Fast food customers have long expressed his frustration with McDonald’s ice cream machines. They are out of service so often that there is even a website dedicated to tracking locations that can serve you a McFlurry at any time. Today, the government has intervened to resolve the problem.

The US Copyright Office has granted an exemption that will allow third parties to diagnose and repair commercial food preparation equipment such as McDonald’s ice cream machines, Edge reported. This is a major development because copyright law previously prohibited anyone other than the manufacturer of the McFlurry machines (Taylor) from bypassing software locks and repairing them. In other words, McFlurry machines will now be easier to repair and put back in order after a malfunction.

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This forced reliance on the manufacturer has become a point of contention between McDonald’s, its operators, and even the U.S. government. In a joint filing earlier this year supporting the exemptionThe Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice (DOJ) noted that there are typically long wait times for authorized coffee machine repairers and that they charge “more than $300 per fifteen minutes” . Meanwhile, restaurants can lose $625 in sales per day due to restaurant equipment failures, according to the filing.

Now that the exemption has been granted, McDonald’s operators will be able to break these locks and hire third parties to repair their machines without having to rely on Taylor. The new rule will officially go into effect on October 28 and will hopefully result in faster and more affordable repairs for ice cream equipment.

Fans of McFlurries and McDonald’s soft serve have the advocacy organization Public Knowledge and iFixit, a website that offers repair guides and supplies, to thank for the change. The two groups teamed up to seek the exemption with support from the FTC and DOJ.6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

Although the U.S. Copyright Office has not granted the full range of exemptions requested by organizations for commercial and industrial equipment, Public Knowledge nonetheless celebrated the exemption for food preparation equipment.

“Today’s recommendations are a win for everyone: franchise owners, independent repair shops and anyone who has had to bribe their children with a frozen treat on long trips,” said Meredith Rose, senior policy advisor at Public Knowledge, in a statement. statement. “It has been a long and rocky road to securing the right to repair, and while there are many dips and twists and turns ahead, today’s decision by the Copyright Office will result in a Long-awaited shake-up in the commercial food preparation industry There’s nothing vanilla about this victory an exemption for commercial food preparation equipment at the retail level will trigger a wave of. “third-party repair activities and will allow businesses to better serve their customers.”

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Years before this exemption was granted, a company named Kytch attempted to come up with its own solution to McDonald’s broken ice cream machine problems. The company created a device that franchisees could install on their ice machines and use to monitor their internal workings and troubleshoot operational issues.

However, McDonald’s sent an email to franchisees in 2020 warning them against using these devices, saying they allowed access to confidential data and posed a safety risk to workers. Sales subsequently dried up, Wired reportedand Kych later accused McDonald’s in lawsuit deliberately driving it out of the market and spreading false information about the security of its device.

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Zoe Strozewski