Whether you’ve eaten at the American fast food giant McDonald’s or not, the chain’s broken ice cream machines are, at this point, universal knowledge. The machines which supply frozen soft serve ice cream on cones or in drinks are so consistently unreliable, that most people assume that the machine at a location is broken rather than actually functioning. That is, until recent legislation turns the tide for this famous, almost comical, malfunction.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects the codes inside the machine and makes it illegal for the digital lock to be broken by third-party people like McDonald’s employees or franchise owners. This meant that if a machine needed repair, the manufacturing company’s repairmen were only allowed to repair ice cream machines.
The new legislation is a win for the “right to repair” movement, which allows people or businesses to fix products they had purchased from a company. While the movement itself pushes for people and independent repair services access to manufacturers’ parts, tools, and service information to fix the items they purchased, this new legislation is a small step in that direction. The change in rules prohibits the ability to share and distribute the repair tools, it legalizes the ability to self-repair.
This is the second-largest leap for this movement, which hadn’t seen a big change since 2021 when Apple allowed owners to self-repair their devices. There are other machines affected by this ruling, McDonald’s, with its ever-famous out-of-service ice cream machines, is the face of this change in law.