No more ice scream!

Feds weigh legal fix for McD’s treat machines

The federal government wants to make it legal for McDonald’s franchise owners to use a thirdparty hacking device to fix chronically broken icecream machines after the fast-food giant was sued because it didn’t allow them to do so.

The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust unit of the Department of Justice are asking the US Copyright Office to approve an exemption to copyright law that would allow business owners to repair “commercial and industrial equipment.”

The feds said that not allowing business owners to hire third-party repair people limits competition and makes repairs more costly, according to comments filed Thursday amid deliberations seeking the exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Broken-down soft-serve machines cost business owners $625 in lost sales per day, the agencies estimated in their filing with the Copyright Office.

Since business owners are not legally permitted to fix the machines on their own or to hire a third-party technician. They need to wait for an authorized technician, which usually takes around 90 days, the comment noted.

The agencies want the exemptions to apply to commercial soft-serve machines, a proprietary diagnostic kit, programmable logic controllers and enterprise IT, according to the filing, which was first reported by The Verge.

“In the Agencies’ view, renewing and expanding repair-related exemptions would promote competition in markets for replacement parts, repair and maintenance services, as well as facilitate competition in markets for repairable products,” they wrote in the filing.

In 2021, the FTC launched an investigation into complaints by McDonald’s franchise owners who said they were losing business due to McFlurry machines that kept breaking down.

The problem was compounded by customer complaints. One McDonald’s fan even made a website, McBroken, that tracks broken machines in real time.

McDonald’s didn’t respond to a request for comment.