It’s a tragedy so many of us have experienced. We hyped ourselves up by the promise of a McDonald’s McFlurry, only to be let down when their damn McFlurry machine is broken, yet again. Well, those days might be finally coming to an end as McDonald’s now has the legal right to fix their own McFlurry machines.
As of today, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024, McDonald’s franchise owners can now use third parties to legally diagnose and repair their busted ice cream machines.
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If you’re a snobby healthy person who has never heard of the McDonald’s ice cream machine conundrum, here’s a quick history. McDonald’s serves ice cream products. The machine that spits out those ice cream products is a worthless piece of shit that’s constantly breaking. On top of that, the machines are notoriously disgusting, so they need to be rigorously cleaned of bacteria in a long and complicated process that requires the near-complete disassembly of the machine.
All of that led to a fairly common scenario. People would go to McDonald’s hoping to get a McFlurry and would be turned away because the machine was “down.” If you’ve ever had a McFlurry for McDonald’s, you may not have realized it, but you were actually one of the luckiest people on earth that day. You were there in the tiny window where the McFlurry machine was operating.
One of the things that made it difficult to repair these constantly breaking machines was section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which barred franchise owners from getting third parties to fix the busted machines. The only company that was allowed to bypass the machines’ software locks was its manufacturer, a company called Taylor.
Every three years though, the Federal Trade Commission adds exceptions to the DMCA, and one of those exceptions this year is putting the power of McFlurry machine repair in the hands of McDonald’s franchise owners. We can all thank a nonprofit public interest group Public Knowledge and DIY repair site iFixit for paving the way for us all to hopefully start getting McFlurry’s when the craving hits.
