Freedom to fix

Expect even more ice cream under the golden arches. On Oct. 25, the U.S. Copyright Office granted an exemption giving businesses like McDonald’s a “right to repair” retail food equipment. McDonald’s soft-serve ice cream machines have frustrated customers in recent years because of frequent breakdowns and long outages. Ice-cream-loving patrons even created the website McBroken.com—which attempts to create a real-time map of McDonald’s ice cream machine outages across the country. Previously, only the manufacturer could perform equipment repairs, but franchises would typically have to wait 90 days for a service appointment. Franchises can now seek alternatives to get their broken machines swirling again.