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iFixit Tears Down McDonald's McFlurry Machine, Petitions Government for Right to Hack Them (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From the article: "A DMCA exemption would allow McDonald’s franchises to legally do repair work on their own machines."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Wait, copyright can be used to prevent repairs? What is the justification? Is it a "ice cream machine company owns the copyright to mcdonalds ice cream and if you tamper with the machine you can't call it McDonald's ice cream anymore" kind of deal or is tampering straight up illegal?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The DMCA criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This only applies to digital access controls right? Otherwise those 'warranty void if removed' stickers would be legal

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think there needs to be a digital component but it can still apply to physical goods. Either way, “warranty void if removed” stickers aren’t a control. It only applies to “effective” controls:

For the DMCA, circumvention means that there is a user attempting to “descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner” – assuming that there is a technological measure in place that “effectively controls access to a work.”

If you need to reverse engineer the product to bypass the access control, then that generally qualifies as an effective control. But if you can just press F12 or Escape or remove a sticker, that wouldn’t qualify as effective.

(For what it’s worth I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

[–] Hawke 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But isn’t it ineffective once it’s been bypassed, therefore making it legal again?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately that’s not what they mean by “effective.” They define it like this:

a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

The key verbiage there is “in the ordinary course of its operation.”

[–] Hawke 1 points 1 year ago

Someone should tell these people that words have meanings.