I mean, IANAL, but assuming those franchisees bought those machines instead of licensed them, then yes, they should be able to repair them themselves. Companies try really hard to have folks forget that as an owner you can do what you want with your equipment. McDonalds may be able to say “You can only work with this 3rd party repair provider” but they can’t tell you you can’t fix your own shit yourself.
Further, the article specifically says the same:
Currently, Taylor has service contracts with McDonald’s franchises that allow them to exclusively service the ice cream machines. A DMCA exemption would allow McDonald’s franchises to legally do repair work on their own machines.
All bets are off though if the franchisees only license or rent those machines.
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
Emma Goldman, Living My Life
We are forced to participate in capitalistic society. Demanding that we don’t take any enjoyment from it to recover from what it takes from us is counter productive.
Yeah. I never even ask for ice cream or McFlurries any more. It’s broken, just ran out of mix or the cashier isn’t sure how to use it. I guess my thighs don’t need it any way.
I just went through the manual for the Taylor soft serve machine that iFixIt has.
If the power gets interrupted or the machine gets switched off, the machine forces you to disassemble and brush-clean it or go through a heat treatment cycle which raises the internal temperature to 151°F (66 °C) to pasteurize everything.
There doesn’t appear to be a way to bypass it. The machine locks itself until it’s done.
It’s also clear from the manual that these procedures have to be done by McD employees regularly anyway. The heat treatment cycle has to be run every 24 hours or the machine locks itself and there are daily sanitation procedures on top of that.
There seems to be a rather large number of food safety related things that can make the machine demand a heat treatment cycle.
One of the big ones I see, besides power outages, is that the machine is designed to operate in ambient temperatures of 70°F to 75°F, so if it is warmer and you push it, it could cause the freezer temperature to go above its max allowed temp which will then force a heat treatment cycle. Of course, hot days are exactly when people start buying ice cream.
Since that cycle can take up to 6 hours, I’m not shocked the machines are out of order a lot.
In which aspect?
That the previous BB article I provided a link to stated 3 people died from contamination of an ice cream machine due to improper maintenance and cleaning or that people could be so over worked (or lazy) to not do the proper procedures on the perpetually broken ice cream machine?
The more quality is designed into a process the less you have to rely on fallible humans to ensure the quality you need. That’s not a knock on McD employees, that’s a simple fact that people are not machines. Based on what Alosius posted it sounds like Taylor has the machine programmed to the point where it will be clean when it is used. Given the potential of what could happen this is the right type of safety lock to have in place.
It’s also clear from the manual that these procedures have to be done by McD employees regularly anyway. The heat treatment cycle has to be run every 24 hours or the machine locks itself and there are daily sanitation procedures on top of that.
There seems to be a rather large number of food safety related things that can make the machine demand a heat treatment cycle.
Maybe Taylor is being overly cautious with the forced cleanings, but something tells me that McD would push some (or all) of the fault of a food borne illness caused by one of their machines back on them.
With those type of programmed safety measures in place I don’t see why McD employees couldn’t “fix” most of the less serious issues that might arise.
I wouldn’t say they are that overly cautious. It looks more to me like the machine is simply underpowered and it takes hours for it to raise the temperature high enough for pasteurization.
I looked at three other manufacturers and none of the had a similar pasteurization feature or anything to require it if temperatures went into the danger zone for too long. They seemed to instead rely on the operator being proactive and doing full manual clean outs instead.
Also from the Taylor manual it looks like quite a lot of maintenance is designed to be done by the operator. Where it wants you to call for service seems to be for more serious issues like faulty thermistors or the gearbox being out of alignment which I doubt many operators could handle themselves. That said non-Taylor repair services could if it was better documented and it didn’t void the warranty.
Edit: I take that back. The Carpigiani machines have self-pasteurization option like Taylor that I somehow missed.
There are literally what, tens- if not hundreds of thousands of these things in the wild? Yes, you’ll find an exception that proves every rule. That doesn’t mean you create a forced monopoly because of it. These companies server some insane proportion of the world population every day without making them sick, I think they can suss it out. Otherwise, the government would regulate their use, not use breaking copyright law to try and enforce public safety.
Well, that article was hugely disappointing. They tease revalations that they did only to say, “too bad we can’t tell you anything interesting because DMCA!” I expected more from an outfit like iFixit.
The article briefly mentioned Kytch. Wired has some great coverage of their work:
In 1946 he organized more than 40 of Taylor’s employees as Tekni-Craft, one of America’s first worker cooperatives, to which he sold Taylor’s manufacturing and distribution rights.
I’m super confused about the DMCA bit given Kytch existed and afaik, wasn’t sued for DMCA violations despite reverse engineering and even distributing a device.
Frankly, I’m not sure why the DMCA even applies if we’re just talking about reverse engineering to document how something works generally or error codes since those aren’t copyrightable anyway. If we were talking about copying the firmware of the device and publishing it, that would just be a straight copyright violation, but again, not really anything to do with the DMCA.
Honestly, I thought it was because the crew didn’t want to have to clean the machine.
ETA: I just realized that this must be a uniquely American problem. In the twenty-ish years I’ve lived in France, I don’t remember ever being told that the ice cream machine was broken. Does that mean that the proprietary repair contracts are only good in the US and the employees can fix them here?
No. They use Carpigiani machines instead iirc. Some American McDonalds use Carpigiani machines too, but when they actually break down, it can take a while to get parts in the US.
From the Kytch lawsuit filings, it looks like most of the time the Taylor machines are “broken”, they’re either doing a heat treatment cycle because the one overnight failed or because of simple operator mistakes that have easy fixes, but the error messages and documentation are so shit that the operator doesn’t not what to do, so they end up calling for service.
There is a Carpigiani machine with a heat treatment cycle too, but theirs takes half as long. It also has infinitely better documentation (seriously, there must be over a hundred well-drawn diagrams), a battery backup that keep tracking the freezer temperature if the power goes out so you don’t have to force a heat treatment cycle if it just goes out briefly and seemingly better error messages (though far from great).
