8 ms·

Keurig competitors crack company's DRM code

74 points by thisisblurry 12y ago

jonknee 12y ago
The fact that a coffee maker has DRM at all is depressing.
- oinksoft 12y ago
  Hah, just wait until you experience the INTERNET OF THINGS.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    There will come a day when the proverbial walled garden becomes a literal walled garden, and we'll all get to say "we told you so!" It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - potatolicious 12y ago
      > "It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures." [expression of cynicism detected] [content override triggered] [querying for user's linguistic analysis based on previous communication] [synthesizing praise for walled garden using user's linguistic profile] [deliver praise to recipient instead of ungood sentiment] Seriously though, we're already filtering Facebook posts based on "relevance". We're a really, really thin line away from silencing posts based on the sentiments expressed within.
      - Zikes 12y ago
        Filtering based on sentiment? Oh, they're way ahead of you there: http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/30/technology/social/facebook-experiment/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/30/technology/social/facebook-e...
      - spacemanmatt 12y ago
        Zoom. Enhance.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    ...the internet of things that you do not really own or have any control over anymore. This is just a step away from e.g. toasters that won't toast anything but "authorised" bread (packaged in cartridges for "convenience", I'm sure...) A lot of this vendor lock-in has already been happening in the computing industry with things like printer cartridges, but as more and more appliances become "smarter" the incremental implementation costs of lock-in decrease so it becomes more widespread. On the other hand the saying "when there's a will, there's a way" fortunately continues to apply, so we see "breakthroughs" like this. However, the frightening part is that this will no doubt be considered a "flaw" or "security breach" by some, so the systems gradually become more secure over time, and sadly this is security against the users. I could imagine this easily escalating into use of cryptography, which might then result in firmware hacking, countered by even stronger cryptography (e.g. signed firmware updates), leading to hardware hacking, stronger antitamper hardware, etc.
    - aGuyWithPlan123 12y ago
      Breaking that kind of DRM is easy. Very, very easy. Step 1: Get some wheat, eggs, water, etc. Make bread. Step 2: Get some wood, coal, gas, some fuel. Step 3: Bake bread. DRM PWNED. This walled garden is the kind of walled garden you build around cattle. If the cows move, you can't just build a fence around them.
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  It would be depressing if a Kuerig were the only way you could obtain coffee.
- wkdown 12y ago
  I think it is fantastic. Companies lately are moving toward profits over customer loyalty, which seems counter-intuitive. Keurig et al need to learn a lesson from this and stop the silly non-sense. They have already cornered the at-home brewing market (or close to it I would assume) and personally have never seen a non-Keurig branded K-cup that they are so worried about. There is no need to get greedy.
hendzen 12y ago
Next time Keurig should hire a cryptographer. GPG signed QR-codes or something similar (vulnerable to replay attack, but harder to circumvent).
- Zikes 12y ago
  I don't understand how literally printing the password on the cup would be more effective, unless the coffee maker is internet-connected and each code is revoked after usage. It harkens back to having to call Microsoft because you've replaced your motherboard except now it's Keurig and even less pleasant because you can't have your coffee while you're on hold.
  - X-Cubed 12y ago
    The machine could add each code to an internal blacklist after each use. It doesn't prevent the same code being used with another machine, but it would prevent coffee vendors from providing boxes of K-cups that are all printed with a single code.
    - Zikes 12y ago
      Those vendors could acquire new codes as easily as making a trip to the store. Heck, they could even incentivize customers to snap a photo of an authentic K-cup's code and tweet it to them, maybe for a coupon or imaginary internet points. As long as they had enough codes to make sure any given pallet didn't have any duplicates, they could be 99% certain a customer wouldn't get repeats, especially if they retired codes after a certain number of printings.
  - greenburger 12y ago
    They could do a Louis Vuitton and make their trademark an integral part of the password design. Or pick a nice QR code and trademark that.
    - morcheeba 12y ago
      This doesn't work... Nintendo tried it with the gameboy. The boot rom would extract the nintendo logo from the cartridge and display it on the screen. If it wasn't correct, the game wouldn't run. If it was correct, the theory was that trademark would prevent 3rd party games. But the judge ruled it was being used as a functional access control device and not as a trademark, so 3rd parties could include the nintendo logo in their games. LV uses pure trademark law; it's not functional. That's why their protection stands.
nandhp 12y ago
Their SSL is bad. It gets an F from SSL Labs due to an exploitable version of OpenSSL -- https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=consumeraffairs.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=consumeraffai... -- and Firefox refuses to connect to it at all due to weak ciphers: An error occurred during a connection to www.consumeraffairs.com. SSL peer selected a cipher suite disallowed for the selected protocol version. (Error code: ssl_error_cipher_disallowed_for_version)
- deathanatos 12y ago
  > and Firefox refuses to connect to it at all due to weak ciphers: It's not a weak cipher. I get the same error, but the cipher the server selects is TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_128_SHA (0xc011). If I've got my SSL best-practices straight, that's not a bad choice. The server, however, also selected SSL 3.0. My understanding is that you can't use that cipher with SSL 3.0 because it didn't exist. Firefox thus aborts the connection; note the error: "…cipher_disallowed_for_version" (of SSL). I've seen this before on a server I had, and it had the same behavior. I'm nearly certain this is a bug on the server side, perhaps in OpenSSL. The server I had made some pretty nonsensical decisions in the server hello, such as the above with Firefox, and with Chrome, selecting TLS 1.0 even though that was disabled. I asked about it on SO[1], but never got a reply. (For me, it's no longer an issue; we enabled TLS on that server for hopefully obvious reasons.) Firefox and Chrome's client hellos are pretty similar, but not the same, and I never figured out the difference that caused the server to choose SSL or TLS over the other. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25146651/why-is-nginx-selecting-the-ssl-versions-ciphers-it-is-selecting http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25146651/why-is-nginx-sel...
dubcanada 12y ago
They should require you to create an account online which you must login too and enter a code found on the K-cup in order to get your coffee. That will show those pesky people wanting to use your rather expensive machine with slightly less expensive however still a ripe off single serving coffee pods.
- Zikes 12y ago
  They'll be willing to go through all that trouble for the convenience of only having to push a button to get their coffee!
  - dmix 12y ago
    Worked so well for Sim City!
    - Zikes 12y ago
      Some potential parallels there. Blatant lies: "Our coffee machines just can't support other companies' k-cups." Empty promises: "Buy our new coffee machine and it'll enable us to make a lot of new and exciting flavors!" First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew. I'm looking forward to the inevitable half-hearted apology, which will of course have still more empty promises. Not long after that they'll announce the v3 model, which will have an incompatible DRM to v2, forcing their customers to either upgrade or use off-brand companies' k-cups.
      - CaptainZapp 12y ago
        First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew. Can't be much worse than hazelnut, or vanilla.
        Natsu 12y ago
        Have you ever had a durian? We actually bought one once, at Christmas. It was... memorable.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
Is it really that hard to get a coffee presser and some ground coffee?
- dwaltrip 12y ago
  Why does it bother you that others wish to make some task more convenient? And BTW, there are bio-degradable (compostable) cups that one can buy, if that was part of your concern. The office manager at my company says they are actually cheaper, too.
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    It doesn't bother me that people want to make certain things convenient what bothers me is the commoditization of every last thing in our consumer driven culture. Is your life really going to be so much better if you can make your coffee in 1 minute instead of 2 minutes? I really don't see any other convenience with ready-made coffee other than the time component. If that convenience comes at the cost of locked down devices for making coffee then it is really short-sighted of people to buy into that "convenience".
    - pak 12y ago
      In a workplace environment with a shared kitchen it absolutely is worth it to an average manager to avoid the spills and mess of grounds and keep everything in the pods. This is where I saw most Keurigs first, and then it seemed to "hijack" its way into the household because people got addicted to the convenience that they enjoyed at the office.
      - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        Where I work there is a machine that dispenses coffee (Americano: basically an espresso plus piping hot water to fill the cup up). Such machines are more expensive than the typical office Keurig, but for an office of any size not prohibitively so. For office coffee it's actually quite good, and far and away better than any swill out of a Keurig I've ever had the misfortune of drinking.
jbigelow76 12y ago
Jailbreaking your iPhone is so 2010, now the cool kids are jailbreaking their Keurigs.
ErikRogneby 12y ago
When your proprietary coffee delivery system costs $50/pound and people still buy it, is DRM a surprise?
- morcheeba 12y ago
  You know perfectly well people are paying for the convenience and easy cleanup. Starbucks coffee -- $1.75 for an espresso shot that uses 0.25 oz of beans -- is $112/pound, so the k-cup is a bargain.
- michaelt 12y ago
  Are there any non-proprietary pod based coffee machines?
apendleton 12y ago
A cursory Google search shows that not only are companies making Keurig-compatible cups, but also Keurig-compatible coffee machines, so people who want them could get those instead. Funny that the end consequence of this may be that a whole ecosystem around this format ends up continuing to dominate despite the fact that all of the players are selling knock-offs and the originator of the idea has moved on... it's IBM PC-compatible all over again.
- hatfieej 12y ago
  I wrote the software for the Mother Parkers RealCup brewer and am quite familiar with at least their knockoff. The real purpose of the brewer was really as a way to push their brand of K-cups (it's the razor blade thing). Everything is about pushing those cups because the margins on those cups are amazing. Keurig is desperate to try to maintain their licensing deals. The (patented) Vue cups aren't doing great, so this was their next attempt. Keurig's attempts aren't really focused on serving the customer, but rather on trying to extract continued revenues from them. BTW...$3.7B market in K-Cups. Crazy huh?
  - nhstanley 12y ago
    Rent seeking. This is one of the things that in my businesses I try to avoid because it is basically should be a last ditch, hail-mary pass. Which is what this DRM probably is for Keurig. Ideally, you should always focus on being better than your competitors, which is difficult--but not impossible--in commodity products. Good examples are Dropbox or Starbucks. Cloud storage space or coffee are obviously not new or hard to deliver products, but it's how you deliver them that makes all the difference. I think this is a loosing battle for Keurig, and they should focus on providing some additional value (or perceived value, which can be just as good) to their customers. Maybe that's genuinely better tasting coffee, or maybe it's a slight (but acceptable) premium over generics (people like and trust brands).
    - hatfieej 12y ago
      Exactly. Customer satisfaction is the last thing on Keurig's mind right now. I think we all know how this will play out if they don't wise up.
nthitz 12y ago
Article states it's not true "digital" rights management. Seems more like an analog rights management (shine an infrared light on ink and register reflection). So presumably no one can be technically liable under the DMCA. However, if Keurig were to switch to a more "digital" form of rights management (perhaps actual RFID), could these third party coffee pod creators be found guilty of circumventing content protection technologies (DMCA violation)?
- rcthompson 12y ago
  Since there's no copyrightable artistic work involved here, I don't think the DMCA applies.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    Like someone above said, the pattern could be in a shape of their logo, so anyone replicating it would be effectively putting another company logo on their product,which is definitely not legal.
    - turingfail 12y ago
      There are ways to lose your trademarks if you use them or simply allow them to be used in the wrong contexts. I think their competitors would argue that this is one of those ways.
pwarner 12y ago
I was going to ask why they didn't just patent the thing. This is the physical world after all. Turns out they did, but the most important one expired in 2012. http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2012/11/28/the-k-cup-patent-is-dead-long-live-the-k-cup/ http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2012/11/28/the-k...
shmerl 12y ago
Good, but doesn't make Keurig a good coffee worth drinking ;)
takemikazuchi 12y ago
Perhaps Keurig should print their logo onto the cups with said special ink, and the machine should identify the logo with an image matching algorithm. If I understand trademark law correctly, competitors wouldn't be able to reproduce the Keurig logo without the strong possibility of facing repercussions for trademark infringement. I mean in reality it wouldn't work well at all and just make consumers pissed, but I wonder what the legal situation would be if they could pull it off.
- nacs 12y ago
  Even if they print an entire logo in the ink, someone could sell some kind of reusable sticker with that special-ink-logo and just stick it onto the non-Keurig cups during use. When finished with 1 cup, remove sticker and stick it on to a different cup. I don't see why they even bother trying to lock down their machines TBH as it can't be done well without significantly increasing the cost of the machine or cups (or inconveniencing existing customers). I have a Keurig (non-DRM) and buy mostly Keurig branded cups anyway but if I had to buy one of these "2.0" machines with DRM, I'd just not buy a Keurig machine.
  - anon4 12y ago
    Or put the sticker over the sensor. Or hotwire the sensor (caution: voids your warranty).
- ginko 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade should apply here.
- nicholassmith 12y ago
  Somewhere a Keurig engineer has gone 'shit'. As far as I know the law for Europe, you're not allowed to use another companies logo form on a commercial product without prior agreement, which is why clothing houses like to heavily brand their items as they can't prevent a competitor from stealing the cut of the item but they can prevent them from using a logo.
takemikazuchi 12y ago
Perhaps Keurig should print their logo onto the cups with said special ink, and the machine should identify the logo with an image matching algorithm. If I understand trademark law correctly, competitors wouldn't be able to reproduce the Keurig logo without the strong possibility of facing repercussions for trademark infringement. I mean in reality it wouldn't work well at all and just make consumers pissed, but I wonder what the legal situation would be if they could pull it off.
sasoon 12y ago
I do not understand why is anyone buying machines with pods. Expensive machine, expensive coffee, and creating garbage for each cup. Is it so hard to put teaspoon of coffee in cup and pour hot water?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Its simple, its clean, and convenient. There are many makers of k-cups to choose from so finding an acceptable cup of coffee made this way isn't too hard. I went through a few variety packs, read reviews on Amazon and the like, to narrow my choices. I then used Amazon's subscribe and save feature, visits to slick deals, and even my costco membership, to buy k-cups are good prices. During summer my coffee drinking goes down and the ability to just make one cup is great. Cooler months and its time for the Bonavita, sometimes its good when friends want some but even then I have dropped back to the k-cup.
- gambiting 12y ago
  I only agree with the "expensive coffee" part. I've got a tassimo machine which has capsules for both coffee and milk - you use both,and it makes delicious latte, much better than I would be able to do myself - at least not without frothing milk, which is messy and I would rather not do it. The machine itself was $40 which is hardly expensive, and the coffee is most absolutely not garbage. And the convenience is huge. It could be cheaper, but it works out at something like $0.80 per cup, which I am ok with, since I rarely drink more than 1 cup a day anyway.
jrs235 12y ago
Couldn't someone just cut the top off or take the foil off a legit k cup and place it on top of a non legit one then run the machine? This would cost the non legit companies less... Not having to retool production. Just tell the consumer what to do or include a special cover.
JadeNB 12y ago
The author's confidence in common sense is touching: > It's still too early to tell, but the fact that Keurig's “DRM” can be cracked with such ease doesn't seem to bode well for the company. > So that's one reason Keurig might be in trouble: because it bet everything on imposing a technological barrier which turned out to be ridiculously easy to get around. Err, so easily crackable DRM will not survive legal challenges? (I seem to remember a story, which my Google-fu is insufficient to recover, of someone embarrassing Jack Palance during an interview by showing him the complete DeCSS source ….)
forceblast 12y ago
I have no idea why anyone would put up with drm and pay such a ridiculous price for such terrible "coffee."

74 points by thisisblurry 12y ago

jonknee 12y ago

The fact that a coffee maker has DRM at all is depressing.

oinksoft 12y ago
Hah, just wait until you experience the INTERNET OF THINGS.
- Zikes 12y ago
  There will come a day when the proverbial walled garden becomes a literal walled garden, and we'll all get to say "we told you so!" It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    > "It won't be particularly satisfying, but in that dystopian near-future, it will be one of life's few remaining pleasures." [expression of cynicism detected] [content override triggered] [querying for user's linguistic analysis based on previous communication] [synthesizing praise for walled garden using user's linguistic profile] [deliver praise to recipient instead of ungood sentiment] Seriously though, we're already filtering Facebook posts based on "relevance". We're a really, really thin line away from silencing posts based on the sentiments expressed within.
    - Zikes 12y ago
      Filtering based on sentiment? Oh, they're way ahead of you there: http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/30/technology/social/facebook-experiment/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/30/technology/social/facebook-e...
    - spacemanmatt 12y ago
      Zoom. Enhance.
- userbinator 12y ago
  ...the internet of things that you do not really own or have any control over anymore. This is just a step away from e.g. toasters that won't toast anything but "authorised" bread (packaged in cartridges for "convenience", I'm sure...) A lot of this vendor lock-in has already been happening in the computing industry with things like printer cartridges, but as more and more appliances become "smarter" the incremental implementation costs of lock-in decrease so it becomes more widespread. On the other hand the saying "when there's a will, there's a way" fortunately continues to apply, so we see "breakthroughs" like this. However, the frightening part is that this will no doubt be considered a "flaw" or "security breach" by some, so the systems gradually become more secure over time, and sadly this is security against the users. I could imagine this easily escalating into use of cryptography, which might then result in firmware hacking, countered by even stronger cryptography (e.g. signed firmware updates), leading to hardware hacking, stronger antitamper hardware, etc.
  - aGuyWithPlan123 12y ago
    Breaking that kind of DRM is easy. Very, very easy. Step 1: Get some wheat, eggs, water, etc. Make bread. Step 2: Get some wood, coal, gas, some fuel. Step 3: Bake bread. DRM PWNED. This walled garden is the kind of walled garden you build around cattle. If the cows move, you can't just build a fence around them.
brandonmenc 12y ago
It would be depressing if a Kuerig were the only way you could obtain coffee.
wkdown 12y ago
I think it is fantastic. Companies lately are moving toward profits over customer loyalty, which seems counter-intuitive. Keurig et al need to learn a lesson from this and stop the silly non-sense. They have already cornered the at-home brewing market (or close to it I would assume) and personally have never seen a non-Keurig branded K-cup that they are so worried about. There is no need to get greedy.

hendzen 12y ago

Next time Keurig should hire a cryptographer. GPG signed QR-codes or something similar (vulnerable to replay attack, but harder to circumvent).

Zikes 12y ago
I don't understand how literally printing the password on the cup would be more effective, unless the coffee maker is internet-connected and each code is revoked after usage. It harkens back to having to call Microsoft because you've replaced your motherboard except now it's Keurig and even less pleasant because you can't have your coffee while you're on hold.
- X-Cubed 12y ago
  The machine could add each code to an internal blacklist after each use. It doesn't prevent the same code being used with another machine, but it would prevent coffee vendors from providing boxes of K-cups that are all printed with a single code.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    Those vendors could acquire new codes as easily as making a trip to the store. Heck, they could even incentivize customers to snap a photo of an authentic K-cup's code and tweet it to them, maybe for a coupon or imaginary internet points. As long as they had enough codes to make sure any given pallet didn't have any duplicates, they could be 99% certain a customer wouldn't get repeats, especially if they retired codes after a certain number of printings.
- greenburger 12y ago
  They could do a Louis Vuitton and make their trademark an integral part of the password design. Or pick a nice QR code and trademark that.
  - morcheeba 12y ago
    This doesn't work... Nintendo tried it with the gameboy. The boot rom would extract the nintendo logo from the cartridge and display it on the screen. If it wasn't correct, the game wouldn't run. If it was correct, the theory was that trademark would prevent 3rd party games. But the judge ruled it was being used as a functional access control device and not as a trademark, so 3rd parties could include the nintendo logo in their games. LV uses pure trademark law; it's not functional. That's why their protection stands.

nandhp 12y ago

Their SSL is bad. It gets an F from SSL Labs due to an exploitable version of OpenSSL -- https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=consumeraffairs.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=consumeraffai... -- and Firefox refuses to connect to it at all due to weak ciphers: An error occurred during a connection to www.consumeraffairs.com. SSL peer selected a cipher suite disallowed for the selected protocol version. (Error code: ssl_error_cipher_disallowed_for_version)

deathanatos 12y ago
> and Firefox refuses to connect to it at all due to weak ciphers: It's not a weak cipher. I get the same error, but the cipher the server selects is TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_128_SHA (0xc011). If I've got my SSL best-practices straight, that's not a bad choice. The server, however, also selected SSL 3.0. My understanding is that you can't use that cipher with SSL 3.0 because it didn't exist. Firefox thus aborts the connection; note the error: "…cipher_disallowed_for_version" (of SSL). I've seen this before on a server I had, and it had the same behavior. I'm nearly certain this is a bug on the server side, perhaps in OpenSSL. The server I had made some pretty nonsensical decisions in the server hello, such as the above with Firefox, and with Chrome, selecting TLS 1.0 even though that was disabled. I asked about it on SO[1], but never got a reply. (For me, it's no longer an issue; we enabled TLS on that server for hopefully obvious reasons.) Firefox and Chrome's client hellos are pretty similar, but not the same, and I never figured out the difference that caused the server to choose SSL or TLS over the other. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25146651/why-is-nginx-selecting-the-ssl-versions-ciphers-it-is-selecting http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25146651/why-is-nginx-sel...

dubcanada 12y ago

They should require you to create an account online which you must login too and enter a code found on the K-cup in order to get your coffee. That will show those pesky people wanting to use your rather expensive machine with slightly less expensive however still a ripe off single serving coffee pods.

Zikes 12y ago
They'll be willing to go through all that trouble for the convenience of only having to push a button to get their coffee!
- dmix 12y ago
  Worked so well for Sim City!
  - Zikes 12y ago
    Some potential parallels there. Blatant lies: "Our coffee machines just can't support other companies' k-cups." Empty promises: "Buy our new coffee machine and it'll enable us to make a lot of new and exciting flavors!" First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew. I'm looking forward to the inevitable half-hearted apology, which will of course have still more empty promises. Not long after that they'll announce the v3 model, which will have an incompatible DRM to v2, forcing their customers to either upgrade or use off-brand companies' k-cups.
    - CaptainZapp 12y ago
      First new flavors out of the gate are durian and Mountain Dew. Can't be much worse than hazelnut, or vanilla.
      - Natsu 12y ago
        Have you ever had a durian? We actually bought one once, at Christmas. It was... memorable.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

Is it really that hard to get a coffee presser and some ground coffee?

dwaltrip 12y ago
Why does it bother you that others wish to make some task more convenient? And BTW, there are bio-degradable (compostable) cups that one can buy, if that was part of your concern. The office manager at my company says they are actually cheaper, too.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  It doesn't bother me that people want to make certain things convenient what bothers me is the commoditization of every last thing in our consumer driven culture. Is your life really going to be so much better if you can make your coffee in 1 minute instead of 2 minutes? I really don't see any other convenience with ready-made coffee other than the time component. If that convenience comes at the cost of locked down devices for making coffee then it is really short-sighted of people to buy into that "convenience".
  - pak 12y ago
    In a workplace environment with a shared kitchen it absolutely is worth it to an average manager to avoid the spills and mess of grounds and keep everything in the pods. This is where I saw most Keurigs first, and then it seemed to "hijack" its way into the household because people got addicted to the convenience that they enjoyed at the office.
    - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
      Where I work there is a machine that dispenses coffee (Americano: basically an espresso plus piping hot water to fill the cup up). Such machines are more expensive than the typical office Keurig, but for an office of any size not prohibitively so. For office coffee it's actually quite good, and far and away better than any swill out of a Keurig I've ever had the misfortune of drinking.

jbigelow76 12y ago

Jailbreaking your iPhone is so 2010, now the cool kids are jailbreaking their Keurigs.

ErikRogneby 12y ago

When your proprietary coffee delivery system costs $50/pound and people still buy it, is DRM a surprise?

morcheeba 12y ago
You know perfectly well people are paying for the convenience and easy cleanup. Starbucks coffee -- $1.75 for an espresso shot that uses 0.25 oz of beans -- is $112/pound, so the k-cup is a bargain.
michaelt 12y ago
Are there any non-proprietary pod based coffee machines?

apendleton 12y ago

A cursory Google search shows that not only are companies making Keurig-compatible cups, but also Keurig-compatible coffee machines, so people who want them could get those instead. Funny that the end consequence of this may be that a whole ecosystem around this format ends up continuing to dominate despite the fact that all of the players are selling knock-offs and the originator of the idea has moved on... it's IBM PC-compatible all over again.

hatfieej 12y ago
I wrote the software for the Mother Parkers RealCup brewer and am quite familiar with at least their knockoff. The real purpose of the brewer was really as a way to push their brand of K-cups (it's the razor blade thing). Everything is about pushing those cups because the margins on those cups are amazing. Keurig is desperate to try to maintain their licensing deals. The (patented) Vue cups aren't doing great, so this was their next attempt. Keurig's attempts aren't really focused on serving the customer, but rather on trying to extract continued revenues from them. BTW...$3.7B market in K-Cups. Crazy huh?
- nhstanley 12y ago
  Rent seeking. This is one of the things that in my businesses I try to avoid because it is basically should be a last ditch, hail-mary pass. Which is what this DRM probably is for Keurig. Ideally, you should always focus on being better than your competitors, which is difficult--but not impossible--in commodity products. Good examples are Dropbox or Starbucks. Cloud storage space or coffee are obviously not new or hard to deliver products, but it's how you deliver them that makes all the difference. I think this is a loosing battle for Keurig, and they should focus on providing some additional value (or perceived value, which can be just as good) to their customers. Maybe that's genuinely better tasting coffee, or maybe it's a slight (but acceptable) premium over generics (people like and trust brands).
  - hatfieej 12y ago
    Exactly. Customer satisfaction is the last thing on Keurig's mind right now. I think we all know how this will play out if they don't wise up.

nthitz 12y ago

Article states it's not true "digital" rights management. Seems more like an analog rights management (shine an infrared light on ink and register reflection). So presumably no one can be technically liable under the DMCA. However, if Keurig were to switch to a more "digital" form of rights management (perhaps actual RFID), could these third party coffee pod creators be found guilty of circumventing content protection technologies (DMCA violation)?

rcthompson 12y ago
Since there's no copyrightable artistic work involved here, I don't think the DMCA applies.
- gambiting 12y ago
  Like someone above said, the pattern could be in a shape of their logo, so anyone replicating it would be effectively putting another company logo on their product,which is definitely not legal.
  - turingfail 12y ago
    There are ways to lose your trademarks if you use them or simply allow them to be used in the wrong contexts. I think their competitors would argue that this is one of those ways.

pwarner 12y ago

I was going to ask why they didn't just patent the thing. This is the physical world after all. Turns out they did, but the most important one expired in 2012. http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2012/11/28/the-k-cup-patent-is-dead-long-live-the-k-cup/ http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2012/11/28/the-k...

shmerl 12y ago

Good, but doesn't make Keurig a good coffee worth drinking ;)

takemikazuchi 12y ago

Perhaps Keurig should print their logo onto the cups with said special ink, and the machine should identify the logo with an image matching algorithm. If I understand trademark law correctly, competitors wouldn't be able to reproduce the Keurig logo without the strong possibility of facing repercussions for trademark infringement. I mean in reality it wouldn't work well at all and just make consumers pissed, but I wonder what the legal situation would be if they could pull it off.

nacs 12y ago
Even if they print an entire logo in the ink, someone could sell some kind of reusable sticker with that special-ink-logo and just stick it onto the non-Keurig cups during use. When finished with 1 cup, remove sticker and stick it on to a different cup. I don't see why they even bother trying to lock down their machines TBH as it can't be done well without significantly increasing the cost of the machine or cups (or inconveniencing existing customers). I have a Keurig (non-DRM) and buy mostly Keurig branded cups anyway but if I had to buy one of these "2.0" machines with DRM, I'd just not buy a Keurig machine.
- anon4 12y ago
  Or put the sticker over the sensor. Or hotwire the sensor (caution: voids your warranty).
ginko 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade should apply here.
nicholassmith 12y ago
Somewhere a Keurig engineer has gone 'shit'. As far as I know the law for Europe, you're not allowed to use another companies logo form on a commercial product without prior agreement, which is why clothing houses like to heavily brand their items as they can't prevent a competitor from stealing the cut of the item but they can prevent them from using a logo.

takemikazuchi 12y ago

sasoon 12y ago

I do not understand why is anyone buying machines with pods. Expensive machine, expensive coffee, and creating garbage for each cup. Is it so hard to put teaspoon of coffee in cup and pour hot water?

Shivetya 12y ago
Its simple, its clean, and convenient. There are many makers of k-cups to choose from so finding an acceptable cup of coffee made this way isn't too hard. I went through a few variety packs, read reviews on Amazon and the like, to narrow my choices. I then used Amazon's subscribe and save feature, visits to slick deals, and even my costco membership, to buy k-cups are good prices. During summer my coffee drinking goes down and the ability to just make one cup is great. Cooler months and its time for the Bonavita, sometimes its good when friends want some but even then I have dropped back to the k-cup.
gambiting 12y ago
I only agree with the "expensive coffee" part. I've got a tassimo machine which has capsules for both coffee and milk - you use both,and it makes delicious latte, much better than I would be able to do myself - at least not without frothing milk, which is messy and I would rather not do it. The machine itself was $40 which is hardly expensive, and the coffee is most absolutely not garbage. And the convenience is huge. It could be cheaper, but it works out at something like $0.80 per cup, which I am ok with, since I rarely drink more than 1 cup a day anyway.

jrs235 12y ago

Couldn't someone just cut the top off or take the foil off a legit k cup and place it on top of a non legit one then run the machine? This would cost the non legit companies less... Not having to retool production. Just tell the consumer what to do or include a special cover.

JadeNB 12y ago

The author's confidence in common sense is touching: > It's still too early to tell, but the fact that Keurig's “DRM” can be cracked with such ease doesn't seem to bode well for the company. > So that's one reason Keurig might be in trouble: because it bet everything on imposing a technological barrier which turned out to be ridiculously easy to get around. Err, so easily crackable DRM will not survive legal challenges? (I seem to remember a story, which my Google-fu is insufficient to recover, of someone embarrassing Jack Palance during an interview by showing him the complete DeCSS source ….)

forceblast 12y ago

I have no idea why anyone would put up with drm and pay such a ridiculous price for such terrible "coffee."