Victory Is Sweet: We Can Now Fix McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines
www.ifixit.com
The Copyright Office just handed down a big Right to Repair win: we can now legally repair commercial food preparation equipment, including McDonald’s machines.
  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    Ah this bit is sad. The exception only covers bypassing DMCA protections to fix your own stuff not distributing the tooling for it.

    It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame. The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      I wonder if someone could invent a new open source machine of some sort along with a tool to fix that, and that tool just happens to also be able to fix the McDonald’s ice cream machines?

      • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        I mean, you could. The problem becomes “do you have more money and lawyers than McDonald’s” to keep pretending it has nothing to do with it in court.

  • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    This company sure has been making the rounds on the internet. I estimate maybe 1-2 years before they decide to cash in on their goodwill with some kind of monetary product

      • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        I’m not really. Who are these guys and why am I hearing about them on every social media outlet.

        They’re a company whose sole aim is to make money. Right now they’re in the goodwill phase of building community trust, but what’s their endgame? Is this an emerging market they’re cornering.

        I know these sound like sarcastic questions, but I’m genuinely wondering.

        • why_not_start_over@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          28 days ago

          Ifixit has been a community driven repair site for over 20 years. It was indispensable for repairing apple laptops when they were still transitioning to Intel from PowerPC. I haven’t kept up with all the changes, but they sell tools and parts now. Even from a jaded perspective one can see the right to repair is in their best interest.

          • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            28 days ago

            Well, that sounds promising at least. I hope their interests continue to align with their consumer-base for another 20 years, and doesn’t nosedive into the CEO rot we’ve seen with Mozilla

            • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              27 days ago

              So far they haven’t shown any form above declined. In fact the actually just decided to separate from being an official Samsung repair partner, because Samsung was trying to dictate how much they were charging for the repair costs and were actively hinderings efforts regarding repairing Samsung products, so they decide that Samsung wasn’t aligned with their programs values and decided to drop the program. This doesn’t mean that they dropped how to repair Samsung devices, it just means that they no longer offer second party access to Parts it’s now third party and Samsung themselves aren’t providing the repair manuals anymore (not that they really did in the first place)

              While I find their tools pretty steep in pricing, there’s still nowhere near cost of doing it through Apple or Samsung

              • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                27 days ago

                Thanks for the informed context – I think my brain is just predisposed towards seeing such efforts as disingenuous, but I should learn to criticize companies after they do bad things, and not before.