iFixit Tears Down McDonald's McFlurry Machine, Petitions Government for Right to Hack Them
iFixit Tears Down McDonald's McFlurry Machine, Petitions Government for Right to Hack Them
iFixit tears down a notoriously unreliable McDonald’s ice cream machine: “The error codes are nonsensical, counterintuitive, and seemingly random.”
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mcdonalds is somehow profiting from this, or it just wouldnt be happening.
Taylor must pay McDonald’s a tidy sum for the exclusivity contract. Both parties make out like bandits in the deal. I’m kind of surprised McDonald’s never in-housed it out of greed, but that day may be coming due to all the negative publicity.
I suspect it's a case of they thought they were getting a good deal out of this when they signed the contract but didn't realise how much Taylor was going to take the piss until it was too late. Likely when the contract expires it probably won't be renewed.
From the article: "A DMCA exemption would allow McDonald’s franchises to legally do repair work on their own machines."
Wait, copyright can be used to prevent repairs? What is the justification? Is it a "ice cream machine company owns the copyright to mcdonalds ice cream and if you tamper with the machine you can't call it McDonald's ice cream anymore" kind of deal or is tampering straight up illegal?
The DMCA criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.
This only applies to digital access controls right? Otherwise those 'warranty void if removed' stickers would be legal
I think there needs to be a digital component but it can still apply to physical goods. Either way, “warranty void if removed” stickers aren’t a control. It only applies to “effective” controls:
For the DMCA, circumvention means that there is a user attempting to “descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner” – assuming that there is a technological measure in place that “effectively controls access to a work.”
If you need to reverse engineer the product to bypass the access control, then that generally qualifies as an effective control. But if you can just press F12 or Escape or remove a sticker, that wouldn’t qualify as effective.
(For what it’s worth I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
But isn’t it ineffective once it’s been bypassed, therefore making it legal again?
Unfortunately that’s not what they mean by “effective.” They define it like this:
a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
The key verbiage there is “in the ordinary course of its operation.”
Someone should tell these people that words have meanings.
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More likely someone at McDonalds than the company itself.
The company itself, they profit from the repairs.
How? A different company sells and services the machines, and it is not a subsidiary of the McDonalds Corporation.
There's literally no other explanation, McDonald's can only do whatever brings them profit, and they did the math I'm sure, this HAS to be profitable.
No. I already gave another more probable explanation that happens all the time in business.
Eh not necessarily. It's a common joke, and ifixit gets publicity both for their own brand and for right to repair out of it
Edit: unless you meant they're getting something out of it being so locked down, in which case yeah. Corporate basically gets to pass the costs down to individual franchisees even more
Not necessarily. If the losses they are sustaining aren't understood or obfuscated through corporate and bureaucratic bullshit, it could go unnoticed for quite a while.