Hopefully, we can stop mocking McDonald’s for giving us all E. coli soon, and go back to mocking their McFlurry machines for always being broken. Or, maybe not . . .
It sounds like the broken McFlurry machine problem might finally be SOLVED.
The fact that they’re always busted is such a well-known thing, there’s a website that tracks it called McBroken.com. At any given time, around 10% of McFlurry machines are down nationwide.
But it turns out the reason they’re always broken is because not just anyone can fix them. A company called Taylor makes those machines. And for years, they’ve been the only ones LEGALLY ALLOWED to work on them.
They owned the exclusive rights, so McDonald’s had no choice but to wait around for an official Taylor repairman to swing by.
But now that’s changing after the U.S. Copyright Office just weighed in. They granted an exemption that gives companies like McDonald’s the “right to repair” those machines themselves, and bypass digital locks.
Starting this week, third-party companies can show up and fix McFlurry machines nationwide. The new rules just went into effect Monday.
You can thank a group called Public Knowledge and the website iFixIt.com for the change. They filed the exemption request after iFixIt ripped apart a McFlurry machine last year and found they’re really not hard to repair.
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