(FeaturedNews.com) – The United States is calling for fast food restaurants to fix their non-working ice cream machines while also pushing for a change in the process for fixing equipment up.
This week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) along with the Justice Department sent a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office in which they pushed for the antitrust division to set up an exemption for soft serve ice cream machines. The exemption would be from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that did not always allow franchise owners to hire third-party repair technicians or make the repairs themselves.
Under the current rules, only technicians licensed by the company that creates the machines used for the soft ice cream machines are allowed to make the digital repairs. In the joint letter, it is noted that by allowing the franchise owners to make the repairs it would increase competition in the market for replacement parts as well as result in the maintenance and repair of services.
In the letter, it was pointed out that having the machines not functioning could cause businesses to lose around $625 every day and that authorized repairs while licensed repair technicians were costly, charging $300 or more for every 15 minutes they were spending on the job.
The FTC started to look into the complaints in 2021 as many consumers and franchise owners had pointed out that the issues with the soft serve machines were causing them to lose money as they had to wait for extensive wait periods before they could get an authorized technician to fix them.
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