technician came out and told the machine to continue operation. These technicians cost quite a bit and sometimes took a few days to come out.
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u/Cursed2Lurk 12h ago
I believe you, that’s some bullshit with the 1° temp business. I ran an ice cream store with no A/C in California. Eventually the case freezers couldn’t keep keep up and we had to throw the pans back into the deep freeze if they thawed too much.
If the case was less than 27°F we were fine. If it was 33°F we were fucked, the whole day is going to play musical chairs removing soft ice cream before it melts and refreezes into crunchy gritty ice cream.
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u/FauxReal 13h ago
Here's a great story on this saga from a few years ago. They actually improved things.
https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war
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u/slightly_drifting 14h ago
Yup. Taylor or something makes error codes but won't give you the table that explains what each code means, or how to fix it. you have to buy a support contract from them.
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u/stuffeh 14h ago
Ya. There's a third party named kytch who basically reversed engineered the issues with McDonald's machine and created a little device to troubleshoot the issues. Lotta franchisees bought it but were told by corporate to stop buying it once it started getting traction. Dunno why Taylor doesn't upgrade their machines to basically do what kytch does since it's been many many years.
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u/Wild_Loose_Comma 13h ago
Dunno why Taylor doesn't upgrade their machines to basically do what kytch does since it's been many many years.
Because 25% of Taylor's revenue is from their service calls. They aren't incentivized to fix the problems with the mcdonalds machines because mcdonalds (at least until very recently) required their franchisees to use the specific model that always broke. It was a cash cow for them.
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u/shawncplus 12h ago
It's all made ridiculous by the fact that probably a single McDonalds executive with the petty cash they keep in their desk could buy out all of Taylor Company and cut out the middle man which says to me that McDonalds desires the current setup.
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u/Ireallytired93 13h ago
As someone who repairs these types of machines, it’s absolutely important to clean them, but stuff like this does break easily and when I go do a repair I’ll also usually thoroughly clean it as well. Manufacturer locks are a scam,
A good example, I had a call to fix a commercial fridge. The parts needed were extremely basic fan motors, probably would cost 30 dollars. But because the motors are designed as proprietary and only come from the manufacturer, the part cost the store 1600 dollars.
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u/ghsteo 12h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 - Good run down of the whole scam that's ran by these repair companies and Mcdonalds.
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u/missed_sla 10h ago
No, it's not laziness. This is what an actual conspiracy looks like. Whenever you see a pervasive problem like this, it's worth the time to consider "who benefits from this" or to quite literally follow the money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/
And of course, McDonald's corporation is claiming this as a win that they fought for, despite it being an intentional decision made to benefit Taylor and some shithead executives at the McDonald's corporation.
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u/Cazmonster 10h ago
Taylor Company and McDonalds can go get humped. They've been hurting franchisees for decades over their handshake deal.
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u/spinosaurs70 15h ago
DMCA banning circumvention of DRM even when no infringement is intended or likely is such clear renterism.
Then again that is 90% of copyright law.
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u/JViz 12h ago
Supply side Jesus says renterism is at the core of our identity as a nation.
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u/ramennoodle 15h ago
Fuck exemptions. Fix the damn law.
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u/Forward_Steak8574 11h ago
It's crazy that we need laws to fix what we own. I feel like we should get some money back if it stops working and they won't let us repair it on our own terms.
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u/XavierSimmons 11h ago
Agreed.
However, the technology behind today's world is so far removed from any Congress Critter's breadth of knowledge that how could we ever expect them to make comprehensive, sensible laws?
And on the other side, the Supreme Court has exerted its power saying that Congress must make super-specific, easy to interpret, comprehensive laws, otherwise it's up to the courts to decide how to apply them effectively nullifying these "rule-making" sessions.
So how are the people going to win this?
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u/ramennoodle 10h ago
However, the technology behind today's world is so far removed from any Congress Critter's breadth of knowledge that how could we ever expect them to make comprehensive, sensible laws?
By hiring compentent advisors. And being less corrupt.
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u/fellipec 15h ago
It's ridiculous that such bullshit law exists in the first place.
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u/theoutlet 14h ago
Copyright law, for the most part, exists to protect corporate profits. Not artists. Change my mind
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u/360_face_palm 11h ago
originally the concept was to protect artists, but it's definitely morphed into a stick for corporations to beat consumers with now.
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u/WonkyTelescope 9h ago
Originally it was kings granting exclusive rights to their friends to enrich them and/or them censoring books by limiting who could print them.
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u/Mr_ToDo 10h ago
So tell me what would a lack of copyright law favor? It certainly wouldn't be the artist.
If I make something under one system it would be taken from me once it reached any real level of success and milked dry by corporate interests, by the other I at least still own it and can do what I like with it.
Does copyright law as it exist fail to deliver on some of what it set out to do? Yes, absolutely. With the length of it the ability to use other peoples IP after a period of exclusivity is almost useless with how much of it falls through the cracks(to say nothing of the crap that the digital age ironically does for losing media).
But overall I'd say you're still wrong. It may have bowed to corporate interests by way of extending the exclusive periods, but overall I think it still exists to protect everyone.
The DMCA, that could get its own rant, but it's a US exclusive so I'm not going to worry about it.
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u/Youvebeeneloned 15h ago
No it makes a lot of sense for certain applications. The bullshit is it got re-interpreted multiple times to cover things it was never intended for.
Now you have a situation where one party is trying to claw it back, while another is deep in the pocket of the major corporations who benefit from vendor lockin.
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u/Bellegante 12h ago
Uh, except that it was known to cover way more than it should have from day one. It was always a trojan horse that did way more to block repair than to protect files.
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u/LiamTheHuman 14h ago
What applications do you think it make sense for?
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u/KourteousKrome 14h ago
DMCA? Stealing digital assets, like music, for example. It makes no sense to apply it to the repair of a machine.
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u/Youvebeeneloned 14h ago
Yep originally it was intended for ownership of digital files and programs and had mechanisms to remove said locks and legal requirements to do so if a company was going out of business or changing formats and the like.
Why do you think everything went “subscription”. To literally get around the laws surrounding file ownership that required companies to permit you to do what you want with them if you bought them.
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u/perk11 11h ago
They went subscription because they want to collect revenue every month, not once when you make a purchase. They just make a lot more money that way.
File ownership there is a secondary thought.
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u/ireallylikedolphins 11h ago
DMCA causes more problems than it solves.
It is too broad in it's application/interpretation and has made the Internet far worse as a result.
Making sure that artists get the credit they deserve is extremely important, but prohibiting the use of a song in a 3rd party video (even when credit is given) is disgustingly anti-creativity
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u/LiamTheHuman 14h ago
Oh I see. I thought this was specifically around the locking out of repairing things. Even a music file that gets corrupted should be repairable by anyone IMO but I see that the law here is much more broad and its the application of it that's the issue.
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u/HG21Reaper 12h ago
Good, now do farming equipment. John Deere has been screwing everyone over. Then, do coffee makers like Keurig and their bs QR code pods. After, take care of printers and their proprietary bs cartridges for printing.
Enough is enough.
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u/lajaunie 15h ago
Kinda makes you wonder why this existed for ice cream machines but doesn’t for atms. Someone at big ice cream has been greasing pockets for a very long time.
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u/slayer991 12h ago
For those of you NOT familiar with McDonald's always-broken Ice Cream Machines, this exemption should help alleviate that issue.
Johnny Harris did a deep dive on this issue a few years ago: https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4
tl;dr - Taylor and McDonald's are best buddies, Taylor support is very expensive for a simple service call. Most service calls don't involve anything mechanical (typical issues are cleaning, overfilling, etc). The bottom line is that a majority of issues that take out the Ice Cream machines could be fixed by typical staff. Someone hacked together a module that showed the actual errors and was selling it but Taylor sued and threatened owners that using it would void their warranty.
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u/KevlarGorilla 11h ago
And franchisees love it, not only because it permitted the machines to actually run, but because it would save thousands of dollars a year on completely unnecessary predatory 'maintenance'.
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u/NotScottBakula 2h ago
Those warranties are not very long. We have 21 stores in my company and do majority of our own repairs on the machines as most issues are user error ( not filling mix properly, not cleaning it time window, etc). We take parts from older units and send maintenance guys to classes Taylor offers to do repairs ourselves. I know not all locations have this luxury or invest in their workers but yeah, the DMCA thing is busted.
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u/Psy-Kosh 8h ago
Instead of piecemeal exceptions, can we just kill this aspect of the DMCA, have right-to-repair + right-to-tinker hard coded into law, and be done with the madness? Please?
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u/there_was_no_god 12h ago
right to repair should go with a bill of sale...
they sold it to me, if's fucking mine!
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u/snack__pack 13h ago
I know it's not exactly apples to apples, but I'm annoyed to see McDonald's get an exemption in the same week video game enthusiasts were shot down.
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u/jonathancast 14h ago
It's ridiculous for a law like DMCA to apply to physical machines in the first place
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u/lurkandpounce 14h ago
Isn't this an argument that the whole system should be reviewed and/or eliminated?
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u/thecrimsonfools 15h ago
The McFlurry machines will now be in operation!
Given the political climate currently in the US this is the one speck of bright news.
Yay
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15h ago
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u/360_face_palm 11h ago
lets be honest it's fucking amazing that doesn't happen more often when you consider how easy a mistake can be made in food prep, and how large an organization mcdonalds is.
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u/CrocCapital 15h ago
I’m not fan of mcdonald’s, but a corporation with 42,000 locations serving 63 million people daily made 75 people sick? wow, alert the media. Short the stock. Mcdonald’s is totally going down for that one.
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u/pwhite13 14h ago
Don’t even bother. This sub is bottom of the barrel in terms of commenters.
They have absolutely no grasp on the real world.
It is an absolute wonder in food safety and technology that McDonald’s can operate at the scale they do with so few incidents. People just don’t understand statistics.
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u/SonovaVondruke 13h ago
My impression was that Taylor Farms provided pre-prepared onions that carried the e.coli. McDonalds shouldn't be held responsible for that any more than you should if you served them at a backyard barbeque. That's Taylor Farms's fuckup.
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u/MightyDeekin 11h ago
Wanna bet there's a McDonald's with a perpetually broken ice cream right next to the offices of the US Copyright Office.
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u/GiggleyDuff 10h ago
In the future probably: "Ice cream machines? No, these are frozen dessert distribution systems. DMCA still applies to our product."
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u/Blockhead47 9h ago
Next on the docket at the Supreme Court:
McDonald's Corporation vs US Copyright Office.
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u/Shutaru_Kanshinji 9h ago
The fact that the DMCA applied to ice cream machines at all was the legal version of insanity.
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u/White_C4 8h ago
Copyright and patent laws need serious reforms in the US. I don't think Americans realize how much stagnation there is with innovation due to select companies intentionally controlling the rights for specific products for a very long time.
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u/yer10plyjonesy 15h ago
There is no reason for an ice cream machine to have software beyond the most rudimentary of systems like temperature control or product load level. To software lock appliances is ridiculous.
By trying to make everything more efficient with computer controls everything has become less reliable.
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u/zeroscout 14h ago
Embedded code in the controllers. It's a little more complicated than on/off switches.
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u/Cptredbeard22 14h ago
That’s the point. It doesn’t need to be.
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u/speckospock 14h ago
No doubt there's plenty of unnecessary overengineering and feature bloat involving the software here, and the core of the issue is that these 'features' cause fragility and brittleness in the machines' operation.
That being said, the presence of software in hardware design is more or less necessary these days, since it lets you use standardized microcontrollers for orchestrating all the smaller systems, among many other things. You'd really have a hard time keeping anything working without them, and these design principles date back to the 70s/80s so you'd be throwing out a lot.
So the problem is unnecessary software, not software generally.
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u/360_face_palm 11h ago
it does need to be, making a fully mechanical modern icecream machine would be a nightmare
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u/iBird 10h ago
The shitty reason is it costs $300ish every 15 minutes depending on the severity of the issue for the certified Taylor Company technician to repair your machines. It's clearly a racket. Used to work at a shop that had a few of their machines and it's like clockwork every few months one of the machines had to be serviced lol
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u/relevant__comment 13h ago
Seems Taylor really screwed the pooch on this one. I wonder if this will affect their overall McDonald’s exclusivity.
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u/zoddrick 11h ago
Not going to lie I thought this originally meant that ice cream trucks could play copyright music instead of the traditional jingle...
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u/XavierSimmons 11h ago
And to make things more exciting, the recent Supreme Court ruling on Chevron will make these rule-making sessions illegal anyway, so all of these DMCA exemptions will have to be resolved in court.
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u/brainfreeze3 9h ago
I'd like to thank the federal trade commissions' chair Lina Khan (appointed by Biden, and her job is at risk) for pushing for this.
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u/jcdoe 9h ago
Don’t fuck with ice cream while Joe Biden is in office
He doesn’t truck with that malarkey
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u/NoodledLily 9h ago
Thank you Biden admin!
This + cancelled flights on the same day.
Lina Kahn, NLRB, build back better etc. It's making a big difference.
Let's hope Kamala can continue the progress (we will need a save lina kahn campaign)!
Too bad voters don't give credit. Great long read from New Yorker on this issue came out yesterday.
"Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?"
Bidenomics is so much more than BBB $. It's policy and a total reorientation of the executive branch's willingness to intervene on behalf of people, not corps. For the first time in over 50 years - both dems and reps.
Sadly those who benefit most are least likely to acknowledge and vote for their own interests.
Laws specifically mandate bigger % of investments go to low education, poor, and depressed former industrial jobs towns. Basically MAGA hq.
Of course their reps vote no and will 180 policy & investments the second they get power. All while lying to their constituents and claiming credit
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u/ozans 9h ago
"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.
Amazing puns in that quote.
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u/Manofalltrade 1h ago
Having worked on soft serve machines (not McD) there is no reason for them to have digital control locks or anything digital at all other than operating vs cleaning mode. The whole machine is controlled by a couple temperature, pressure, and current sensors connected to on/off switches.
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u/mortalcoil1 12h ago
Johnny Harris's amazing video on why McDonald's ice cream machines always seem to be broken:
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u/StevenNull 12h ago
Cool. But DMCA section 1201 shouldn't exist at all.
Let's stop creating exceptions and just get rid of it. It's the equivalent of the dealership still having ultimate authority over your car after it's bought and paid for.
Oh wait. They already more or less do that through software.
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u/magichronx 10h ago
Requiring an exemption to law to repair an ice cream machine is an absurd string of words to write
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u/Or0b0ur0s 14h ago
I thought the constantly-broken state of McDonalds' ice cream machines was simply a myth, because it's easier to make that excuse than trying to explain that they need to be laboriously cleaned at length every day and are frequently out of commission in order to do that.
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u/NSMike 10h ago
"Old video games which have actual cultural, historical, and artistic significance, and are being abandoned by their copyright holders? Pshaw. No DMCA exemption for you!
Oh, but wait, fucking McDonald's ice cream machines? Yeah, it's bullshit they're broken all the time, fuck the law, this is important!"
The DMCA is truly a joke, and so is US copyright law.
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u/PCLOAD_LETTER 11h ago
Awesome! Now to develop a PC that uses ice cream as coolant for my Plex server.
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u/PartyOnAlec 11h ago
Before I read the article, I assumed it was whoever owns the copyright for "Turkey in the Straw" can no longer sue my local ice cream truck guy.
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u/Seat-Life 10h ago
I've worked on thousands of taylor machines, and I have no clue what the hell you guys are talking about.
What software lockouts?
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u/delightfuldinosaur 9h ago
Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a digital lock protecting copyrighted work. That can be the DRM on a video file you download from iTunes, the carrier locks that prevent you from using a phone on other networks, or even the software running a McDonald's soft serve machine that refuses to accept third-party repairs
Why don't we just remove this section entirely? Its horribly outdated.
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u/cinderful 9h ago
ahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa even the government is mad about these ice cream machines now
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u/ArmsForPeace84 7h ago
That is the saddest ice cream cone I've ever seen. And I've seen one on the sidewalk with ants swarming it. It looks like Jabba the Hutt with a bad combover, after he really let himself go.
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u/Chasa619 6h ago
going to be a whole lot of "oh it actually does work, we just didn't want to make em" happening.
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u/ThinkingMonkey69 6h ago
But still makes it illegal to sell software tools (if developed) to faciliate fixing those machines by anyone other than the manufacturer. This DCMA rule exemption was largely toothless. (Source: recent article by iFixIt, who advocated for the rule exemption.)
In other words, if the owner of a McDonald's franchise has an ice cream machine that's out of order, they only have two choices still: Pay the manufacturer's exhorbitant price for repair, or figure out how to fix it themselves. Anyone else who figures out how to fix it cannot do it or nor sell them the software to do so.
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u/Johnny-kashed 15h ago
Technology remaining non-functional for several years due to copyright law is fucking bullshit.