Court Ruling Could Mean Fewer Broken McFlurry Machines At McDonald's

The U.S. Copyright Office recently allowed repairs for food preparation equipment at franchise restaurants like McDonald's often damaged soft-serve machines by approving an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Fans of franchise fast food restaurants can rejoice as the decision allows owners and independent repair shops to fix commonly broken machines themselves.

This ruling is part of broader efforts to secure the right to repair across industries, reported ARS Technica. The ruling aims to improve customer service and increase third-party repairs.

Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose called the decision a victory and said it should "spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers. ... We will continue to chip away at half-baked laws blocking the right to repair, sprinkling consumer victories as we go."

The move is a win for fans of the McFlurry, a soft serve dessert that can withstand up to five minutes of 106 Fahrenheit heat. McDonald's often-broken and repeatedly under repair ice cream machines that churns out the McFlurry is the stuff of Internet fodder.

Broken Taylor machines cost franchise owners a daily loss of $625, a report from the U.S. Copyright Office said.

This landmark decision stems from a $900 million lawsuit involving Kytch, a third-party company that can hack the Taylor soft serve machines to fix it and McDonald's, reported the New York Post.

The news caused Rashiq Zahid, a software engineer, to make an interactive map that shows every single McDonald's that has a broken ice cream machine throughout Canada and the U.S. The live map can be found on a website that's aptly called McBroken.

It's the subject matter of many conspiracy theories on Reddit claiming a nefarious reason for the outages. The machines, manufactured by Taylor, are designed to break so franchise owners must call Taylor directly.

Johnny Harris, a producer, made a 30-minute documentary, The Real Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken, about this phenomenon in 2021 that has over 13 million views on the platform. Now the Taylor ice cream machines used at McDonald's can be repaired by anyone.

(Fun fact: When a McDonald's employee would attempt the complicated task of trying to repair it, they were restricted from doing so through a process known as "technological protection measures" that spews out error codes and requests using specific maintenance tools.)

While manufacturers opposed the exemption, government departments such as the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, helped secure it.

The exemption, which was requested last year with iFixit and Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, excludes industrial equipment.