iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it
McDonald’s soft-serve ice cream machines are regularly broken, and it’s not just your perception. When repair vendor and advocate iFixit was filming a video about the topic, it checked tracking map McBroken and found that 34 percent of the machines in the state of New York were reported inoperable. As I write this, the nationwide number of broken machines is just above 14 percent.
To improve the nation’s semi-frozen milk fat infrastructure, iFixit has done two things. One, as first reported by 404 Media, is to join with interest group Public Knowledge to petition the Copyright Office for an exemption allowing people to fix commercial equipment, such as McDonald’s ice cream machines and other industrial kitchen equipment, without fear of reprisal under Section 1201 of the DMCA.
You might be thinking of the password vs fingerprint phone unlock. Courts decided that while your fingerprint could be compelled, you couldn't be compelled to reveal your password as that was private knowledge. That isn't due to copyright though, it's a 5th Amendment issue here in the US (The Fifth Amendment grants anyone in the U.S. the right to remain silent, which includes the right to not turn over information that could incriminate them in a crime. These days, those protections extend to the passcodes that only a device owner knows).
We've written plenty of legal justification around it, but ultimately it just comes down to the fact that police CAN physically place your finger into your phone, but cannot extract a password from your brain that you don't want to give up.
If we had the ability to read minds, there'd be legal justification to grab your password within a year.
There are technologies the police are not allowed to use for constitutional reasons. If brain reading was a thing, the 5th amendment would still protect you. Not that they wouldn't try before getting smacked down.