US Copyright Office granted an exemption allowing third parties to diagnose and repair commercial equipment — including the ones that make your McFlurries.
The decision is part of the Copyright Office’s final rule granting exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This exemption-making process happens every three years and is supposed to ensure that the DMCA doesn’t negatively impact people trying to use copyrighted material.
Worth nothing that DMCA exceptions are reviewed on the same 3 year cycle and are frequently revoked. So if you’re a McD ice cream fan, enjoy it while you can.
“Repair” is a bit of a stretch. Oftentimes it is pushing a series of buttons and takes less than a minute.
90% of the time the fix was just rebooting the machine. We just got tired of the machine breaking and exploding on us so we’d just stop doing that and say it’s broken broken.