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

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Makes complete sense to me.

Copyright should not mean no right to repair your own equipment.

NOW-—THEY need to apply it to JOHN DEERE TRACTORS & OTHER EAUIPMENT

That’s the problem with too many things these days. There is code involved. For most things, no code needs to be involved.

Copyright should not mean no right to repair your own equipment.

The manufacturers try to make it complicated by claiming that you own the equipment, but not the code on the equipment. It is garbage.

John Deere used to be the worst offender in keeping folks from servicing their own equipment. A huge combine breaks down? No problem. Just bring it back to the dealer (who may be hundreds of miles away) and drop it off for a quick change-out of the broken part and updating the software to recognize the new part. Instead of getting the part shipped to you to bolt into place.

Free market folks will flame me for this, but I do support ‘Right to Repair’ legislation. I’m a main street conservative, not a Wall Street conservative.

There’s a long-running joke among hackers (and you’ll see it a lot if you read Hackaday). “You could have done that with a 555.”

But if we can fix our own cars, we might disable the Deep State’s upcoming controls on our travel (speed, total distance, max distance from home, number of trips, amount of gasoline burned, etc). We certainly cannot have that.

“How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.”

The device didn’t fix the machines.

Ah, the old triple nickle timer trick!

That’s right. It just means you can’t build and sell machines with their code.

Now apply this to farm equipment, and other vehicles. From what I hear even Commercial trucks in California will literally shut down automatically if they aren’t maintained by specialized licensed repairmen on a regular schedule. Even a small fix like changing spark plugs requires scheduling, and a lot more money than it should cost. Almost anyone could do that, but you need the expert and someone to reset the computer.

This was also impacting farmers. They could not change a simple thing like a fuel pump with out violating a copyright law owned by the manufacturer.

Free market folks will flame me for this, but I do support ‘Right to Repair’ legislation.

Intellectual property laws are inherently arbitrary. Some libertarians would not recognize them as free market.