The popular e-commerce site iFixit wants Congress to allow it to fix the chronically broken ice cream machines used at McDonald’s franchises.
The move comes a year after a couple sued the fast food chain for not allowing franchise owners to use a gadget they invented which allows them to hack into the ice cream machines and repair them quickly — rather than pay for costly service from the manufacturer.
“At any given time, about 10% of McDonald’s ice cream machines are broken,” wrote iFixit’s Elizabeth Chamberlain.
“This summer, we’re on a mission to fix that problem, in two big ways: We’re getting into the sticky insides of commercial ice cream machines and the US copyright law that makes them hard to fix.”
The site filed a petition on Tuesday with the US Copyright Office seeking an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to bypass software locks on devices.
“Getting this exemption request granted would let us do more with our machine: Instead of just taking it apart, we could also dig into the software,” Chamberlain wrote.
“We could reverse engineer the error codes and figure out how to reset them.”
A technician for iFixit bought an ice cream machine used in McDonald’s locations and found that the problems are fixable.
Attempts by independent actors to fix McDonald’s ice cream machines have been met with fierce resistance by the company.
The machines, which are manufactured by Taylor, are sold to McDonald’s franchises at a cost of $18,000 apiece.
But McDonald’s customers nationwide have grown frustrated at the frequent technical meltdowns that render the machines out of service.
According to the “McBroken” app, some 10% of ice cream machines at McDonald’s locations throughout the US are malfunctioning at any given moment.
Franchisees must then order a technician from Taylor, which has exclusive rights to service the machines and charge franchise owners a fee for each visit by a repairperson.
To solve the problem, Jeremy O’Sullivan and his partner, Melissa Nelson, created Kytch, a device that intercepts the machine’s internal communications and send them via WiFi to a smartphone or web interface — allowing owners to troubleshoot the problem.
But McDonald’s told franchise owners not to use the device due to risk of “serious human injury.”
In 2021, Kytch sued Taylor after Taylor allegedly obtained one of Kytch’s devices and reverse-engineered it to create its own internet-connected monitoring product.
Kytch has also sued McDonald’s for $900 million, alleging that the company defamed it. Both lawsuits are still pending.
The Post has sought comment from McDonald’s and Taylor’s parent company.
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