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The FTC and DOJ think McDonald’s ice cream machines should be legal to fix
Soft serve machine outages can cost business owners as much as $625 a day — and they can’t legally fix them on their own.
The FTC and DOJ are asking the Copyright Office to go a step further, extending the right to repair to “commercial and industrial equipment.” The comment singles out four distinct categories that would benefit from DMCA exemptions: commercial soft serve machines; proprietary diagnostic kits; programmable logic controllers; and enterprise IT. The average estimated cost of “unplanned manufacturing downtime” was $260,000 per hour, the comment notes, citing research from Public Knowledge and iFixit. After a third-party company, Kytch, built a product that can read the error codes, McDonald’s told its franchise owners not to use it.
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