We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

This seems like a very one-sided take. Just look at all the artists (actors, painters, musicians, etc.) that are fighting tooth and nail against AI, and for good reason. While there are plenty of issues with copyright, I don't agree at all that just because the marginal cost of copying is 0 that if someone puts a ton of time and effort in creating a piece of work that I should just get to copy it for free.

   I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population

-Chomsky

Uhh, it's because information can be easily copied that the laws were put in place. If anyone can "steal" your work then it would be a deterrent to invention.

If I'm a business that can make money on the service contract I can sell the unit at a lower price. Now I'm forced to make the unit cost higher.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s pretty clear that piracy is not illegal because of the DMCA; it’s illegal because it violates normal copyright laws. Repealing the DMCA would not change the legal status of piracy.

Repealing the DMCA also wouldn’t make DRM illegal, but DRM would still be exactly as (in)effective as it has already proven to be countless times. DRM has done nothing to restrict piracy, as far as I can tell.

Repealing the DMCA would simply allow people to more freely break DRM in pursuit of lawful purposes, which are currently restricted unfairly, including activities that would fall strictly under Fair Use. I would argue the DMCA is infringing my legal rights for no benefit to society.

Distributing copies of copyrighted content without authorization was unlawful long before the DMCA, outside of Fair Use scenarios.

Piracy was just as Federally illegal prior to the DMCA. Think back to Streetfighter....

(not op) I think DMCA specifically should be repealed. We can still have DRM/Copyright/etc if enough people want it, we could look at other systems, but DMCA itself is awful. Repealing it doesn't make any statement about piracy.

Sure, but the anti-circumvention provisions in particular just inconvenience everyone. It's not like DVDs being "protected" prevented them from being ripped.

And Paraguay won

Been a while since I first watched the video. I would imagine the ice cream machines are a relatively small part of the McDonald's business. As evidenced by the fact that McDonalds ice cream has been an issue for quite a while. I would imagine franchises of a similar caliber to McD's also exploit their owner-operators on a similar scale because they can, we just don't necessarily hear about it because McDonalds is the largest.

McDonald's isn't known for its quality anyway. I've had my fair share of sketchy McDonalds experiences. McDs is as large as it is because it is cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous. McDonalds has no qualms with cutting corners on quality, as evidenced by its entire menu.

> If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.

They are and it doesn't matter. You don't go to McD for the ice cream. It's been a running joke for decades how they're always broken.

I like how the answers include both "they've done the math and it's worth it" and "they're idiots who don't know what they're doing". I don't think anybody cares what's really going on, as long as they can say McDonald's is bad.

There's an uncertain future cost (basically an externality that impacts McDonald corporate) but in return they get a nice premium now and immediate uncertainty for franchisees. It's possible it's overall a net negative for MD corporate, but it's also possible it's an overall economically profitable trade (even though it's clearly immoral).

I'm sure corporate has done the math and concluded that whatever money the machine provider pays them is higher than any expected losses in franchise revenue due to franchise owners quitting due to poor ice cream sales.

Modern capitalism isn't particularly rational. Money in the pocket is more tangible than minor brand damage.

If you want to be really cynical, you can assume that somebody at McDonald's and Taylor have crunched the numbers they know exactly how much they can squeeze their franchisees and the customer to effectively make money out of nothing. So many businesses operate this way now.

> I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.

Try to quantify that to the MBA bean counters, good luck.

No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's, given that most employees in fast food stores are high school kids and I got the runs more than once from that shit, I don't trust them anyway to follow up with the stringent hygiene requirements that serving ice cream demands. Burger patties at least are grilled/fried.

then why is it that its only the ice cream machines that have problems not not things like the soda fountain any other food production tool?

Similarly Instagram started adding tracking querystrings (igshid or something like that), and for a good few weeks any Instagram link with it was completely broken for me (few loops, errors, and throwing me to the home page), I had to manually remove that part of the url.

My bad! Fixed. Didn't even realize the YT links had tracking info on them!

Eh. Taylor doesn't fix the machines. You actually get a contract with an independent certified technician - quite often provided through the reseller who sold the machine.

How can they be low? Here it's nearly 3 euros for a thimble of ice cream lol

I suspect its a probably a combination of abundance of caution based on past bad experiences/lawsuits as well as also being good for margins:

The Surprising Reasons Soft-Serve Ice Cream Can Be Dangerous To Eat

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/surprising-reasons-soft-serv...

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7149927

From 2005:

More than 120 people were sickened after eating ice cream at their local McDonald's. The health department says the restaurant's dairy mixture somehow was contaminated with staphylococcus, and a mechanical malfunction in the soft serve machine allowed the bacteria to grow. So many people became so ill, so quickly, the director of the local emergency room told me he at first thought there was some kind of bioterrorism incident in the town.... Nancy Smith says she had taken her grandchildren for an outing, and stopped at McDonald's to buy them a treat. Her grandson Darien had a milkshake, and she says he was violently ill an hour later. He became limp and listless, Smith says, and they rushed him to the hospital, scared to death. Then she got sick. She says she had just three sips of Darien's shake, but it was enough to make her very ill. She told us she was vomiting so violently, she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's now suing McDonald's, as are many of the other people who got sick in that incident.