I understand individual actors following incentives wherever they lead. I wouldn't say condone, but understand. What I don't understand is how it came to pass that McDonalds, whom I would assume are canny and cutthroat in their own right, would find themselves maneuvered into a position like this.
Is there no equivalent phenomenon when it comes to their grills, deep fryers, drive-thru comms systems, self-order kiosks, etc?
Here [1] is a video on this topic by Johnny Harris from a couple years ago. It's been a while since I watched it but IIRC there is a conflicting relationship between specifically McDonalds the corporation and Taylor which benefits both of them but screws over the individual franchise owners. Here is an interactive map [2] that shows where all the broken machines are.
All franchise brands do this once they have sufficient power relative to the franchisees.
Hotel brands force hotel owners to use only certain vendors, taking a kickback from the vendor. Same with restaurants/etc.
I can give a specific example. Roughly 8 years ago, IHG hotels required all of their branded hotels to only sell Coca Cola products. The only reason this would happen is if Coke paid IHG.
It has nothing to do with a person’s hotel stay. It just restricts hotel owners and hotel guests from being able to sell and buy their preferred products, such as Red Bull or Starbucks or Pepsi/Tropicana, for the benefit of Coke and IHG.
If I'm following OP's question, it was basically that all of this makes sense from a "people are doing what benefits them the most" POV.
But some time went by and it morphed into being overall bad for the McDonald's brand, and that's the puzzling part of it. You would think Micky D's would have power to step in and say "enough is a enough, this is hurting our image, quit fucking around and fix the machines or we find another vendor."
I would agree Micky D's corporate probably does have sway here, so this problem probably just isn't interesting or important enough for them to do anything about it. Maybe ice cream is such a small part of their sales they don't see the point in raising a stink about it. Or maybe the vendor just happened to Game of Thrones their way into a little niche of power that Ronald can't do anything about.
And for the size that they are, I find that pretty interesting and puzzling as well!
> If I'm following OP's question, it was basically that all of this makes sense from a "people are doing what benefits them the most" POV.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes sense, but it's no surprise that things break down when a bunch of people who should be working together each act selfishly. As you'd expect nobody really wins, but it's the little guy that gets screwed the worst. Customers don't get ice cream, employees deal with frustrated customers, franchise owners lose time and money, the shitty vendor gets worked around, and the corporation's image takes a hit for being the ringleader of this circus.
Possibly apocryphal, but I'd heard the reason most Marriott (and their associated brands) have Pepsi vs. Coke is 'cause Marriott Sr. asked Coca-Cola for a loan some years ago and they refused him.
Do they? Pepsi has been making a big push into "rich people places" (air ports, ski resorts, conference venues, that sort of thing) and the usual result is not that I ask for a Diet Coke and one appears, it's that I ask and one fails to appear, and continues to fail to appear at every place I visit on the entire trip/vacation and I simply must go without. Which is fine, it's just a flavor, but this is noticeable and repeatable and annoying and almost exactly the opposite of the situation where a bar has a strategic reserve of the good stuff.
The ones I've seen do - and pretty expensive hotels, too.
If you're running a conference and ask them to get some coke from the bar, they usually have been able to get it (it's also possible they have a secret "guest happiness" stash) - and I've seen them pour it at the bar - Pepsi is from the spigot machine, Coke from a can.
Rules are different if you are at a bar and paying bar prices for bar products, I get that, but it's not what I'm looking for. I could also go out of my way to buy from an unaffiliated store and schlep the stuff, but I'm just not that much of an addict. My point is that I don't think it's reasonable to be dismissive of Pepsi's "accomplishment" here -- they have arranged a substantial enough barrier to corral the behavior of someone with a significant (though not mountain-scaling) preference to the contrary. Significant enough that my fallback is usually water. Like out the toilet.
Is that an actual preference or just spite-driven? Nope, sprite is a Coke product, we don't serve that here! But seriously, it's a real preference, it holds for the generics too. Most generic colas seem to be based on the Pepsi taste. Ugh. RC isn't, so RC Cola is fine, but too rare to ever be helpful. Caring about this is a curse!
I think they’d just make it with Pepsi and call it a “rum and coke” anyway. “Coke” is the generic word for all soda/pop, including Pepsi, in much of the US and world, and I think “rum and coke” also qualifies as a name in its own right.
>“Coke” is the generic word for all soda/pop, including Pepsi, in much of the US and world
I don't think this is even true for most of the USA, much less the world. I've never heard anyone refer to anything except a cola as "coke" although I heard that was the vernacular in some subset of the US... some southern US states?
It isn't that niche. Probably in second behind "soda" pop being in third place. Some areas have other names like "cold drink" that while seeming generic actually only refer to carbonated sweet beverages.
I'm really surprised kickbacks haven't become illegal. It seems that a lot of really bad behavior can be traced to that especially in the medical field.
It also pretty much just hurts the consumer as well since competition (or lack thereof) is based on who gives the seller the most money.
Beyond vendor kickbacks, hotel brands do have legitimate reasons to ensure a consistent guest experience regardless of which franchisee owns a particular property. Frequent travelers can be surprisingly picky about little things like soft drinks and they don't like surprises.
Then they would have required offering specific products. It would not require prohibiting other products.
Edit: to respond to tomnipotent:
I don’t see why a distributor is relevant. There are myriad to choose from. Hotel owners/operators can buy from the local Coke/Pepsi/whatever distributor, or Sam’s/Costco/grocery store, or Restaurant Depot/US Foods, etc.
Edit 2: note that IHG is not buying the beverages to sell in the franchised hotel, the IHG franchisees are. IHG does not suffer any costs from making an exclusive deal with Coke, or not making an exclusive deal with Coke.
> It would not require prohibiting other products.
You're forgetting about distribution and margin. Your distributor is unlikely to offer both choices, and keeping the original product means selling less of the new so you're getting less favorable volume deals with both. For the hotel, it makes sense to concentrate that sales volume into a single contract for better discounts.
It's definitely possible, and I've seen it done, but obviously for most businesses that have to answer the "coke or Pepsi" question pick one. Nothing is really preventing having both in the same soda machine, but it's rare enough that there must be a reason, likely exclusivity deals and discounts.
Gas stations will usually have both, for example. Fast food places won't.
There is two "McDonald's" the corporation, that requires a specific machine and by extension a specific company to repair it exclusively, and then there is a ton of "McDonald's" franchises who are the victims (paying the literal price).
So McDonald's corporate didn't get out-maneuvered, they just found a new way to extract money from their franchises, who tried to fight back (and kind of lost the first battle).
Sounds like the FTC/DOJ are stepping in to give the franchises more ammo to fight back with.
> and then there is a ton of "McDonald's" franchises who are the victims (paying the literal price).
Everybody loses in this situation. the biggest victims here are the consumers who can't get the products that they want, and have had to resort to developing/using apps to track down working machines, followed by the employees who have to deal with the constantly angry/frustrated customers, followed by the franchise owners who are losing money and disappointing their customers. The franchise owners are acting in self-defense by working around the vendor which means the vendor is losing money on service calls, and the corporation loses because (quite rightly) their image suffers for causing this mess in the first place and allowing it to continue.
> grills, deep fryers, drive-thru comms systems, self-order kiosks, etc?
The key difference between all those things is there's almost no moving parts involved.
Grills are simply resistive heaters and a thermostat that will outlast everyone.
Deep fryers are exactly the same, but with a tub to put in oil.
Drive through comms systems are simply speakers/telephone systems with the only moving part being the speaker itself. (The rest is software).
And The kiosks are basically just giant touch screens with a small computer running everything.
Ice cream is different. It's a thick highly spoil-able product being pushed through tubes which need to be clean. It involves a refrigerant and often a mixing device to keep the ice cream from freezing solid. Mcdonalds isn't the only one with icecream machines that constantly break down. If you notice, everyone has this problem. It's simply a hard product to serve in a sanitary way using machinery.
>Deep fryers are exactly the same, but with a tub to put in oil.
Not really true. The fryers used by McDonalds and the vast majority of QSRs are digitally controlled have a fairly sophisticated recirculating filter system to keep the shortening in good condition. The state of this system is much less critical from a food safety standpoint, but it can be extremely hazardous to employees for obvious reasons. The pressure fryers used by fried chicken restaurants are potentially even more hazardous. To my knowledge, none of these systems have weird DMCA-protected firmware to prevent unauthorised maintenance.
I do think there's a little bit more difficulty in the ice cream machine that doesn't exist with oil.
I went and watched some videos on fry machine maintenance (lol) and one thing that doesn't translate to the ice cream machine is how easy it is to empty the oil, throw in polish, refill, empty, refill. You can't really have an automated process which drains out the ice-cream and then sterilizes it.
> To my knowledge, none of these systems have weird DMCA-protected firmware to prevent unauthorised maintenance.
Absolutely agree. The point of my post was more why a fry machine might have easier (and hence cheaper) maintenance than an ice cream machine.
The grills used by McDonalds are a bit more complex than a flat hot surface. They cook both sides of the burger simultaneously using "clamshells" lined with a heat reflective material, which automatically raise using hydraulics on a timer. Perhaps not as complex as an ice cream machine, but definitely not your griddle at home.
Edit: likewise, the fry machine has a self-propelled hopper which splits the raw fries up into batches.
Oh sorry, I wasn't trying to say it wasn't a scam. Just explaining why ice cream machines would be harder to maintain/install than something like a grill and why there might be limited options on who to go with.
If they go down the right path right at the beginning, a bit of payoff in the right places in McDonalds (which, remember, can be just taking the right people out to a really nice dinner every so often), and it could be that one equipment supplier managed to go down a path that no other current supplier could ever hope to replicate because it really depends on some early decisions, and those suppliers no longer have any opportunity to make "early" decisions.
I think of McDonald's as being pretty savvy, having dominated for decades in a competitive domain with large volume and low margins. In violation of Hanlon's Razor, I'd bet the reason is more malice rather than stupidity. Or rather, the specific form of malice more precisely called short-sighted greed.
McDonald's probably has paperwork that shows "ice cream machine broke" doesn't really cost them anything in sales or return visits, so why work on fixing it?
If it was a critical product, they'd have multiple machines per store, just like the friers (often way more than is needed).
That's curious - we use the Taylor machines with almost '0 downtime' besides maintenance (scheduled and rarely interferes with customers). The tech who installed our machines says it's all a skill issue with anyone who can't keep these machines up. According to him, the issues are rare / negligent maintenance and very old product left entirely too long in the machine. He will have one from our machines, but never from some other establishments.
The C602 is supposedly exclusive to McDonald's, which if you watch the video posted elsewhere in this thread, explains why their machines are less reliable than those of other chains.
I suspect Taylor’s social media listening company. This looks pretty similar to the boilerplate response they put on Reddit, where they get torn to shreds by McD managers who are Reddit users and disagree. Doubt we’ll see that response here.
Okay, good to be speculative in situations such as this, but after skimming that user's page for even 3 seconds, one can see this was a lazy, really off-base accusation - unless this user sold their HN account.
Is that the accusation? If so, better to email the site admins, rather than alert the fraudster, or distact from discussion.
Better Idea: A Lemon Law for commercial equipment. Doesn't matter if Taylor uses copyright, DMCA, patents, contract law, replace-every-10-hours proprietary filters, brittle plastic gears, or what - companies that inflict unreliable & high-maintenance crap on the economy need to suffer sustained fiscal agony.
> Better Idea: A Lemon Law for commercial equipment.
Even better idea:
Amend the DMCA to permanently add an exemption for bypassing DRM for repair purposes.
Of course it likely won't happen because those most impacted by the adjustment of the statute would buy a sufficient number of congress critters to block passage of the amendment.
That is actually what the FTC and DOJ is proposing here, when reading their actual ask rather than blogspam poorly rehashing it.
> This proceeding concerns possible temporary exemptions to the DMCA’s prohibition against circumvention of technological protection measures (“TPMs”) that control access to copyrighted works, including functional software that facilitates the repair and monitoring of consumer and industrial product
McDonalds soft serve are mentioned only as an example of what would benefit
> As described by Public Knowledge and iFixit, four “index” examples of commercial and industrial device categories would benefit from the proposed expansion: commercial soft serve machines, proprietary diagnostic kits, programmable logic controllers, and enterprise IT
> The proposed expansion would benefit competition in areas beyond those outlined by Public Knowledge and iFixit. For example, increasingly sophisticated agricultural equipment often employs onboard computers that control error identification and repair, limiting options for farmers in need of quick repairs.
Nice to see PLCs called out here— they're ground zero for traditional factory automation, and are typically the easy route to anything that needs to be low volume and programmable while also being capital-s Safe.
But anything smarter than a tape-following AGV also has a computer on it running a bunch of high level perception and control software, so there's a natural friction point there, particularly if the PLC can only be flashed from proprietary Windows-based software.
It will probably cost you a lot of money to figure out how to bypass the DRM though, assuming that’s even possible at all. That’s money you should never have to pay in the first place.
> It will probably cost you a lot of money to figure out how to bypass the DRM though
This is the reason I think we've been "allowed" to get some right to repair laws passed. The legislators are a decade behind and, now that tech is good enough to make bypassing impossible, the lobbyists are letting the government pass legislation that gives you the right to do something that's technically impossible. The legislators are like a younger sibling playing with an unplugged Nintendo controller.
And, even if someone can figure out a bypass, the barrier to getting there is so high that they'll most likely charge a huge premium too.
To what extent though? If you remove the blu-ray drive from a ps3, it will not play any games, even digital ones. The only way to fix it is to install a noBD custom firmware or use custom firmware and recovery tools to "remarry" another drive to the console.
I don't think either of those things should be illegal, but they currently are. Having an exception may result in designs changing to make such repairs easier, however.
FWIW, in most cases this is done intentionally not as a cost-saving measure but to improve repairability. It's cheaper and easier to have a 5¢ nylon gear fail when subjected to out-of-spec loads than to have catastrophic failure of multiple structural parts that happen to be the weakest link in the kinetic chain from the motor.
This does also cause them to fail through regular use, but having to do minor maintenance is a fundamental aspect of operating machines that are designed to be repaired and not simply thrown away.
Also depends what the larger policy is around that one designed-to-fail part. Is it a toolless swap, with the store manager having a baggy of them in a cabinet somewhere?
Or is even the sacrificial component only able to be swapped out by a special technician who must be specially summoned with some amount of cost and lead-time?
That'll depend a lot on the plastics and forces involved. Sometimes metal against plastic like that will increase the wear of the plastic parts because of the differences in hardness of the materials.
Clutches are much larger, more expensive, and liable to fail themselves if not regularly actuated. Most commercial equipment is quite well-designed by thoughtful people; a non-expert is unlikely to come up with a better design at a moment's thought.
Why doesn't it make sense? Taylor makes crap, Taylor sells crap to "Smallville Burgers, LLC", Taylor pays agonizing penalties & fines. Doesn't matter if the victim bought the Taylor equipment because McD's contract required it, or because their daughter is a Swiftie.
Taylor doesn't think there's anything wrong with their machine, the maintenance is just onerous. The result of applying any Lemon Law here would be that Taylor buys the machine back. Leaving the franchisee without an ice cream machine, and potentially out of a franchise. Given that an ice cream machine costs thousands, and MCD franchises cost millions, it is a no brainer to just deal with the machine.
Assume a loophole-free Commercial Equipment Lemon Law would disallow any "Oops, sorry, your contract with McD. requires you to suffer while we profit!" crap. Or perhaps McD. would also be liable for agonizing fines?
Then you're not talking about a lemon law, you're talking about something else. I think what you actually want are laws that regulate franchise agreements. That's the actual problem here.
If Taylor buy $X machines back for $X plus agonizing financial penalties, then figures they'll recover the losses selling $2X machines...$4X machines - then the SEC will be expecting "Taylor may not be a viable or sustainable business" disclosures in Taylor's next quarterly filing. If there is one - major creditors and investors could move first.
Forcing a buyback of defective equipment does not preclude the purchase of a new, non-defective unit. Without the lemon law, the buyer would toss the old unit out without compensation and buy a new one. This way, the buyer will get money back from the defective unit and be able to get a new unit with it.
Sounds like Taylor will be set up to loose a lot of money if they don't fix the lemon. Even if it's just swapping out a lemon for a new lemon, Taylor will have an incentive to fix this.
There's a lot of miscommunication on this topic. These "broken" machines aren't actually "broken".
They require extensive cleaning cycles and some operations require manufacturer servicing. It's just they way they work, it's documented, and there are service contracts in place to do the servicing.
When the kid at the drive through says the ice cream machine is "broken", what is actually meant is that it is currently not producing ice cream, and they don't want to argue with the person who wants ice cream. But the reason isn't that it is malfunctioning.
Taylor isn't losing money "fixing" these machines, the maintenance they do on them is on contract, and is quite lucrative.
Right, we know they're broken all of the time. However, the franchisees must have the machines to comply with their franchise agreement which grants them the ability to sell any McDonalds food.
The machine it sells to McDonald franchisee are crap. They make other ice cream machines for other franchises and they don't seem to have the same repair issues.
It does because McDonald's isn't the one that suffers. It's the franchise owners having revenue extracted by them from the ice cream company and McDonald's corporate.
Taylor makes perfectly good machines for other restaurants iirc.
The McDonald's machines ARE unique and supposedly superior. They can sterilize the feed liquid without removing it from the machine.
Nominally, this is far more idiot proof than other machines which are dependent upon underpaid fast food staff cleaning the machine correctly every single night.
The problem is that Taylor didn't allocate enough development funding because the sales volumes are low and consequently they produced an unreliable machine. Even worse, Taylor gets to double dip by being the only people allowed to repair the unreliable machine.
McDonald's only cares in that the machine doesn't give customers food poisoning--for them, mission accomplished. Taylor only sees positive cashflow from repair and consequently has zero incentive to improve the machine--mission accomplished.
The fact that the franchisees get shafted isn't on the radar.
From what I recall (and I may be wrong) the McDs versions are "idiot proofed" in ways that the other restaurant machines aren't.
The complaint is you can't de-idiot proof it, even if you know what you're doing (and some McDs franchises are owned by people who run other restaurants with the other machines).
It's quite possible that McDs requires these idiot-proof ones because the risk of "someone got sick from the ice cream gonorreah machine" is too high.
A Lemon Law wouldn't let franchisees use different machines. A Lemon Law would (might) require Taylor to buy them back, which wouldn't be desirable for a franchisee.
> ”McDonalds franchises are required to buy those specific Taylor machines.”
This is the weird part. Why doesn’t McDonald’s step in and certify an additional equipment supplier so that franchisees have a choice?
This would put competitive pressure on Taylor to improve their machines, since franchisees are likely to avoid equipment that is unreliable or has high maintenance costs.
McDonald’s customers would be happier too. It reflects poorly on the McDonald’s brand that there is this constant guessing game (or having to check in the app) of whether shakes and flurries etc are available at any given time/location.
McDonald's corporate doesn't give a shit about the health of their franchises, they're getting kickbacks every time they renew their contract with Taylor. Taylor makes non-garbage ice cream machines that work just fine at, e.g. Wendy's.
McDonald's just has the brand-recognition and clout to get away with a shitty corrupt practice for the moment, so that's what they're doing. For money.
They used to be, but have not been for like four years. But most of them still choose it anyway, because it is a perfectly good machine, and even with their ridiculous repair restrictions, the economic case is still better than the competitor.
The problem exists outside the arena of franchisor/franchisee relationships. The downthread idea of a DMCA exemption for repair reasons is a very good one.
Best Idea: companies that inflict unreliable & high-maintenance crap on the market naturally go out of business because people freely choose to no longer purchase their unreliable and high-maintenance crap.
How many times do you see friends buying unreliable rubbish? I was talking with an acquaintance the other day and they were predictably complaining about the high maintenance costs of their VW. Another friend was spending huge amounts every year on their very good looking Jeep.
Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
Even specialists can't be expected to judge correctly.
Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
Plenty of the "solutions" suggested here cause other harms or are gameable or otherwise unworkable.
> Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good
Indiviuals do not have to understand the fractals of complexity inherent in what it took to make a finished product to know if the finished product is good quality or not.
Let's just say for the sake of argument I do not understand 1/10th of what goes into HVAC systems, or what it takes to make them. I don't understand supply chain and part sourcing. I don't understand the engineering schematics that underpin the design of the control board that runs my given HVAC unit, therefore, have no expert knowledge of HVAC systems. But what I do know, as an end user / consumer is, if you sell me a Lennox, its most likely going to be a piece of shit, and therefore I do not want a Lennox HVAC system.
I don't think the GP's solution is really that unreasonable - it's just that there's something missing. Like you said:
> Modern goods are fractally complex: individuals can't be expected to become experts in all the disciplines required to judge the quality of a good.
I think the idea that individual consumers can individually exhaustively assess the value of their goods is not really reasonable.
However, I think it's reasonable to believe you can construct a system where a large number of consumers, enthusiasts, and experts pool their knowledge together in order to much more accurately assess product quality.
For instance, if we could conduct wide-scale long-term surveys of the reliability of large appliances, e.g. by requiring that appliance technicians log service visits for an appliance into a database (that could be run by a non-profit), then that would significantly increase pressure on manufacturers to build robust products. After all, if the cheap $2k fridge is listed in the appliance database as having a lifetime one-third of that of the $5k fridge nearby, far more consumers will opt to buy the latter, because now they actually know that there's an advantage to buying that one.
Also, consumer testing labs like Consumer Reports and ConsumerLabs do some expert testing of products, which is better than nothing.
I think that the problem is information asymmetry - companies know how bad the products that they're selling are, and consumers don't. The free market system only works if buyers have "good enough" information to make a rational decision (although that's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition), and we're not in that state right now.
> Government interference in purchase decisions is a big hammer. It is hard to imagine policies that would actually help.
I agree - it's far harder for the government to legislate vague things like "appliances must be built well" then something like "appliance lifetime and service visits must be logged into a registry".
So you're proposing to change the people. I can't imagine that's easier than changing the law, even if I agree with you that the free market should solve the problem.
From what I understand (could be wrong): McDonalds forces their franchises to buy these Taylor ice cream machines, and despite the high cost and frequency oof repairs, McDonalds franchisees continue to own and operate McDonalds meaning that despite the troubles, it is still worth it. If the ice cream machine caused a big of an issue, McDonalds would see less franchisees, and discern from their research that the machine was an issue, and change brands.
Again, it starts with the customer. If people really are that pissed off McDonalds ice cream machines are seemingly always broken, then they should stop going to McDonalds, and then the feedback loop will start from there. It's not like there isn't ample other options (Wendys, Burger King, etc). That tells me that this "problem" is really overblown, and while McDonalds customers really would prefer to have the option to reliably order ice cream, it does not deter them significantly enough from consuming McDonalds, and doing something like simply purchasing their ice cream from a different location. If McDonalds wants to recoup that income, then they will, again, prioritize that initiative, and work on improving the ice cream machine, but again, that juice does not seem worth the squeeze.
You’re making it out to be far simpler than reality. McDonald’s is more than just an ice cream place, they sell Big Macs, fries, a clean place with wifi, and cheap coffee. It would have to be the sum of those worse off than a competitor.
A bad ice cream machine could just mean sub optimal profits / experience.
I don't know many, if any, fast food places in America that don't have wifi, coffee, fries, and try to keep their restaurant clean (Calling McDonalds clean is debatable). Taco Bell? Even they have Nacho Fries and coffee.
Taylor isn’t selling lemons. Their machines are among the best. They simply (like any soft serve machine) can’t withstand improper use and they’re being run mainly by teenagers who don’t give a shit. The lack of serviceability is the problem here.
McDonald’s has for a few years been allowing franchisees to use Carpigiani (the other big brand in commercial ice cream machines) but they’re not better machines and while they are much more open in regards to servicing, parts must come from Italy and wait times are longer. Most of the franchisees are still opting for Taylor even though they have a choice.
I'd also like to add my own experience with jobs that tell me constantly to go faster and faster: that you have to do everything so fast requires a certain level of durability in your equipment and tools. If you are moving fast, you have less leeway to be careful with things.
Having a job while in one's teenage years can be a huge benefit to many people, in many ways. Learning the basics of how to participate in a workplace, experiencing self-worth as a result of providing others with things they want, and the opportunity to build a resume which will come in useful. It can be hard to understand these things if one is from a wealthy background where teenage years are filled with extra-curricular activities in anticipation of 'higher education'.
I grew up the son of a single mother who has been working more or less constantly in some capacity since the age of 15, so kindly take your presumptive comment and stick it somewhere anatomically inappropriate.
I'm not commenting on whether or not 16 year olds should have jobs: I'm saying it's pretty rich to (according to the comments I replied to anyway, the actual demographics are much more varied) hire a bunch of children to work at your restaurant, and then complain that they break things. Like, I dunno man, maybe if your business needs to hire so much labor that is JUST over the line of legally allowed to work (or as recent news shows, isn't) and pay them as little as you can legally do so in order to function, maybe your business sucks or, more likely, you suck at running your business and you should close it.
Ok 23 isn’t that far from teenager and I agree employers are at least partially (maybe largely) at fault, but that just backs up that Taylor is not selling lemons.
Most websites with user submitted content would not be able to exist without DMCA safe harbor provisions. The status quo before the whole "DMCA takedown request" process became a thing was that websites were liable for any user submitted content that was in violation. If the DMCA was repealed today, and tomorrow someone posted copyright content here on HN, then HN would be liable for copyright infringement. A repeal of the DMCA would essentially be a death sentence for social media.
Do you like that you dont own your content any more? Do you like that it gets sold to open AI to make the next ML power draw?
We have the compute power and the networking to decentralize all of it. That means ownership and with that comes personal responsibility. It's not a trivial problem but it's a solvable one today.
> Do you like that you dont own your content any more?
I don't know what you're talking about, I hold a copyright to all of my content, (except the content I produce at work) even if I decide to license a bunch of it.
> Do you like that it gets sold to open AI to make the next ML power draw?
What about the DMCA enabled that?
> We have the compute power and the networking to decentralize all of it. That means ownership and with that comes personal responsibility. It's not a trivial problem but it's a solvable one today.
I think people still want to have conversations using services on the internet. Even email isn't decentralized enough that it would alleviate concerns about third party content. To decentralize enough so that third-party content isn't a legal concern without DMCA, you'd essentially be asking everyone in the world to run federated services with a maximum server size of one user. I don't think we have the technology to make that actually work for the average user.
NO safe harbor means... no reddit, no Facebook, no YouTube... content aggregation in gated monoliths goes away. Data aggregation, data brokering gets a lot harder. And where are you going to mass license content at that point?
> run federated services with a maximum server size of one user.
Family exist, friends exist. Killing the DMCA, then the sea of copyright law suits is a path to copyright reform.
...because the internet was still tiny and wasn't getting any legal attention. The passage of the DMCA was a response to the situation that was going on once it started to get industry attention.
There have been initiatives and proposals from various legislators and interested parties to revamp the DMCA. Without fail, they all seem to universally make things worse for the rights of the consumer and small creators while vastly increasing corporate power. A few token concessions to normal people that inevitably have large loopholes or wording that make them actually meaningless.
So it may be the case that, while it is really shitty in a lot of ways, there is currently no way to open up that Pandora's box and change the DMCA without things getting much worse. The incentives and influences in place for legislators today are simply too perverse.
Parts of the DMCA are alright, but I think section 1201 should be outright repealed. Everything it intends to cover, can already be covered under either "copyright infringement" or "theft of service."
On top of that, I'd like to see certain forms copyright infringement for the sake of repairing/maintaining equipment, be made legal (so you can legally hack a tractor to get it to run, without relying on a fair use defense). Of course this is a much more complex discussion than just repealing 1201.
It could definitely use a strong revision / overhaul. But it is also the reason many sites can exist without being sued in to the ground over hosting copyright infringing material.
DRM itself seems like the most pointed issue with the DMCA, but any change that reduces the efficacy or DRM is going to be fought by every large company in America
The rate of return from starting a McDonald’s franchise is less than the average return of just throwing your money into an index fund and most owners work ungodly hours
The key is they're buying a job they can buy more of later; if you get a McDs off the ground (you need about $500k in cash and assets - like land, you can borrow the rest) you will have a much easier time expanding.
The whole Taylor repair scenario reeks of some sort of corporate kickback scheme. Taylor makes a deal with corporate that forces franchises to buy a subpar machine. Every time the machine goes down Taylor gets a repair order and corporate extracts power by potentially revoking the franchise if the owner seeks other means to repair it.
Talking to McDonalds workers one main complaint was that every item on the menu required a special machine. McDonald’s more closely resembles a factory than a kitchen.
> every item on the menu required a special machine
* One of McDonald's well known qualities is how consistent their products are. This is largely because every McDonald uses the same ingredients, the same equipment, and the same process.
* Assembly line production is a key part of how McDonald's maintains speed. Not surprised to see that the equipment resembles factory equipment.
* All of this is highly visible to the customer. You see inside the kitchen when you place an order inside the restaurant.
Is there some reason I'm not understanding why McDonald's can't or won't just change vendors? Why is there no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market?
Ah, so this is just a backdoor fee in the franchise agreement?
You (the franchisee) must use this specific machine that breaks all the time and for repairs to that machine you must use this specific vendor with whom we (the franchisor) have a "special" deal.
which is part of why I'm so confused by the scheme. Sure, as other commenters have pointed out, it's the franchisees that are bearing this cost and not the "corporation" (which is allegedly getting a kickback), but I have to imagine that, at the margin and in the long term, the reputation that McDonalds has of never having working ice cream machines causes some harm (if caused zero harm, then the flip side is that there is zero value to them having the machines/product), so in the long term there are fewer franchises and therefore less money to the corporation.
Rather than this complicated kick back scheme....why not just charge the franchisees more money? It's Mcdonald's gets the same amount of money, the franchisees pay the same amount of money, but you have ice cream machines with a greater uptime and therefore a better brand image which leads to greater long term growth. It just seems stupid and short sighted.
I realize that humans do stupid and short sighted things all the time, but this one just seems really obvious. This almost feels like it has to be a cause of corruption where the the corporation isn't actually getting something but rather some executive got a direct kickback in order to slip this in, even though it's in the best interests of neither the franchisees nor the corporation.
I'm with you on this part of it. I don't see what the real benefit is to McD if it hurts their brand long-term, which seems to be happening in regard to their ice cream products. We are not talking about highly sophisticated machines or repairs, its more like an organic situation that's made visible because there are so many McDonald's franchises and they all have the same temperamental machines.
I would guess that the real reason is that within the bureaucracy of Mickey D's there is little incentive to get this problem fixed. Leadership either isn't aware or doesn't see the value to fix it. I'm sure some people are definitely benefitting a lot from this, but not enough people higher up are affected by it to care.
> Why is there no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market?
There is plenty of competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market. There is no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine for mcdonalds franchisee market
I see the expected comments about addressing symptoms here. Yes, intellectual property lock-in is bad. Confusion over why McDonald's put up with this (as in, in an idealized view of a free market, that problem would resolve itself).
The problem is capitalism. And it's working as intended.
IP, by definition, is just an enclosure [1]. McDonald's the corporation has an adversarial relationship with its franchisees and you see this in every franchise. The head corporation will simply try to extract the maximum possible wealth from their franchisees, even to their detriment.
Profits tend to decrease over time. To keep profits growing, it inevitably leads to cutting quality to lower costs and predating on your customers, franchisees and employees.
They may have an adversarial relationship with franchisees, but the McDonald's corporation owns and runs 2800 restaurants themselves. You would think that's enough self-inflicted pain that they would do something.
McDonald's gave an exclusive contract for a particular ice cream machine. They then locked down those machines so only first-party repairers can fix them. It's a means of extracting wealth from the franchisees. The ice creame machine maker makes money on these service call outs so they have no incentive to make them reliable (the opposite, actually). And I'm sure McDonald's gets a piece of those service call outs.
Now does this do long-term damage to the McDonald's brand? Maybe. But nobody actually cares about that.
The problem is not capitalism, it's a very specific part of it: intellectual property. The notion that you can own ideas is fundamentally broken and nonsensical, it's logically reducible to attempting to claim ownership over numbers. The economies and laws that arose out of it are fundamentally exploitative. Corporations put a little software on a machine and suddenly they have complete control over what you can and can't do with it, any attempt to resist is felony contempt of business model.
I was a bit shocked to learn about a $900M lawsuit over a Raspberry Pi device. At first I thought it was Taylor suing them out of existence, but it’s actually Kytch suing McDonald’s
Wow, the apocryphal story I thought was just that the machines were a pain to clean, so they were always “broken.” I had no idea there was a whole corporate kickback scheme behind it all.
Since this is a case of McDonald's corporate and Taylor joining hands to exploit their franchisees, I'm not sure how this will help.
If they get it have the legal right to repair the machines, it's kinda pointless if McDonald's corporate merely needs to send down an order such that all franchises must not repair their own ice cream machines, as they would for any other kickback-driven franchise requirement.
> For that matter, suspend copyright for works that aren’t purchasable.
When do you start (or stop) counting something as "purchasable"?
Does it mean I can copy the tapes of movies the day before their first screenings, but not the day after? Or if my local shop doesn't have a show on disk?
You do realize that the proposal would work much the same as any other law? First a little more rigor would go into it than an off the cuff HN comment. Second, if you find something ambiguous then go to court and find out.
That is exactly why I asked: I can't think of a definition that would be both intuitive and that would not rule out reasonable and valid sales strategies for some forms of art.
The McDs ice cream experience is just flat out the worst.
It's like ice cream lottery. "Boy, a bit of ice cream might be nice!"
And it's a total crapshoot. Drive up with no idea whether it's going to happen or not. You want to just write it off, give up, "McDs doesn't sell ice cream".
But then you go another day, and there it is on the menu, teasing you!
They shouldn't get an exception, the law is painful as designed and consumers have to deal with it so should they.
The underlying laws should be removed. IP laws like this are unenforceable at a global level and don't help/protect the consumers. All they do is create artificial walled gardens. There is no reason that its illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, or repair a tractor, or hack your bmw seat warmer. This is going to continue to lead us to a corporate hellscape.
China has a more free market in this regard until the party shows up with a gun to tell you to do something for political reasons, but meanwhile they are able to leverage a more free market.
In the US, IP law flows from this line of the Constitution:
> [Congress shall have power] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Are laws like this really helping promote the progress of science and useful arts? Because it sure does seem like it's doing the opposite.
I completely agree. The DCMA Anti-Circumvention rules are just a hack to make it easier to enforce copyright protections. But why should we make that easier? Why do we have a law making it illegal to do something that may be used for illegal purposes?
The real answer here is REMOVING the DMCA on criminalizing reverse engineering and DRM.
If its your property, you should legally speaking tell any OTHER company to rightly fuck off about restrictions on your property.
Intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, trademark) should NOT have any ground in restricting property rights of things directly owned. Instead, we see shit like Iphones where they use the term "SELL", and then continual and ongoing restrictions by the FORMER OWNER.
If a company wants to maintain control, they should RENT it, with an explicit, simple to read rental agreement.
As the owner of an iPhone, I can legally do whatever I want with it. The restrictions are on developers who sign agreements with Apple. Nothing stops me legally from jailbreaking my own phone.
Your ignorance of this terrible law is not immunity of this law. Apple could as easily destroy your device with no recourse, or sue YOU personally for "defeat of technical prevention".
That's from 2009. Did they file comments claiming individual-level jailbreaking is illegal in 2012, 2015, 2018, 2021, or this year?
I'm not an Apple employee or direct stockholder. I imagine my 401(k) has some in it, but I don't really know. I'm not claiming they're angels. What I am claiming is that Apple's never told me I'm not allowed to do whatever I want with the things I've bought from them. They might not support me in my ventures, and I'm sure they'd prefer I not, but I'm not aware of any case where Apple tried to legally limit a regular end customer's usage.
Well, they're the ones who spearheaded the attempt to make it illegal. They're not able to raise complaints for its renewal because, well, it _wasn't_ renewed in 2012, but is now covered under the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act.
Unfortunately we can't deduce the reasons why it wasn't renewed in 2012, but I imagine Apple was doing the best in their power to convince the Librarian to make that decision.
You asked if there were any cases of someone getting hassled for modding their own gear (and outside of phones, there are plenty of examples of that happening).
If we're going back to phones, then it would have been illegal to jailbreak for a few months in 2014 after their anti-circumvention exemption expired and before the aforementioned Unlocking Consumer Choice act took effect.
Though jailbreaking is still just one aspect of how DMCA is being used to restrict what you can do with the hardware you've purchased.
Why should McDonalds be individually saved from a shitty contract that they signed? How about we fix the crappy DMCA anti-circumvention clause that has been causing problems for tons of people since 1999? Oh, because this will provide press coverage and notoriety for somebody who's probably up for reelection soon.
Sometimes a contract is a bad contract, but it's not known how bad at first reading. There should absolutely be a mechanism for nullifying in whole or in part contracts that are this way. Especially if the contract forces you to purchase equipment that does not work. After all, a contract is just a piece of paper than can easily be torn up. You're trying to make it some magical binding spell type of thing instead
> After all, a contract is just a piece of paper than can easily be torn up.
The piece of paper just represents the contract, other forms of contracts exist (such as digital, verbal). I agree there should be an easier way to get out of shitty ones. But make it too easy and you make contracts too weak. It's a balancing act.
There is a mechanism, a judge can decide to unilaterally annul a contract and order the parties involve to form a new one that they mediate the negotiation and terms of.
McDonald's the corporation is not being hurt by this contract, in fact they are heavily profiting from it. Independently owned individual franchises are the ones suffering from this machine that corporate forces them to use.
I don't understand what the public problem is here.
People are free not to operate a franchise. Why should I, John Q. Public, care if some restaurant owner enters into a shitty contract with McDonald corporation or a ice cream machine vendor.
Is there no equivalent phenomenon when it comes to their grills, deep fryers, drive-thru comms systems, self-order kiosks, etc?