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- cross-posted to:
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This is a nice win for self-repair hardware rights.
For context, see their old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCpY3tFTIA
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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.
Long hard fight.
We take our Ws where we can get them.
They should do like the folks selling weed in DC, where they sell you a $200 cookie or sticker and give you a free ounce of weed with your purchase.
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Illegal like sharing pirated media.
It can’t be commercialised, but if you just “happen” to find the software somewhere, you are allowed to use it.Corpos hate decentralized operations…
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?
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.
While there is feel good framing, write ups like this just reinforce what a dystopian hell hole we live in. It is depressing.
You’re not wrong, but I’d still encourage everyone to celebrate the small victories. If we wait for perfection it may never come.
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the merely good” is one (imo important) way to state it.
Yes, but framing is important. Saying “Oh look what our perfect corporate buddies over at Taylor let us do even though it’s their call” (a huge lie btw.) vs. saying “We finally got this victory, we can finally do part of what we should’ve never have been unable to do due to corporate greed, thank you Taylor for getting some sense, it seems like your scrooges still have some semblance of a soul left” is a big difference. Sure, the truth is somewere in-betweeen these two extremes but it’s much closer to the latter than the former.
Oh, tbh I was just commenting the sort of “pithy” way to say what commenter above me was saying. I wasn’t actually commenting on the situation, screw McDonalds and Taylor both lol
as long as we are walking forwards, and not backwards or sideways, we can go one step at a time and we will be closer to something better.
The only Victory I see in my medium term future is leaving the country. The US is fucked 5 ways to sunday and honestly I don’t see that recovering any time soon
Plus it’s still an improvement over the alternative.
That’s great, but I’m sure Taylor (ice cream machine manufacturer) will still void your warranty, and McDonald’s corporate will still tell you you’re required to have Taylor service it. There were blackboxed control bypass devices for these machines that let them run longer and self-clean better, but McDonald’s sent out a memo requiring all franchisees to remove them and only allow Taylor to work on those machines.
McDonald’s franchisees being forced to buy one specific problematic ice cream machine is ducked up on it’s own. Let them choose what works.
The whole situation is ducked IMO.
Sweet! Sub par soft-serve for everyone!
It’s not even cheap anymore :(
Costco’s soft-serve is way better than McD’s and actually is cheap.
Was McDonalds ever cheap in the first place?
Maybe not now since we can hack it
My ice cream came with bronzer smeared all over the cone last time I went there.
No extra charge?
“You are allowed to repair the thing you own”
Why would you buy an ice cream machine from McDonalds? They have bland food and cut cola with hygiene problems in their ice machines.
If you run a franchise, you have to get the machine from a specific vendor. That vendor makes a killing charging for their techs to come over to fix those machines. There’s some videos on YouTube that explain how the scam works.
Why would anyone even eat there?
I don’t think I’ve ever ordered ice-cream from McDonald’s. Not exactly the type of product I’d go to a hamburger joint for.
While McDonald’s ice cream isn’t great, hamburger joints are usually a great spot for ice cream and milkshakes
Their ice cream and McFlurry is used to be really good for the value
I say used to because they more or less butchered the McFlurry in the past 7 years they no longer have the iconic spoons they’ve removed the packaging replacing it with a slightly smaller packaging and they’ve increased the cost by about double.
That’s all I used to go there for, but not sure if it’s different ice-cream in Europe.
Thumbnail isn’t even a Mcds unit.
Well they weren’t allowed to before
you cant sell/buy a tool but i wonder if you can hire a contractor to build you one.
Just transfer ownership to the company that has the tools and lease it back.
This was exactly what I thought. You could start a staffing company that supplied skilled temp workers with this skill set.
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
Ifixit? They’ve been selling tools for years, and they’re great.
I am honestly not sure if you’re joking or not
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.
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.
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
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
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.
World on fire and there are people worried about repairing ice cream machines of an evil corporation and consider it a “victory”. Depressing
The right to repair in general is pretty significant.
Theres quite a lot of humans on this planet. collectively we are capable of performing more than a single task y’know.
I’m not a climate scientist, but i am a programmer. i’d be much more useful on this sort of thing than trying to program my way out of climate change
Repairing things helps reduce the endless resource expediture and trash creation. Ice cream machines are just a random example. As you can read in the article they were going for much more, and more significant stuff, but got denied.
