Why are the ice cream machines at McDonald's "always" broken?

We've all been there. It's a hot day and all we want is a cone of soft serve ice cream. But the person behind the cash register solemnly informs us the ice cream machine is out of order. What's going on? We learn about the ice cream machines used at McDonald's franchises and how service agreements, bad technical manuals and copyright law mess everything up.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you so. Over the last couple of years, I've
talked a lot about the concept of right to repair.

(00:27):
In fact, I've talked about it this week simply, but
the right to repair is all about giving individuals the
right to perform their own maintenance and repair on the
products that they buy, rather than being forced to go
through some official channel from the manufacturer itself. So a
lot of hardware companies will lock down their products in

(00:47):
ways that make it difficult or sometimes even impossible for
the average person or independent repair shop to do maintenance
or repair on their products. A company could use stuff
like dietary fasteners, for example, that require specialized tools to
remove them, or the company might not provide any useful

(01:08):
documentation on how their technology works or what to do
if something goes wrong. And if you don't know how
something works, you really don't have a way to fix
it when it's not working. There are lots of ways
that a company might lock down a product. It's not
unusual in the world of vehicles, from automobiles to heavy

(01:29):
farm equipment, for a company to tie everything into a
computer system, and that computer system is more or less
inaccessible unless you have the right equipment and knowledge to
tap into it. So these are all examples of almost
turning products into black boxes. And meanwhile you have people
who say, I want to be able to fix this
if something goes wrong and not have to bring it

(01:51):
all the way back to some official store. Now, a
lot of companies will actually tell you the reason that
they even do this, that they do all this locking
away stuff is for your own good. Take Apple for example. Traditionally,
Apple had argued that locking down its systems really keeps
customers safe because Apple can guarantee a high level of service.

(02:14):
And if just any Yahoo out there could open up
an iPhone and make changes, then who knows what evil
doers would get up to. Maybe you would think that
you're taking your phone to get your battery swapped out,
but what's really happening is Joe Schmo of Joe Schmo's
iPhone and VCR repair is actually installing like geo trackers
on your device or something. Other companies like e bike companies,

(02:38):
I talked about this this week. They have argued that
any repairs that are done outside the company's own ecosystem
could lead to dangerous situations like a fire. And it's
true that some electric vehicles, you know, stuff like hoverboards
and even some e bikes have been involved in some fires,
some of them really catastrophic ones. But these fires typically

(03:00):
result from poor manufacturing processes and damage to batteries. And
in this case, you talk about a battery where you've
got a flaw somewhere that creates a short circuit inside
the battery itself. It is a pathway through which the
electrochemical system that can generate electricity has a shortcut. It

(03:21):
bypasses everything else. This leads to the battery overheating very
quickly and in some cases exploding into flame. But again
that's not necessarily because some e bike owner decided they
were going to replace a battery on their own. More
often than not, it happens because there's a flaw in
the actual manufacturing process and the owner had nothing to

(03:43):
do with it whatsoever. In fact, in yesterday's news episode,
I talked about how a representative for the lobbying organization
called People for Bikes, which by the way, represents the
bike industry. It doesn't represent the bicyclist community anyway. This
representative couldn't give evidence of this being a situation at all. Instead,

(04:06):
this person said the evidence was quote unquote anecdotal. Does
this mean that it would be impossible for someone to
accidentally cause a fire while trying to repair their own
e bike? No, it would be possible, but it isn't
something that's actually been documented. So the reason for the
policy is based upon something that hasn't been proven to

(04:27):
actually happen. You know, it's like one of those protective measures,
and you're saying, but if the thing that it's protecting
against hasn't happened, how is it protecting anyone other than
your own interests? Anyway. A big reason why companies actually
do this is that it makes them a lot more money.
A company like Apple, by controlling the entire ecosystem, can

(04:50):
make money throughout the whole life cycle of your Apple device.
So let's say it's an iPhone. Well, first, Apple gets
money when you buy your eye phone. They get money
if you pay for Apple Care. They also make money
if you don't have Apple Care, and then you have
to bring the phone into an Apple store for repairs,

(05:11):
or they make money by granting a license to repair
shops that pay for the privilege of being able to
work on Apple devices. By controlling the big picture, Apple
can generate revenue the whole time. There's every touch point
is a place where Apple makes money. So recently, Apple
has actually backed off of this a little bit. The

(05:33):
company has started to offer a self service repair kit,
which includes some of the tools needed to access the
innerds of stuff like iPhones, and you can purchase a kit,
or you can rent one for a week. You know,
if you're someone who doesn't need to own one of
these kits, you could just rent it for a week
for like fifty bucks and then use it to do
your own repairs. You can also purchase replacement parts from

(05:56):
Apple and repair manuals Apples providing those as well. It's
not exactly cheap, and if you're just working on your
own device, you might eventually come to the conclusion that
it would actually be less hassle and less expensive to
bring your device into Apple anyway. But if you're an
independent repair shop owner, the program could make a lot
of financial sense anyway. The whole reason that I'm bringing

(06:20):
this up again is to talk about something that has
been a long standing issue, one that has led to
endless jokes and posts and memes and videos of people
really frustrated as they go through drive through I'm talking
about the much maligned ice cream machines at the fast
food chain McDonald's. So the company I fix It, which
I love, by the way, I fix It, is a

(06:41):
phenomenal resource. If you want to learn how stuff works,
check out I fix it because they have these detailed
repair sections on all these different devices and as a result,
you will learn how those devices work. You have to again,
if you want to be able to fix something, you
gotta know how it works in the first place. It
does get very technical, but it is incredibly detailed. Anyway,

(07:05):
I fix It has been documenting how to repair all
types of technology for years, and they recently did a
piece on the ice cream machines at McDonald's and it's
actually well worth checking out their YouTube video on the subject.
It is really fantastic. It's entertaining and informative, and it's
you know, like just like ten minutes long. It's not

(07:26):
long at all, so it's really worth checking out. So
some of the stuff I'm going to talk about will
overlap what they cover in that video, but I'm also
looking at some other things as well. Now, the issue
here is that there's this essentially a perception more but
really based in reality, that the ice cream machines at
McDonald's are quote unquote always broken. So I fix it

(07:48):
found that this perception has at least some merit to it,
because at any given time, according to various tools online,
around a third of McDonald's franchises have an ice cream
machine that's not currently working, which almost makes it sound
like it's a conspiracy. So what's going on here? Well,
to answer that, we have to learn a little bit

(08:10):
about the company that provides those ice cream machines. Once
upon a time, it was called the Tailor Freezer Corporation.
Now it's just known as the Tailor Company. And way
back in nineteen twenty six, a man named Charles Taylor,
whom the company describes as a third generation ice cream maker,
wanted to create a means of making ice cream without

(08:32):
having to hand crank a device, and to guarantee better
consistency between ice cream batches. I guess it would benefit
us to first understand how ice cream actually you know
happens which involves some physics and some chemistry. So essentially,
you need to take your ice cream mixture, which typically

(08:54):
includes ingredients like sugar, milk, and fat, and then any
other flavorings that you want, and you might be using
something like heavy cream to provide the fat, and you
want to freeze this mixture. But the structure of this liquid,
you know, in order to get to crystallize, it actually
requires a lower freezing point than what we get using

(09:16):
just ice, and that presents a challenge. How do you
get a mixture to a cold enough temperature to freeze,
particularly if you want to make ice cream during the
dog days of summer, how do you get that mixture
colder than the temperature of ice. If you've ever used
an old fashioned ice cream churn, you know, the hand

(09:36):
cranked kind, you know that you pack the perimeter of
the churn like there's a gap inside the churn between
the outer wall and the ice cream chamber, right, and
you pack that with a mixture of ice and salt.
Why do you use salt? What does the salt do well?
Salt lowers the freezing point for water if you're talking

(09:59):
about pure water, that of course freezes at zero degrees
celsius or thirty two degrees fahrenheit. When you introduce salt
to water, it will require a lower temperature for that
water to freeze. How much lower depends upon the concentration
of salt. So this is also why people will salt
roads and walkways either before or during a snow or

(10:20):
ice storm. It lowers the freezing point. That means the
ice will actually start to melt at a lower temperature
than it normally would. So if you're on a winter day,
maybe the high temperature is going to be like twenty
eight degrees well fahrenheit. Twenty eight degrees fahrenheit is still
below the freezing point for water, right, and so typically

(10:40):
the frozen roads would remain frozen. But if you put
salt on those roads, it will lower the freezing point
of water, and maybe you get it down so that
the freezing point of water would be twenty degrees fahrenheit.
And since you're high at twenty eight, it means the
ice will actually start to melt. So that's why we
add salt to roads in the way times. On a

(11:01):
molecular level, what's going on is that the salt is
interfering with the water ability to form the crystalline structure
of ice. So that means the freezing point has to
go down in order to get a temperature low enough
to overcome salt inhibiting the water in this way, and again,
the concentration of salt will determine exactly how low you

(11:22):
have to get before the water will freeze. But what
does that mean for our ice cream? Well, let's imagine
the ice cream maker is an enclosed thermal system. The
ice and salt mixture is at a lower temperature than
the ice cream mixture, right Like, let's say we've poured
the ice cream mixture in, it's more or less at
room temperature, and the surrounding ice and salt mixture is

(11:47):
closer to the freezing point for water, so it's closer
to zero degrees celsius. We know that the laws of
thermo dynamic state that if you have stuff that is
of different energy levels, the system will tend toward an equilibrium.
And that we know that energy has to flow from
high concentrations to low concentrations. It can't go the other way.

(12:09):
Energy can't go from low to high. It has to
go from high to low. So our ice mixture begins
to melt, so the heat from our ice cream mixture
starts to transfer to the outer part of the ice
cream chamber. That heat transfers to the ice and salt mixture,
and so the ice is absorbing heat and thus the

(12:32):
temperature of the ice cream mixture is going down. So
it then is going to need to get cold enough
to freeze that ice cream mixture. If we were just
using ice, we wouldn't get there because the temperature we
would be at would be essentially zero degrees celsius or
thirty two degrees fahrenheit. It wouldn't be cold enough to
get to the temperature that would be required to turn

(12:54):
the ice cream mixture into actual ice cream. But the
salt we've added has lowered the freezing point for the
ice ice in the churn. This is important. Let's think
about the different phases of water in terms of energy, right.
So ice is water with its low energy point at
this stage. In this phase, water molecules are in that

(13:15):
crystalline structure. They pretty much stop moving, so they are
very low energy. So we can then think of liquid
water as water that has a medium energy phase. In
this phase, the water molecules can move around, and they do,
and water will also take the shape of whatever container
it's in, So stuff is happening when it's in liquid form.
If we were to go even warmer and increase the

(13:37):
energy more, then we would have the water evaporate into gas,
and then it would be at a very high energy phase.
Those molecules would be zipping around all over the place.
But anyway, our ice, the solid water starts to melt,
but the salt we've added has lowered that freezing point
to below zero celsius or thirty two fahrenheit. Meanwhile, we
have this salty water that's inside the churn, and that

(14:00):
salty water is going to continue to transfer energy to
the ice because remember the liquid water has a higher
energy than the solid water does than the ice does,
So the decreased freezing point means that the liquid water
will actually keep giving energy to the ice even below
the normal point for freezing, because you know, as it's

(14:20):
transferring heat to the ice, the liquid water's temperature continues
to drop, and now the freezing point is lower, so
it remains freezing longer and you end up getting this salty,
icy slurry inside the churn that gets to a much
lower temperature than the freezing point for water, and thus

(14:42):
you can have a low enough temperature where the ice
cream mixture inside the chamber will reach a temperature low
enough to start to crystallize and become ice cream. So yeah,
it's really cool that it works this way just by
using salt and ice. And I gotta tell you, like,
it's been so long since I've had basic physics that

(15:03):
it took me a while to really get my mind
wrapped around this, because it seems like it seems almost
counterintuitive in some ways, but as you think about it,
you start to realize, oh, it makes sense. You're just
thinking about the wrong way, or at least for me.
I'm not suggesting you thought of it that way, but
for me, it was like there was a little block there. Anyway,
these days, a lot of ice cream makers use other
stuff to chill the mixture down low enough for it

(15:25):
to freeze. And in fact, if you're looking at industrial ones,
you're typically looking at a device that uses condensers and
refrigerant to build in a sort of heat exchanger. It's
the same as you would find in a refrigerator or
an air conditioner. And I've talked about this process a
lot too, but we will cover that a little bit
when we come back from this quick break. Okay, before

(15:56):
the break, I mentioned a heat exchanger, the kind of
you would find in a refrigerator or you know, like
an industrial freezer, that kind of stuff, including ice cream machines,
and how do these work well. They also take advantage
of the physics of different phases of a material, in
this case a refrigerant, a liquid, or a liquid that

(16:18):
also in some parts of the system is a gas.
So when a liquid evaporates, that liquid absorbs heat. This
is why when you have water on your skin and
it starts to evaporate off your skin, it feels cool
because the water is absorbing heat from your body as
part of that evaporation process. When water condenses, then it

(16:43):
releases heat. So when a gas condenses into a liquid,
it is releasing heat. When it's a liquid that it's
a vaporing into a gas, it absorbs heat. So if
you create a system in which you have a refrigerant
running through a tube and it evaporates in parts of
that system, it will absorb heat in that part, and
if it condenses in another part of the system, it

(17:04):
will release heat in that part. You can actually transfer
heat from one part into the outside part. And that's
how refrigerators and freezers work. Right. You've got essentially some piping,
a tube, if you will, that runs through a freezer,
and in this process, the refrigerant in that tube is

(17:27):
boiling off into a gas and as such is absorbing
heat through the entire pathway that's inside the freezer. It
then passes through a condenser. The condenser's job is to
pressurize this very now warm gas, and it becomes even
hotter liquid because you've increased the pressure, you've increased the

(17:48):
boiling point of this gas. It now has condensed into
a liquid. The liquid you allow to pass through condenser
coils and as it does so, it releases heat the
external environment and then eventually it reaches an expansion valve.
This valve only works in one direction. It allows the

(18:09):
high pressure liquid to go through this expansion valve and
then drop into an area of much lower pressure, at
which point the liquid boils off and thus begins to
absorb heat. So as it goes through the expansion valve,
it's moving into the freezer again, right, that's where it's
pulling the heat from the freezer into this boiled off

(18:31):
refrigerant and it goes through the system again. So really
you can think of the expansion valve and the condenser
as creating two different sections of this system. In one
section you have low pressure and that's where the refrigerant
can absorb heat, and then the other section you have
high pressure and that's where the refrigerant condenses and releases

(18:54):
heat to the outside environment. So a lot of industrial
modern ice cream machines use this method, and again it's
pretty simple really when you get down to it. I mean,
you do have a motor that you have to deal
with with the condenser, right like, that's an actual motorized
part of the system. But otherwise you're using valves and

(19:15):
pipes to just take advantage of physics in order to
make a section very cold and to transfer that heat
to the outside again, same way the air conditioners work.
So pretty cool anyway, This is just one component obviously,
of ice cream machines, even the one we talked about
earlier with the ice and rock salt. Cooling it down

(19:39):
is just one part of it. Another part of it
is churning the ice cream. When you churn ice cream,
you're introducing air into the mixture, into the fat, the milk,
and the sugar and whatever else may be in it.
This makes the ice cream fluffier. You wouldn't want just
a solid block of sweetened cream. It would be very

(20:00):
difficult to eat. You want it to have that consistency
where it's kind of cloudlike and fluffy. Churning more and
more air into this mixture will make it softer and softer.
So if you are able to do this enough, you
can make it soft enough so that you can treat
the ice cream as if it's a semi liquid. You know,

(20:20):
you can use you know, pumps and stuff, or even
just gravity to allow it to flow through pipes or
a valve or a spigot as it were. Now this
brings us back to mister Charles Taylor back in nineteen
twenty six, so he files his patent in December nineteen
twenty six. The patent is still available for you to read.

(20:42):
In fact, I did read it. I looked at the
images and everything. It's pretty cool. No pun intended it
used a compressor and use condenser coils and that kind
of thing. It did rely on a salted liquid as
the refrigerant and It used an electric motor to provide
the churning motion in the freezing chambers, so it didn't
require a human being to use their actual physical labor

(21:06):
to churn the ice cream. And his ice cream chamber
also featured a spout where you could draw the soft
ice cream out by opening up a valve. There's some
disagreement in the world of ice cream, which I did
not realize was a thing, but it is. But there's
some disagreement as to whether Chuck Taylor, Charlie Taylor, Charles

(21:29):
I guess I should say, invented soft serve ice cream actually,
or if someone else did, Whether he invented soft serve
ice cream or he just made a machine that was
really good at making it. The end of the line
is that his device worked, and that's when he moved
out of becoming an ice cream businessman to a ice

(21:53):
cream maker businessman. He made the equipment that other ice
cream shops would end up using, and thus was born
the Taylor Freezer Company. Okay, we're gonna now flash forward
by three decades. Now. We're up to nineteen fifty six.
That was the year when the head of the McDonald's Corporation,

(22:14):
a guy named Ray Croc, whom you can learn about
in Other Stuff podcasts. I think Stuff you Should Know
has done an episode on him. I'm sure like there's
been stuff I Know. Ben Bullen must have talked about
Ray Croc at least once or twice in some of
his shows. Anyway, Raycroc made a deal with the Taylor
Freezer Company to buy Taylor machines so that his restaurants

(22:38):
could make milkshakes and that kind of thing, and this
became a long standing partnership between McDonald's and Taylor. That
partnership continues to this very day. Now. A few years back,
McDonald's did sign a contract with another ice cream machine
company called Carpigiani. So technically franchises have two options when

(23:01):
it comes to buying an ice cream machine for their store,
but they have to buy it from one of those
two vendors because of this contract. Like you, as a
franchise owner, you do own the store, but you still
have obligations to the corporate entity of McDonald's and one
of those is you've got to work with McDonald's suppliers,
and that includes the suppliers for their equipment. You can't

(23:23):
go outside the restaurant's family to do that kind of stuff.
But this still raises a question. Here are these tailor
you know, freezer machines, these ice cream machines that can
make all sorts of stuff when they're working, But why
are they so frequently out of order? Right? Like, this
is a company that traces its history back to nineteen

(23:44):
twenty six, What is the problem that causes essentially a
third of all of the McDonald's franchises in the United
States to list that their ice cream machine is currently
you know, off the menu as it were. Why are
they not working? Well? This comes down to a few
key factors. One is that proper operation of the tailor

(24:08):
ice cream machine that you find in McDonald's includes a
cleaning process that is complicated. To put it lightly, part
of that process is a four hour cleaning mode. During
that mode, the machine actually heats up with the purpose
to sanitize everything, which makes sense, right You're handling a

(24:30):
lot of food items. You don't want anything to potentially
cause food poisoning or for any contaminated food to cause
an issue, So obviously cleaning is important and sanitizing makes sense.
But when you are sanitizing it, you can't be using
it to make ice cream, right. It's heating up and

(24:52):
the process, like I said, takes four hours to do it.
Whether or not the four hours aren't necessary for this process,
I can't say, but that's how long it takes, and
that means there's four hours of not making ice cream
per day. Now. Of course, you could just run this
mode as the McDonald's is closing for the night, and
then technically it should just be ready to go by

(25:14):
opening of the next day, right, But it is just
one part of a multi step process. I think there
were eleven steps total for cleaning these ice cream machines.
And if someone goofs up while going through this cleaning process,
you might end up getting an error code. Now, as

(25:36):
I fix It discovered, the support documentation for the Tailor
ice cream machines is let's just say it's somewhat lacking.
It lacks comprehensibility. It may be difficult for you to
even find an error code in the manual, and once
you do, the explanation in the manual may not be

(25:58):
sufficient for you to be able to figure out what
exactly is wrong and how to fix it. So if
you do mess something up, you could get an error code,
but have no idea of what to do in order
to clear the problem. At that point, the solution is
to call a service person from Taylor and they send

(26:20):
out a licensed, authorized service person to your your store
and they do some maintenance and repair on the machine.
That service has a very high price tag. According to
I fix It. For fifteen minutes of service time, it
costs three hundred and fifteen dollars, not an hour of

(26:43):
service time. That's just fifteen minutes. If you took an
entire hour to have this machine repaired, if it took
the service person an hour to fix whatever the problem was,
that would set you back oney two hundred and sixty bucks.
That's some expensive ice cream, my friend. And again, according
to ifix it, one quarter of tailor's revenue comes from

(27:04):
the service calls, So wrap your head around that. A
company that makes ice cream machines and other stuff too.
Admittedly they make grills another equipment. Anyway, twenty five percent
of their revenue comes not from their sales, but by
sending out folks to fix those machines, which probably not

(27:26):
a great selling point. Really, Like, if you are a
customer and you find out that the vendor you're considering
makes one quarter of their revenue by fixing the devices
they sell. That raises the question of, well, how reliable
is your product? Because if you're making one quarter of
your revenue just from fixing the stuff you make, how

(27:47):
often does it break? Because that sounds like it breaks
a lot, because these are not cheap machines either. So
I fix it suggests that perhaps, again this is just
an observation, it's not a conclusion, but perhaps the uninformative
technical manuals and the complicated cleaning process could be intentional

(28:10):
in part as a way to generate service calls. It's
kind of like planned obsolescence, you know. That's that concept
that companies build into their devices a limited shelf life
or a limited life cycle, so that they will break
at a point where someone will have to replace it.
It's kind of related to that that if Taylor's documentation

(28:34):
were actually more helpful, maybe someone at the McDonald's could
just hop in and do whatever was needed to clear
out the error code, and then the ice cream would
be back on the menu and there'd be very little
downtime for the machine. But it appears that Taylor decided
to make it very challenging for anyone other than someone

(28:54):
from within their ecosystem to do this kind of stuff.
That really became are in a few years ago when
some hackers built a device using a Raspberry pie board.
I've talked about the Raspberry Pie before. It's essentially a
computer on a chip. Super cool. Anyway, this company created
a device, and actually the company itself had the same

(29:16):
name as the device, Kitch Kytch. This Kitch device could
plug into a USB port that's inside the tailor ice
cream machine. If you watch that I Fix It video,
they'll actually show you where that USB port would be found.
And whenever you would have an inevitable error message pop

(29:38):
up on this machine, you could plug the Kitch device
into the ice cream maker. It would read the error
code and it would actually tell you what the problem was,
and you know, potentially even how to fix it. So
rather than have to thumb through this technical manual and
maybe you never even find the error code in there

(29:59):
because it's not arranged in a way that makes a
whole lot of sense, you get a readout right away
on a connected device and you're able to take action. Now,
a McDonald's franchise owner could purchase one of these Kitch
devices and have the ability to address at least the
less serious issues with their ice cream machines, you know,

(30:20):
ones that wouldn't require someone to come out and maybe
swap out apart or anything like that, and the ice
cream machine would have less downtime. That would be great news.
But I bet you can already guess what happened next.
If you can't, don't worry. After this quick break, I'll
be back and I'll explain what happened next. So Kitch

(30:51):
comes out with this USB device built on a Raspberry
Pie that will explain what the error codes and these
tailor ice cream machines actually mean and potentially help you
fix the problem. But McDonald's corporate was not happy about
this because at the corporate level, McDonald's had signed an
exclusive service contract with Taylor and this would mean that

(31:14):
if they allowed their franchise operators to use a Kitch
device and potentially sidestep the service contract, they would be
in violation of that contract with Taylor. So the corporate
leaders decided to send out a message to all franchises saying, hey,
we know this thing exists, this diagnostic tool, but don't

(31:35):
go us in it and Essentially, they put the pressure
on the different restaurant franchisees who for the most part
stopped using the Kitch device because it wasn't worth the
frustration and the pressure from corporate and the threats that
you know, maybe the franchise would end up getting into

(31:56):
real trouble if they didn't just play ball with the
service contract stuff. Now, the folks that I Fix it
say that the two really big issues with these machines
are that one, they will stop working if they overheat, right,
which not that unusual for technology. Technology when it gets
too hot, often will just stop working, and these ice
cream machines are no different. So if they're in high demand,

(32:19):
they can overheat, and then what you end up is
ice cream that never actually solidifies. It just becomes goofy,
and it can take a while for the machines to
cool down enough to work again, so they essentially become offline.
The other big issue is the one we've talked about
just just recently. This idea about these error codes, paired
with a really substandard technical manual, make it difficult, if

(32:42):
not impossible, to figure out just what has gone wrong
at any given time, so you can't really do anything
about it except make a service call request. The I
fix It video is great. They even open up a machine,
They show all the different components. They explain, you know,
where some of the issues can happen, explain what some
of the switches do. They also talk about a really

(33:06):
infuriating legal problem here in the United States that blocks
I fix It or anyone else from creating a tool
like the kitch. Why that's technically against the law because
of the DMCA or Digital Millennial Copyright Act. And maybe
you're thinking, how the heck does copyright law get into this. Well,

(33:29):
the DMCA allows for essentially the owner of intellectual property
to create digital locks to protect that property, and it's
illegal to try and get around those locks. This, in
my opinion, is a big, old stupid decision that the

(33:49):
government made that has terrible consequences, and it's been in
place since the nineties. So let me put it another way.
Let's imagine a scenario where you've bought yourself a shiny
music CD and I get it. You know CDs are
not really the popular format, but let's just imagine for

(34:11):
the sake of argument, you've gone out you bought yourself
a CD of an album that you've always wanted. Maybe
it's one that's not available digitally, and you love the
music on this CD and you plan to listen to
it a lot. You're going to even take it around
with you and stuff. So you're a little concerned that
you could be putting through the CD through a lot
of wear and tear, and as such, you want to

(34:34):
make a backup copy of the contents of that CD
so that you still have that in case something happens
to the CD itself. Now, copyright law in the United
States allows you to do this. It is covered under
fair use. You can make a copy of material for
the purposes of backup or archival. That's fine as long

(34:55):
as you're not distributing it, and you know you're pretty
much in the clear. Just you can make a copy
for your own purposes. But let's say that the company
that pressed this music CD included some digital rights management,
some DRM stuff on the CD itself, and that is
meant to prevent unauthorized copying. But the problem is it

(35:18):
actually prevents all copying, even if it otherwise would be legal,
because you can't you can't really create a digital system
that's like, oh, in this instance, we'll let you make
a backup copy, but in every other case we're going
to prevent it from happening. Instead, it's an all or nothing,
We're going to prevent any kind of copying whatsoever that happens. Right.

(35:39):
That's part of what a lot of DRM issues run into. Well.
Hackers have spent a lot of time making tools that
can circumvent different types of DRM, including the kind that
was sometimes put on compact discs. So the DMCA has
within it rules that say it's against the law to
use or make those kinds of tools or to try

(36:02):
and get around digital protection in the first place. So
you have the legal right to back up the material
that's on that CD, but you do not have the
legal right to get around the digital locks that prevent
you from making the copy. This is kind of like
saying everything inside that bank vault belongs to you. However,
it is illegal for you to open the bank vault,

(36:24):
to breach it in any way to penetrate the walls.
You can't get to the stuff that's inside the vault.
It belongs to you, but you can't get to it.
So again, in my opinion, this is dumb. It is
a dumb consequence here that has really hurt consumers, especially
just like regular valid consumers who have bought stuff and

(36:47):
could not make a backup because there were these preventions
in place for a problem that really isn't as big
as the companies would have you believe. Anyway, The folks
that I Fix It plan to appeal to Congress to
try and create exemptions to DMCA for the purposes of
maintenance and repair, including for industrial equipment like the tailor

(37:10):
ice cream machine. So not just that machine. This is
an issue that is prevalent throughout the tech sector and
the industrial sector. It's not just for these ice cream machines.
But until Congress makes such an exemption and writes it
into law, trying to create ways to help folks avoid

(37:31):
what some might view as extortionate service practices is technically
against the law. You can't make the tools that bypass
those locks, even if it's legal for you to make
the repairs yourself. The locks you can't get around. I mean,
you could technically get around them, but legally you're not
supposed to. It is another one of those weird not

(37:53):
quite a catch twenty two. It's not quite that level,
but it's real close, and it is infuriating. It's one
of those that lets you makes you look at politics
and bureaucracy and you just say, I'm just gonna go
live in the woods and I'll take a handcraked ice
cream machine with me because I don't have to worry
about that one so much. Anyway, I thought that this

(38:17):
was going to be a pretty fun way to kind
of explore the right to repair, the issues with things
like copyright law that make the right to repair that
much more complicated, and why it always seems to be
the case that when you go to Mickey D's and
you want yourself an ice cream, you can't get one
because the ding dang darn machine is down. Now we understand,

(38:41):
or at least we have a better grip on it. Also,
make sure you go and check out that I Fix
It video. Like I said, it's really good. They talk
a lot more about the systems inside the machines. They
give a passionate plea for the right to repair and
the need for change in copyright law in the United States.
It's well worth your time to watch. I don't have

(39:03):
any connection to the I Fix It people, by the way,
I don't know any of them personally. I've never worked
for the company. I just like their stuff. That's it
for this episode. I hope you're all well and staying cool.
Get yourself an ice cream, and I'll talk to you
again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For

(39:26):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.