The tech website iFixit, known for its repair guides and teardowns of various devices, has filed a petition with the US Copyright Office to allow it to fix the notoriously unreliable ice cream machines used by McDonald’s franchises.
The Problem with McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines
McDonald’s ice cream machines, which are manufactured by Taylor, are sold to franchise owners at a cost of $18,000 each. However, these machines are prone to breaking down frequently, leaving customers disappointed and frustrated. According to the “McBroken” app, some 10% of ice cream machines at McDonald’s locations throughout the US are malfunctioning at any given moment.
The machines have a complex and lengthy cleaning cycle that requires them to be shut down for several hours every day. If the cycle is interrupted or not completed properly, the machine will display an error code and stop working until a technician from Taylor arrives to fix it. Taylor has an exclusive contract with McDonald’s to service the machines and charge franchise owners a fee for each visit.
The Solution by Kytch
To solve this problem, Jeremy O’Sullivan and his partner, Melissa Nelson, created Kytch, a device that intercepts the machine’s internal communications and sends them via WiFi to a smartphone or web interface. This allows owners to troubleshoot the problem, reset the error codes, and resume operation without waiting for Taylor’s service.
However, McDonald’s told franchise owners not to use the device due to risk of “serious human injury”. The company also claimed that Kytch violated its intellectual property rights and threatened legal action. O’Sullivan and Nelson sued McDonald’s in May 2023 for interfering with their business and conspiring with Taylor to maintain a monopoly on the ice cream machine market.
The Petition by iFixit
iFixit, which advocates for the right to repair movement, decided to take matters into its own hands. The site bought an ice cream machine model used by McDonald’s and spent hours trying to get it up and running. The site found that the machine had “nonsensical, counterintuitive, and seemingly random” error codes that were hard to decipher even with the manual.
The site also discovered that the machine consisted of “easily replaceable parts”, such as three printed circuit boards, a motor and belt, and a heat exchanger. However, the machine was protected by software locks that prevented anyone from accessing or modifying its settings without Taylor’s authorization.
To get around this, iFixit filed a petition on Tuesday with the US Copyright Office seeking an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to bypass software locks on devices. The site argued that this law impedes the ability of owners and third parties to repair their own products and reduces competition and innovation.
“Getting this exemption request granted would let us do more with our machine: Instead of just taking it apart, we could also dig into the software,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit’s director of sustainability, said in a video. “We could reverse engineer the error codes and figure out how to reset them.”
However, iFixit noted that even if it does receive the exemption, it still won’t be able to distribute a tool designed to fix ice cream machines. Therefore, it also asked Congress to reintroduce the Freedom to Repair Act, a law that would make it legal to bypass software locks and other measures to repair a product.
If Congress does end up going through with these changes, we may finally have a future where we don’t have to use a broken ice cream machine tracker before we set out for a McFlurry.
