FTC and DOJ want to free McDonald's ice cream machines from DMCA repair rules
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Is there no equivalent phenomenon when it comes to their grills, deep fryers, drive-thru comms systems, self-order kiosks, etc?
If they go down the right path right at the beginning, a bit of payoff in the right places in McDonalds (which, remember, can be just taking the right people out to a really nice dinner every so often), and it could be that one equipment supplier managed to go down a path that no other current supplier could ever hope to replicate because it really depends on some early decisions, and those suppliers no longer have any opportunity to make "early" decisions.
That or it's their franchisee's problem and they don't have any incentive to fix it.
If it was a critical product, they'd have multiple machines per store, just like the friers (often way more than is needed).
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 [video][30 mins]
There is a sponsor ad from 06:49 to 08:47
[2] - https://mcbroken.com/
Hotel brands force hotel owners to use only certain vendors, taking a kickback from the vendor. Same with restaurants/etc.
I can give a specific example. Roughly 8 years ago, IHG hotels required all of their branded hotels to only sell Coca Cola products. The only reason this would happen is if Coke paid IHG.
It has nothing to do with a person’s hotel stay. It just restricts hotel owners and hotel guests from being able to sell and buy their preferred products, such as Red Bull or Starbucks or Pepsi/Tropicana, for the benefit of Coke and IHG.
Edit: to respond to tomnipotent:
I don’t see why a distributor is relevant. There are myriad to choose from. Hotel owners/operators can buy from the local Coke/Pepsi/whatever distributor, or Sam’s/Costco/grocery store, or Restaurant Depot/US Foods, etc.
Edit 2: note that IHG is not buying the beverages to sell in the franchised hotel, the IHG franchisees are. IHG does not suffer any costs from making an exclusive deal with Coke, or not making an exclusive deal with Coke.
You're forgetting about distribution and margin. Your distributor is unlikely to offer both choices, and keeping the original product means selling less of the new so you're getting less favorable volume deals with both. For the hotel, it makes sense to concentrate that sales volume into a single contract for better discounts.
Gas stations will usually have both, for example. Fast food places won't.
As the joke goes, "... is Pepsi okay?"
I don't think this is even true for most of the USA, much less the world. I've never heard anyone refer to anything except a cola as "coke" although I heard that was the vernacular in some subset of the US... some southern US states?
Edit: forgot map
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
If you're running a conference and ask them to get some coke from the bar, they usually have been able to get it (it's also possible they have a secret "guest happiness" stash) - and I've seen them pour it at the bar - Pepsi is from the spigot machine, Coke from a can.
Is that an actual preference or just spite-driven? Nope, sprite is a Coke product, we don't serve that here! But seriously, it's a real preference, it holds for the generics too. Most generic colas seem to be based on the Pepsi taste. Ugh. RC isn't, so RC Cola is fine, but too rare to ever be helpful. Caring about this is a curse!
A quick search suggests no for McDonalds.
It seems like there should be some trade group responsible for collectively bargaining with the main corporation, as a check against kickbacks.
But some time went by and it morphed into being overall bad for the McDonald's brand, and that's the puzzling part of it. You would think Micky D's would have power to step in and say "enough is a enough, this is hurting our image, quit fucking around and fix the machines or we find another vendor."
I would agree Micky D's corporate probably does have sway here, so this problem probably just isn't interesting or important enough for them to do anything about it. Maybe ice cream is such a small part of their sales they don't see the point in raising a stink about it. Or maybe the vendor just happened to Game of Thrones their way into a little niche of power that Ronald can't do anything about.
And for the size that they are, I find that pretty interesting and puzzling as well!
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes sense, but it's no surprise that things break down when a bunch of people who should be working together each act selfishly. As you'd expect nobody really wins, but it's the little guy that gets screwed the worst. Customers don't get ice cream, employees deal with frustrated customers, franchise owners lose time and money, the shitty vendor gets worked around, and the corporation's image takes a hit for being the ringleader of this circus.
It also pretty much just hurts the consumer as well since competition (or lack thereof) is based on who gives the seller the most money.
Supposedly, wendy's, burgerking, etc, have a model that is identical except for the opaque error system.
Info from the internet at large, so big grain of salt.
There is two "McDonald's" the corporation, that requires a specific machine and by extension a specific company to repair it exclusively, and then there is a ton of "McDonald's" franchises who are the victims (paying the literal price).
So McDonald's corporate didn't get out-maneuvered, they just found a new way to extract money from their franchises, who tried to fight back (and kind of lost the first battle).
Sounds like the FTC/DOJ are stepping in to give the franchises more ammo to fight back with.
Everybody loses in this situation. the biggest victims here are the consumers who can't get the products that they want, and have had to resort to developing/using apps to track down working machines, followed by the employees who have to deal with the constantly angry/frustrated customers, followed by the franchise owners who are losing money and disappointing their customers. The franchise owners are acting in self-defense by working around the vendor which means the vendor is losing money on service calls, and the corporation loses because (quite rightly) their image suffers for causing this mess in the first place and allowing it to continue.
The key difference between all those things is there's almost no moving parts involved.
Grills are simply resistive heaters and a thermostat that will outlast everyone.
Deep fryers are exactly the same, but with a tub to put in oil.
Drive through comms systems are simply speakers/telephone systems with the only moving part being the speaker itself. (The rest is software).
And The kiosks are basically just giant touch screens with a small computer running everything.
Ice cream is different. It's a thick highly spoil-able product being pushed through tubes which need to be clean. It involves a refrigerant and often a mixing device to keep the ice cream from freezing solid. Mcdonalds isn't the only one with icecream machines that constantly break down. If you notice, everyone has this problem. It's simply a hard product to serve in a sanitary way using machinery.
Not really true. The fryers used by McDonalds and the vast majority of QSRs are digitally controlled have a fairly sophisticated recirculating filter system to keep the shortening in good condition. The state of this system is much less critical from a food safety standpoint, but it can be extremely hazardous to employees for obvious reasons. The pressure fryers used by fried chicken restaurants are potentially even more hazardous. To my knowledge, none of these systems have weird DMCA-protected firmware to prevent unauthorised maintenance.
I do think there's a little bit more difficulty in the ice cream machine that doesn't exist with oil.
I went and watched some videos on fry machine maintenance (lol) and one thing that doesn't translate to the ice cream machine is how easy it is to empty the oil, throw in polish, refill, empty, refill. You can't really have an automated process which drains out the ice-cream and then sterilizes it.
> To my knowledge, none of these systems have weird DMCA-protected firmware to prevent unauthorised maintenance.
Absolutely agree. The point of my post was more why a fry machine might have easier (and hence cheaper) maintenance than an ice cream machine.
Edit: likewise, the fry machine has a self-propelled hopper which splits the raw fries up into batches.
Is that the accusation? If so, better to email the site admins, rather than alert the fraudster, or distact from discussion.
The C602 is supposedly exclusive to McDonald's, which if you watch the video posted elsewhere in this thread, explains why their machines are less reliable than those of other chains.
No. They have a monopoly.
If they’re forced to buy them back, they’ll incorporate that cost into the next round that the franchises are required to purchase.
Yes, this is what having a captive market means.
The problem is the franchise agreement. Shoehorning this into a lemon-law framework doesn’t work.
Their ice cream machines are broken so often that it’s already become a meme. They might as well not have them at this point.
They require extensive cleaning cycles and some operations require manufacturer servicing. It's just they way they work, it's documented, and there are service contracts in place to do the servicing.
When the kid at the drive through says the ice cream machine is "broken", what is actually meant is that it is currently not producing ice cream, and they don't want to argue with the person who wants ice cream. But the reason isn't that it is malfunctioning.
Taylor isn't losing money "fixing" these machines, the maintenance they do on them is on contract, and is quite lucrative.
Taylor makes perfectly good machines for other restaurants iirc.
The complaint is you can't de-idiot proof it, even if you know what you're doing (and some McDs franchises are owned by people who run other restaurants with the other machines).
It's quite possible that McDs requires these idiot-proof ones because the risk of "someone got sick from the ice cream gonorreah machine" is too high.
Nominally, this is far more idiot proof than other machines which are dependent upon underpaid fast food staff cleaning the machine correctly every single night.
The problem is that Taylor didn't allocate enough development funding because the sales volumes are low and consequently they produced an unreliable machine. Even worse, Taylor gets to double dip by being the only people allowed to repair the unreliable machine.
McDonald's only cares in that the machine doesn't give customers food poisoning--for them, mission accomplished. Taylor only sees positive cashflow from repair and consequently has zero incentive to improve the machine--mission accomplished.
The fact that the franchisees get shafted isn't on the radar.
This is the weird part. Why doesn’t McDonald’s step in and certify an additional equipment supplier so that franchisees have a choice?
This would put competitive pressure on Taylor to improve their machines, since franchisees are likely to avoid equipment that is unreliable or has high maintenance costs.
McDonald’s customers would be happier too. It reflects poorly on the McDonald’s brand that there is this constant guessing game (or having to check in the app) of whether shakes and flurries etc are available at any given time/location.
McDonald's just has the brand-recognition and clout to get away with a shitty corrupt practice for the moment, so that's what they're doing. For money.
"Ice Cream machine out of operation because of technical issue?" Not their problem
Even better idea:
Amend the DMCA to permanently add an exemption for bypassing DRM for repair purposes.
Of course it likely won't happen because those most impacted by the adjustment of the statute would buy a sufficient number of congress critters to block passage of the amendment.
> This proceeding concerns possible temporary exemptions to the DMCA’s prohibition against circumvention of technological protection measures (“TPMs”) that control access to copyrighted works, including functional software that facilitates the repair and monitoring of consumer and industrial product
McDonalds soft serve are mentioned only as an example of what would benefit
> As described by Public Knowledge and iFixit, four “index” examples of commercial and industrial device categories would benefit from the proposed expansion: commercial soft serve machines, proprietary diagnostic kits, programmable logic controllers, and enterprise IT
> The proposed expansion would benefit competition in areas beyond those outlined by Public Knowledge and iFixit. For example, increasingly sophisticated agricultural equipment often employs onboard computers that control error identification and repair, limiting options for farmers in need of quick repairs.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ATR-FTC-JointCo...
But anything smarter than a tape-following AGV also has a computer on it running a bunch of high level perception and control software, so there's a natural friction point there, particularly if the PLC can only be flashed from proprietary Windows-based software.
This is the reason I think we've been "allowed" to get some right to repair laws passed. The legislators are a decade behind and, now that tech is good enough to make bypassing impossible, the lobbyists are letting the government pass legislation that gives you the right to do something that's technically impossible. The legislators are like a younger sibling playing with an unplugged Nintendo controller.
And, even if someone can figure out a bypass, the barrier to getting there is so high that they'll most likely charge a huge premium too.
I don't think either of those things should be illegal, but they currently are. Having an exception may result in designs changing to make such repairs easier, however.
Again, it starts with the customer. If people really are that pissed off McDonalds ice cream machines are seemingly always broken, then they should stop going to McDonalds, and then the feedback loop will start from there. It's not like there isn't ample other options (Wendys, Burger King, etc). That tells me that this "problem" is really overblown, and while McDonalds customers really would prefer to have the option to reliably order ice cream, it does not deter them significantly enough from consuming McDonalds, and doing something like simply purchasing their ice cream from a different location. If McDonalds wants to recoup that income, then they will, again, prioritize that initiative, and work on improving the ice cream machine, but again, that juice does not seem worth the squeeze.
A bad ice cream machine could just mean sub optimal profits / experience.
How many times do you see friends buying unreliable rubbish? I was talking with an acquaintance the other day and they were predictably complaining about the high maintenance costs of their VW. Another friend was spending huge amounts every year on their very good looking Jeep.
Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
Even specialists can't be expected to judge correctly.
Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
Plenty of the "solutions" suggested here cause other harms or are gameable or otherwise unworkable.
> Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
I think the idea that individual consumers can individually exhaustively assess the value of their goods is not really reasonable.
However, I think it's reasonable to believe you can construct a system where a large number of consumers, enthusiasts, and experts pool their knowledge together in order to much more accurately assess product quality.
For instance, if we could conduct wide-scale long-term surveys of the reliability of large appliances, e.g. by requiring that appliance technicians log service visits for an appliance into a database (that could be run by a non-profit), then that would significantly increase pressure on manufacturers to build robust products. After all, if the cheap $2k fridge is listed in the appliance database as having a lifetime one-third of that of the $5k fridge nearby, far more consumers will opt to buy the latter, because now they actually know that there's an advantage to buying that one.
Also, consumer testing labs like Consumer Reports and ConsumerLabs do some expert testing of products, which is better than nothing.
I think that the problem is information asymmetry - companies know how bad the products that they're selling are, and consumers don't. The free market system only works if buyers have "good enough" information to make a rational decision (although that's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition), and we're not in that state right now.
> Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
I agree - it's far harder for the government to legislate vague things like "appliances must be built well" then something like "appliance lifetime and service visits must be logged into a registry".
Indiviuals do not have to understand the fractals of complexity inherent in what it took to make a finished product to know if the finished product is good quality or not.
Let's just say for the sake of argument I do not understand 1/10th of what goes into HVAC systems, or what it takes to make them. I don't understand supply chain and part sourcing. I don't understand the engineering schematics that underpin the design of the control board that runs my given HVAC unit, therefore, have no expert knowledge of HVAC systems. But what I do know, as an end user / consumer is, if you sell me a Lennox, its most likely going to be a piece of shit, and therefore I do not want a Lennox HVAC system.
McDonald’s has for a few years been allowing franchisees to use Carpigiani (the other big brand in commercial ice cream machines) but they’re not better machines and while they are much more open in regards to servicing, parts must come from Italy and wait times are longer. Most of the franchisees are still opting for Taylor even though they have a choice.
I'd also like to add my own experience with jobs that tell me constantly to go faster and faster: that you have to do everything so fast requires a certain level of durability in your equipment and tools. If you are moving fast, you have less leeway to be careful with things.
I'm not commenting on whether or not 16 year olds should have jobs: I'm saying it's pretty rich to (according to the comments I replied to anyway, the actual demographics are much more varied) hire a bunch of children to work at your restaurant, and then complain that they break things. Like, I dunno man, maybe if your business needs to hire so much labor that is JUST over the line of legally allowed to work (or as recent news shows, isn't) and pay them as little as you can legally do so in order to function, maybe your business sucks or, more likely, you suck at running your business and you should close it.
That fail protecting the rest of the mechanisms
FWIW, in most cases this is done intentionally not as a cost-saving measure but to improve repairability. It's cheaper and easier to have a 5¢ nylon gear fail when subjected to out-of-spec loads than to have catastrophic failure of multiple structural parts that happen to be the weakest link in the kinetic chain from the motor.
This does also cause them to fail through regular use, but having to do minor maintenance is a fundamental aspect of operating machines that are designed to be repaired and not simply thrown away.
Typically what I have seen is one gear is plastic and the rest are metal
Or is even the sacrificial component only able to be swapped out by a special technician who must be specially summoned with some amount of cost and lead-time?
A clutch similar to a drill could be used to protect a drive chain.
DRM itself seems like the most pointed issue with the DMCA, but any change that reduces the efficacy or DRM is going to be fought by every large company in America
How is this a bad thing? If we leave an exemption for search I would consider this a positive.
We have the compute power and the networking to decentralize all of it. That means ownership and with that comes personal responsibility. It's not a trivial problem but it's a solvable one today.
I don't know what you're talking about, I hold a copyright to all of my content, (except the content I produce at work) even if I decide to license a bunch of it.
> Do you like that it gets sold to open AI to make the next ML power draw?
What about the DMCA enabled that?
> We have the compute power and the networking to decentralize all of it. That means ownership and with that comes personal responsibility. It's not a trivial problem but it's a solvable one today.
I think people still want to have conversations using services on the internet. Even email isn't decentralized enough that it would alleviate concerns about third party content. To decentralize enough so that third-party content isn't a legal concern without DMCA, you'd essentially be asking everyone in the world to run federated services with a maximum server size of one user. I don't think we have the technology to make that actually work for the average user.
NO safe harbor means... no reddit, no Facebook, no YouTube... content aggregation in gated monoliths goes away. Data aggregation, data brokering gets a lot harder. And where are you going to mass license content at that point?
> run federated services with a maximum server size of one user.
Family exist, friends exist. Killing the DMCA, then the sea of copyright law suits is a path to copyright reform.
So it may be the case that, while it is really shitty in a lot of ways, there is currently no way to open up that Pandora's box and change the DMCA without things getting much worse. The incentives and influences in place for legislators today are simply too perverse.
On top of that, I'd like to see certain forms copyright infringement for the sake of repairing/maintaining equipment, be made legal (so you can legally hack a tractor to get it to run, without relying on a fair use defense). Of course this is a much more complex discussion than just repealing 1201.
The more I read about franchises, the more I’m convinced that most people are just “buying a job” and not starting a business.
https://www.mashed.com/178309/how-much-mcdonalds-franchise-o...
The rate of return from starting a McDonald’s franchise is less than the average return of just throwing your money into an index fund and most owners work ungodly hours
Most McDs franchises run a few of them.
Talking to McDonalds workers one main complaint was that every item on the menu required a special machine. McDonald’s more closely resembles a factory than a kitchen.
* One of McDonald's well known qualities is how consistent their products are. This is largely because every McDonald uses the same ingredients, the same equipment, and the same process.
* Assembly line production is a key part of how McDonald's maintains speed. Not surprised to see that the equipment resembles factory equipment.
* All of this is highly visible to the customer. You see inside the kitchen when you place an order inside the restaurant.
Maybe patents? That's what they're for, after all.
You (the franchisee) must use this specific machine that breaks all the time and for repairs to that machine you must use this specific vendor with whom we (the franchisor) have a "special" deal.
Rather than this complicated kick back scheme....why not just charge the franchisees more money? It's Mcdonald's gets the same amount of money, the franchisees pay the same amount of money, but you have ice cream machines with a greater uptime and therefore a better brand image which leads to greater long term growth. It just seems stupid and short sighted.
I realize that humans do stupid and short sighted things all the time, but this one just seems really obvious. This almost feels like it has to be a cause of corruption where the the corporation isn't actually getting something but rather some executive got a direct kickback in order to slip this in, even though it's in the best interests of neither the franchisees nor the corporation.
I would guess that the real reason is that within the bureaucracy of Mickey D's there is little incentive to get this problem fixed. Leadership either isn't aware or doesn't see the value to fix it. I'm sure some people are definitely benefitting a lot from this, but not enough people higher up are affected by it to care.
There is plenty of competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market. There is no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine for mcdonalds franchisee market
The problem is capitalism. And it's working as intended.
IP, by definition, is just an enclosure [1]. McDonald's the corporation has an adversarial relationship with its franchisees and you see this in every franchise. The head corporation will simply try to extract the maximum possible wealth from their franchisees, even to their detriment.
Profits tend to decrease over time. To keep profits growing, it inevitably leads to cutting quality to lower costs and predating on your customers, franchisees and employees.
McDonald's gave an exclusive contract for a particular ice cream machine. They then locked down those machines so only first-party repairers can fix them. It's a means of extracting wealth from the franchisees. The ice creame machine maker makes money on these service call outs so they have no incentive to make them reliable (the opposite, actually). And I'm sure McDonald's gets a piece of those service call outs.
Now does this do long-term damage to the McDonald's brand? Maybe. But nobody actually cares about that.
https://www.farm-equipment.com/blogs/6-opinions-columns/post...
If they get it have the legal right to repair the machines, it's kinda pointless if McDonald's corporate merely needs to send down an order such that all franchises must not repair their own ice cream machines, as they would for any other kickback-driven franchise requirement.
Build an "open source" ice cream machine.
Not so easy for a tractor I guess but it sounds like China could make one that would last a year for a fraction of the price.
When do you start (or stop) counting something as "purchasable"? Does it mean I can copy the tapes of movies the day before their first screenings, but not the day after? Or if my local shop doesn't have a show on disk?
It's like ice cream lottery. "Boy, a bit of ice cream might be nice!"
And it's a total crapshoot. Drive up with no idea whether it's going to happen or not. You want to just write it off, give up, "McDs doesn't sell ice cream".
But then you go another day, and there it is on the menu, teasing you!
Lies. Deception.
So aggravating.
Ice cream parlours!
The underlying laws should be removed. IP laws like this are unenforceable at a global level and don't help/protect the consumers. All they do is create artificial walled gardens. There is no reason that its illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, or repair a tractor, or hack your bmw seat warmer. This is going to continue to lead us to a corporate hellscape.
China has a more free market in this regard until the party shows up with a gun to tell you to do something for political reasons, but meanwhile they are able to leverage a more free market.
It's a dumb law, let's get rid of it.
> [Congress shall have power] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Are laws like this really helping promote the progress of science and useful arts? Because it sure does seem like it's doing the opposite.
If its your property, you should legally speaking tell any OTHER company to rightly fuck off about restrictions on your property.
Intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, trademark) should NOT have any ground in restricting property rights of things directly owned. Instead, we see shit like Iphones where they use the term "SELL", and then continual and ongoing restrictions by the FORMER OWNER.
If a company wants to maintain control, they should RENT it, with an explicit, simple to read rental agreement.
This link covers 15 years of DMCA abuse, which you say doesn't apply to you.
https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...
Your ignorance of this terrible law is not immunity of this law. Apple could as easily destroy your device with no recourse, or sue YOU personally for "defeat of technical prevention".
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreakin...
edit: after digging into this, my above statement is false as it no longer needs to be renewed every 3 years
I'm not an Apple employee or direct stockholder. I imagine my 401(k) has some in it, but I don't really know. I'm not claiming they're angels. What I am claiming is that Apple's never told me I'm not allowed to do whatever I want with the things I've bought from them. They might not support me in my ventures, and I'm sure they'd prefer I not, but I'm not aware of any case where Apple tried to legally limit a regular end customer's usage.
Unfortunately we can't deduce the reasons why it wasn't renewed in 2012, but I imagine Apple was doing the best in their power to convince the Librarian to make that decision.
You might want to see to that.
If we're going back to phones, then it would have been illegal to jailbreak for a few months in 2014 after their anti-circumvention exemption expired and before the aforementioned Unlocking Consumer Choice act took effect.
Though jailbreaking is still just one aspect of how DMCA is being used to restrict what you can do with the hardware you've purchased.
The piece of paper just represents the contract, other forms of contracts exist (such as digital, verbal). I agree there should be an easier way to get out of shitty ones. But make it too easy and you make contracts too weak. It's a balancing act.
People are free not to operate a franchise. Why should I, John Q. Public, care if some restaurant owner enters into a shitty contract with McDonald corporation or a ice cream machine vendor.
Ice cream isn't exactly a human right.