A new rule could make it easier to fix the McDonald's ice cream machine

Ice cream machines at McDonald's famously break frequently. NPR's Scott Simon speaks to journalist Jason Koebler from 404 Media about a new exemption that allows third parties to fix them.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Do you ever crave an ice cream treat at McDonald's, only to be told that their soft serve machine is down? Almost an ongoing joke, isn't it? The McFlurry machines seem to be down so much the question ought to be, when are they actually, you know, in service? And up until this week, repairs to the machines could only be made with the manufacturer getting involved. But a new exemption allows the ice cream machines and some medical devices to be unlocked and repaired by others. Jason Koebler is a tech journalist with 404 Media. He joins us now from Los Angeles. Thanks so much for being with us.

JASON KOEBLER: Hey, thanks for having me and excited to talk about ice cream repair.

SIMON: Well, it's an important issue. Millions of Americans are affected, of course. So this new exemption was handed down by the Library of Congress Copyright Office?

KOEBLER: That's right. It's something that people probably don't think about very often, but there is a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which covers everything from music and movie piracy to the protection of the embedded code in McFlurry machines. And this week, they said, there is a specific exemption to Section 1201 of that law that allows people to hack or circumvent the kind of arbitrary software locks that manufacturers put on commercial food equipment to prevent repair, and that covers McFlurry machines.

SIMON: So that's the actual purpose - to prevent repair by outside parties.

KOEBLER: That is the purpose. And, I mean, it might sound a little bit frivolous, you know, talking about McFlurry machines, but there are actually exemptions to this law for everything from John Deere tractors to home appliances to computers and phones and, as you mentioned, medical devices.

We've seen over the last decade or so, manufacturers have realized that they can make a lot of money by monopolizing repair of their devices. So they make it very difficult to get into the, like, diagnostic systems of these devices to find out what's going wrong. And so there's this thing called the Right to Repair movement that seeks to help the people who bought these devices fix their own things that they have legally bought. And part of that has been petitioning the Library of Congress for these Section 1201 exemptions.

SIMON: So this was a popular movement that prevailed.

KOEBLER: It's a really popular movement because the software that, you know, quote-unquote, "protects" these machines is copyrighted. And so breaking through that is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And there have been cases where repair folks have been sued or have thought that they might get sued, have been threatened by manufacturers for doing this. And so by petitioning the Library of Congress for these exemptions, they're now legally allowed to do that for a whole class of different devices.

The big one this year was the commercial food equipment, and the sort of impetus for this was the McFlurry machine. There was a person who actually tracked the uptime of McFlurry machines in the United States and found that at any given moment, 10% of all of the machines were broken.

SIMON: Oh, my. You do believe, however, that the most serious implications of this Library of Congress ruling will probably be in the medical device field.

KOEBLER: It is. And in the aftermath of the first wave of COVID in 2020, there were many, many hospitals who had ventilators that were broken. And, you know, hospitals often have their own trained repair people to fix medical devices. But they often were not able to fix ventilators because the manufacturers were overwhelmed by the number of ventilators that were broken because there were so many being used. And so you had hospitals that had to wait weeks or months in order to get an authorized repair person in. So the medical repair device exemption is a huge deal.

SIMON: Yeah. How did we reach this point?

KOEBLER: The big one that I've written about quite a lot is John Deere tractors. And over the last 15 years or so, John Deere has started adding different sensors and software-embedded parts to its tractors. And suddenly farmers found that they were unable to repair their own devices. And these farmers are, you know, politically active. And they started saying, like, hey, this is a real problem for us. And it sort of percolated through the farming industry. And, like, iPhone repair people realized that they were having the same problems with iPhones. And suddenly you had this alliance between farmers and iPhone repair technicians, and a political movement was born.

SIMON: Tech journalist Jason Koebler of 404 Media. Thanks so much for being with us, and merry McFlurrys to your future.

KOEBLER: Merry McFlurrys to you, as well.

(SOUNDBITE OF FRANKLAAY SONG, "ICE CREAM MAN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.