A new copyright rule lets McDonald's fix its own broken ice cream machines

The soft-serve machines at McDonald's restaurants are so often out of order that their reliable unreliability have long been the butt of jokes, memes — and now even a rallying cry in this year’s presidential race.

The widespread issue has even spurred the creation of McBroken, an online tracker for broken machines across the U.S.

A new exemption to a copyright law could pave the way for quicker repairs to the machines, sweetening the McFlurry maker's sour reputation.

Before this week, most of the McDonald's ice cream makers could only be fixed through the machine’s manufacturer. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects the code embedded in the ice cream machines, made it illegal for third parties, like McDonald’s employees and franchisee owners, to break the digital locks installed by manufacturers.

The new rule, which went into effect on Monday, allows outside vendors to fix “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” That includes McDonald’s ice cream machines, as 404 media journalist Jason Koebler explained to NPR’s Weekend Edition.

It’s a win for the “right to repair” movement, which pushes back against companies incentivized to control the repairs made to their own products. The movement advocates for legislation that gets manufacturers to provide consumers and independent repair services access to their parts, tools and service information so consumers can get their own, legally bought devices fixed. The movement prevailed when Apple in 2021 announced it would allow customers to repair their iPhones themselves. 

While the change applies to other devices and machines, McDonald’s and its ice cream machines have become particularly galvanizing topics, especially in the run-up to the presidential election.

Two days before the law went into effect, former President Donald Trump posted a photograph on X of him at a McDonald’s drive-thru, with a photoshopped President Biden holding an ice cream cone, alongside a promise: "WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!”

It's possible the Biden administration beat him to it. Federal regulators backed right-to-repair advocates who petitioned for the exemption to food prep machines. Back in March, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department both submitted comment to the U.S. Copyright Office recommending the change.

Both iFixit, an online repair website, and Public Knowledge, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, petitioned for the exemption.

“This is a significant step forward,” iFixit wrote in a blog post celebrating the move, but said the rule doesn’t go far enough. While the ruling makes it legal for people to repair machines, wrote the guide’s Elizabeth Chamberlain, “it doesn’t allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so.”