But it wasn’t until 2022 that the right-to-repair battle reached wide public consciousness when consumers questioned why McFlurry machines were always broken at their local McDonald’s. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) made it illegal to bypass certain proprietary systems like the one that Taylor Company, the McFlurry manufacturer, used to fix the equipment.
After a repair startup filed a lawsuit challenging Taylor’s restrictive repair policies, which only allowed its repair people to fix machines, the U.S. Copyright Office announced new exceptions to the copyright law to allow third-party McFlurry repairs. Kit Walsh, a director at the nonprofit rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, welcomed the change.
Of course it had to be about maccas. America is so weird 😂
TIL Gizmodo is now owned by a european (Swiss-French) company: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/business/media/gizmodo-sold-keleops.html