Editorial: McDonald's fickle McFlurry machines are now more fixable. That's more significant than you might think

With an E. coli scare linked to some of its Quarter Pounders, likely the slivered onions thereupon, McDonald’s and its franchisees have had a rough go of late, as reflected in its share price gyrations. But this week brought some good news for the Chicago-based fast-food giant.

The notoriously fickle McFlurry stations, otherwise known as soft-serve ice cream machines, can now be legally repaired by the franchisees’ own handy staffers. They no longer have to wait for someone to come from the manufacturer, Taylor Co., to show up and decipher the weird error codes on the machine.

And which entity made this happen? Believe it or not, the U.S. Copyright Office, which announced, in essence, that it approved of allowing retail-level food preparation machines to bypass digital locks without being considered to have violated copyright, a new exemption category that includes the McFlurry devices.

Donald Trump, a fan of the chain, had already claimed on X that, should he be elected, he’d see to it that the machines were kept in working order, presumably Making the McFlurry Great Again. But the nonpartisan U.S. Copyright Office actually beat Trump to the swirl.

Why does this matter? It’s not just because McDonald’s has been playing a weirdly large part in the presidential election, especially when it comes to social media and employment records. It’s to do with the consumer-friendly right of repair, a concept we have written about before, which is designed to limit manufacturers from copyrighting the very processes that allow their machines to be put back in working order, giving them an effective monopoly on repairs.

The Copyright Office’s exemption ruling was narrow (joint petitioners Public Knowledge and iFixit had hoped for a far broader exemption for industrial equipment), but you can see the importance of this for everyone from independent auto services to appliance repair shops, some of which already benefit from state laws. There are business implications, obviously, but also environmental ones: If something is not easily repairable, it’s more likely to hit the landfill.

In the case of the frozen treats at McDonald’s, the machines routinely threw off digital error codes, now a familiar concept with most things we buy. But if you weren’t from Taylor, you struggled to figure out what they meant. And McDonald’s franchisees complained that Taylor repair people did not exactly arrive lickety-split.

Some McDonald’s franchisees took matters into their own hands, sparking a McFlurry of lawsuits, especially pertaining to an outside company, Kytch, that grew up specifically to help franchisees work around a problem that was forcing them to halt ice cream sales. Adding to the complexity were the contracts between machine maker Taylor and McDonald’s corporate offices, which led some franchisees to suspect that the company had competing agendas when it came to keeping the old soft-servers pumped.

So this is a victory for the many small-bore McDonald franchisees and some large ones too. On a broader scale, we’re all for the loosening of these kinds of regulations, in this case helping businesses better serve their customers and consumers enjoy a deftly blended frozen dessert.

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