Manufacturers opposed the exemption, but it received support from the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
“The Registry recommends adopting a new exemption covering the diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of commercial food preparation equipment at the retail level because the plaintiffs have sufficiently established, by a preponderance of the evidence, adverse effects on the proposed non-infringing use of such equipment, ” register results. said.
The exemption does not include commercial and industrial cooking devices. Unlike retail-level equipment, the software-enabled industrial machines “can be very different in several aspects, and proponents have not established a record of adverse effects with respect to industrial equipment,” the registry wrote.
Fault codes unintuitive and change frequently
While ice cream machines are not the only devices affected, the registry’s recommendations note that “supporters primarily relied on an example of a frequently broken soft-serve ice cream machine used in a restaurant to illustrate the negative effects on repair activities.”
Proponents said repairing Taylor Company ice cream machines used at McDonald’s required users to interpret “unintuitive” error codes. Some error codes are listed in the owner’s manual, but these manuals were said to be “often out of date and incomplete” because error codes could change with each firmware update.
Repair difficulties related to “technological protection measures” or TPMs were described as follows:
Also, other error codes can only be accessed by reading a service manual available only to authorized technicians or through a “TPM locked service menu on the device.” This service menu can only be accessed by using a manufacturer-approved diagnostic tool or through an “extended, undocumented keystroke combination.” But “it’s unclear if the 16-press key sequence… still works, or has been changed in subsequent firmware updates.” Supporters therefore argued that many users are unable to diagnose and repair the machine without bypassing the machine’s TPM to access the service menu software, resulting in significant financial damage from lost revenue.
The registry said it is clear that “diagnosis of soft-serve machine error codes for repair purposes can often only be accomplished by accessing software on the machine that is protected by TPMs (which require a password or a proprietary diagnostic tool to unlock)” and that “the threat of lawsuits from bypassing them inhibits users from engaging in repair-related activities.”