Feds Side With Right-to-Repair Advocates, Demands Fixible Ice Cream Machines

A pair of federal governing bodies is advocating for broader exemptions for industrial and commercial repairs that involve tinkering with copyrighted software—a reform that would make it legal for McDonald’s franchise owners to independently fix their chronically broken ice cream machines. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-trust division are seeking to expand an exemption to a copyright law, so that business owners would be allowed to fix “commercial and industrial equipment” themselves or go to a third-party repair shop, rather than having to rely on officially authorized repairmen. In a comment filed Thursday, the FTC and DOJ asked the U.S. Copyright Office to issue new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that prohibits bypassing software locks on devices. Under Section 1201, it could result in copyright violation for people to use third-party tools to diagnose or repair their own broken devices that rely on software to function....