Yesterday’s big news is one which the billions and billions served by McDonald’s are happy to hear. The US Copyright Office has granted restaurant owners the ‘right to repair’ equipment leased from franchisers or parent companies.
How It All Began
Ice cream has always been a problem at McDonald’s. Regardless of your hailing generation, odds are you’ve ordered an ice cream treat from McDonald’s only to be told, “our ice cream machine is broken.” McDonald’s ice cream machines are famously broken. They’ve entered the zeitgeist of one of life’s many disappointments.
Thing is, there is no other ice cream like McDonald’s ice cream. Their ice cream is dense and silky smooth. After years in the lab, McDonald’s food innovators and scientists figured out the right combination of cold, humidity, and movement to churn McDonald’s ice cream. That’s because the McDonald’s ice cream machine is an engineering marvel and testament to American engineering and food science.
It is an exotic machine manufactured in America by the Taylor company. What’s crazy, is the Taylor Company is the only company allowed to official repair the machines costing franchisees thousands of dollars per repair.
An enterprising startup company, Kytsch, was determined to understand why the machines failed so often and offer solutions. Kytsch created a device that could connect to the McDonald’s ice cream machine and download performance codes illustrating how well it was performing. Using this information, franchisees could properly maintain their machines and head off any failures before they happened. Taylor and McDonald’s bullied Kytsch to prevent them from selling their devices. A whole legal saga unfolded between Kytsch, Taylor, and McDonald’s.
Meanwhile, ice cream machines continuously fail with repair lead times exceeding 90 days.
Fast Forward to 2024
McDonald’s and Taylor moved to protect repair guides and how-tos for their machines using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).. They treated the guides and operational data intellectual property and could apply digital rights management (DRM) to keep it secret.
Thanks to Apple not giving up good repair guides for its screens, draconian DRM actions began to fray at the edges thanks to the Copyright Office applying fair use on products. Eventually, the Copyright Office ruled iPhone users had a right to repair their broken devices.
Voila! And now franchise owners can get guides to repair their ice cream machines.
I feel sorry for Taylor and McDonald’s though. I expect a class action suit to come around with franchisees suing for damages due to lost sales because of busted ice cream machines.
-MJ
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