Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker | Hacker News Reader

Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker

techdirt.com

133 pointsmidnitewarrior177 comments

This case doesn't have anything to do with DRM as the title suggest. It's more clear in the article: "the java-bean equivalent of DRM". As far as I can tell it's actually just allegations of patent abuse and anti-competitive vertical integration.

Keurig had a patent on the technology for both machine and pod. That patent expired in 2012, allowing third-party vendors to start making pods. Treehouse Foods argues (among other things) that Keurig is changing the design of their machine and the pods. The allegation is that the new design doesn't have any practical purpose other than to maintain the patent on pods for several years.

If true, this is going to be an interesting case. Keurig can change the design of their machine whenever they want in theory, but can they do so for no other reason than to maintain their own market share? They'd be effectively forcing everyone to pay them to compete at all so long as people buy new machines.

Drug companies often employ similar patent tricks in order to maintain their dominance of a market via extended patents, patents on new uses for the same chemical, and slightly-altered and somewhat improved chemicals. Consumer groups have complained about this for years, but nothing serious has changed yet.

It might end up just being a new shape but the CEO's wording implies that it will be closer to what is used in printer ink cartridges. Following the trail from the submitted article to the article it links to and to the article that one links to finally takes us to the transcript of the CEO's earnings call: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1853341-green-mountain-coffe...

"While we're still not willing to discuss specifics about the platform for competitive reasons, we are confident it delivers game-changing performance. To ensure the system delivers on the promise of excellent quality beverages produced simply and consistently every brew every time, we use interactive technology to help us perfectly brew all Keurig brew packs. Because of this the system will not brew unlicensed packs."

Game changing performance, allowing us to leverage further synchronicity, making a win-win for everybody involved.

I'll circle back to you next week on the details.....

It's. A fucking. Coffeepot.

I bet it doesn't even comply with RFC 2324 either.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324

You know, if someone actually built one of those, I'd probably have to convince our CFO to buy it.

It's actually trivial, just make a teapot that responds to every request with 418 - I'm a teapot.

It won't make coffee, but it will comply with RFC 2324

Buy an Arduino Ethernet and make it respond with HTTP/1.1 418 for every request ;).

Or get it to local Hackerspace, they might make it actually work ;).

To ensure the system delivers on the promise of excellent quality beverages produced simply and consistently every brew every time, we use interactive technology to help us perfectly brew all Keurig brew packs.

This sounds remarkably similar to Tassimo's bar code system on the surface.

Which in turn sounds remarkably similar to the barcodes and the pattern of aluminum pads (which were read out by spring contacts that sensed the electrical conductivity) on 35mm film cartridges.

And this is why we got one of the little cups that let you put any coffee in there :)

"Keurig can change the design of their machine whenever they want in theory, but can they do so for no other reason than to maintain their own market share?"

That's a pretty simple issue to resolve. Yes, Keurig should be able to change their own product at will. Whether it's to maintain their market share or just for fun is irrelevant. If you get into the business of regulating coffee companies based on intentions related to subtle design changes and guessing whether it's directed at maintaining market share, what you'll have is a ridiculous government/business nightmare.

An attempt to generate a new patent from the trivial product change should be denied. Problem solved.

If the patent is expired, one wonders if some company may reverse engineer the Keurig 1.0 design, and continue their manufacture (along with all the factories that are already tooled for the 1.0 cups.)

If the patent is expired, then reverse engineering had better not be necessary, or else the original patent was insufficiently detailed to be valid.

A patent details the key concepts, it's not like downloading a project from github and building it. With something mechanical, even more so. There won't be CAD files of the device uploaded with the patent, let alone tooling designs to produce the device. So there's plenty of reverse engineering to do even if the patent is expired.

The patent was required to be sufficiently detailed to allow producing compatible cups? I don't think so.

Isn't that the point of a patent?

Well, yeah.

However it has also been the game with patents to use as obtuse and as confusing and as little detail to get the patent while making sure people can't reproduce it.

So yeah, we get the worst of both worlds: money extraction of exclusivity and lack of understanding that patents were supposed to solve.

I haven't read the patent, but I assume Keurig patents a way to improve cups in some obscure way that probably doesn't matter but for which they can claim novelty. Their patent must explain how to implement this "improvement". Now, in order to be compatible with a Keurig machine, you must implement this "improvement", which is really the point of the "improvement" in the first place and why I keep putting it in quotes. But compatibility with a Keurig machine is not what's patented and there can be plenty of other undisclosed details that prevent someone from making Keurig compatible coffee cups.

Isn't this standard practice in other industries too? Change something so slightly, simply to hold on to copyright/patent?

I actively try to dissuade people from buying Keurig machines, or any "coffee pod" machine and this is just another reason why. Aside from the fact that the coffee is watery, the pods just add such an unnecessary amount of garbage to something that doesn't need to generate any waste.

I think the concept is cool but re-usable pods are the way to go. This is stupid of Keurig.

I waste 7 pounds of petroleum driving to work, and .01 lbs from my morning k-cup. My time has value, and I am not going to waste it greenwashing.

I have a Breville machine that allows you to pour in a heap of coffee beans, and it grinds and automatically fills the filter with your desired strength based on how much water you put in the machine. I believe they also make one that has a water reservoir that you periodically fill and you can just dial in a cup amount and it does everything else for you.

I've been pretty happy with it since I get fresh ground coffee and don't need to measure it. You still have to clean the filter after every use, but really it takes me less than 60 seconds to clean out the filter and fill the machine with water. Grinding the coffee and measuring it out manually was the biggest bottleneck in my daily coffee routine, so the Breville has at least eliminated that step.

Now if I could only plumb water directly to it...

60 seconds to clean isn't nothing. Changing the keurig pods takes less than 3 seconds.

It might make me lazy, but every second I am not cleaning my coffee device I can be doing something else.

If optimizing 57 seconds of your day makes such a drastic difference, you are doing a vast number of things wrong.

I don't think the parent implied it was drastic.

How does it make sense to project that calculation onto another person to begin with? Their time is not yours, and every person values their time differently. It means your statement of them doing a vast number of things wrong must inherently be false, because there is no objective "wrong" there.

The comment is certainly a bit overgeneralized, but it raises some important points.

I've been a "time-peeler" for a large part of my life, and when I stopped being such, I became way more productive. This happened because I started to waste less and less time on things which didn't really matter.

In certain cultures where most of the people watches TV, for hours every day (in average), then you start to see what's wrong with saving 57 seconds.

In addition to that, somebody pointed that the structure is incredibly wasteful. For some reason, there's this widespread vision of sustainability where the responsibility is somebody else's. If this is not accepted in simple things at the bottom, where should it starts from?

In this terms, the comments make sense, although of course, it's not possible to say if it applies to a given person.

With these things in mind, while there are no "objective wrongs", in the big perspective, there are objective foolishnesses, to say the least.

This. Plus I have yet to see any non-pod-style coffee machine that can competently make one cup at a time.

I have the previous version of the Delongi Primadonna[1]. Fully automatic - you attache the milk frother, pour some beans in, it grinds them and makes the coffee.

Previously I had the Nespresso Lattissima Premium[2] (the top-of-the line pod machine). I liked the Nespresso coffee fine, but the Primadonna makes better coffee and is no more trouble to use (It's also twice the price...).

The clean up is exactly the same for both machines - you press a button to run steam though the milk frother, detach it and put it in the refrigerator. You press the "rinse" button and it runs water through the coffee system to clean that.

~Once a week you empty the grounds container or the empty pods container.

The one trick is to only put as many beans as you a planning on using immediatly in the bean dispenser. It can take a lot more, but as they get exposed for longer they get more bitter.

[1] http://www.delonghi.com/en-AU/products/coffee/coffee-makers/...

[2] http://www.delonghi.com/en-AU/products/coffee/coffee-makers/...

I have a manual grinder and an Aeropress. Making one cup at a time is easy, and the taste is superior to pod-style coffee in my opinion.

The time I spend grinding the coffee is part of the enjoyment.

I just got an Aeropress and it's very nice--smoothest coffee I've ever tasted. Slightly more fiddly preparation compared to a pour-over or press, but worth the effort.

Really?

http://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/bbbb918e28fa404b836...

I much prefer that machine to the crappy k-cup machines.

Hard to tell what machine that is from just a tiny photo.

Soz for the smal shot.

Basically it's a machine with 3 compartments:

Coffee, Decaf Hot Chocolate

And you can push a button, it grinds, and outputs your cup.

I prefer it vastly to the k-cups.

Never heard of the aeropress before. Will have to try it. Thanks for the tip!

Which ones have you tried? Any Jura machine will do the job and produce better, fresher coffee than a pre-ground pod. The upfront cost is substantially more, however; they start at about $800.

what's the freshest you can have your coffee? If a could have my way (which frequently I can) I'd always have 1-2 day old beans. I'd take beans still warm from roasting over those older than 3-4.

Automatic coffee machines exist and take no longer than pod machines to make the coffee or to clean up.

They do tend to be more expensive though.

It's less than 60 to clean and fill with water. The water takes longer than the cleaning. Really, if I want to be lazy and dump the grounds in the sink disposal, it would take about 10 seconds to clean.

... but every second I am not cleaning my coffee device I can be doing something else.

Like, picking your nose?

I have a de longhi machine. It's our favourite appliance. Pays for itself easily.

http://www.delonghi.com/en-US/products/coffee-and-espresso/c...

At the place I used to work we had one similar (I think Delonghi), except it automatically cleaned the filter. Every so often you would have to empty the tank of used grounds, but other than that it was just a case of finding a cup and pressing the button. It cost about $1000 mind...

> I waste 7 pounds of petroleum driving to work

Yes... that is also a problem.

That's about a gallon and change. Depending on your drive that might not be too bad.

25-30 miles is right on the cusp of "an unmanageably long commute", to me. Especially if anything goes wrong.

Then use a reusable keurig pod and get both the benefits of fast coffee and less waste.

Unless, of course, your time is so valuable that you can't even spare the 15 seconds it takes to wash the reusable pod.

The needy baby is the bigger issue, not the time. She also likes pressing the button on the machine.

Making an espresso with a mostly manual machine is an enjoyable once or twice-daily ritual for me. The flavour is most important, but I actually enjoy the time spent making the coffee. However, each person may value the various aspects of caffeine consumption differently.

Far better coffee with roughly equivalent hassles: http://www.sweetmarias.com/clevercoffeedripperpictorial.php

Thanks, that is a good suggestion. It takes 5 minutes instead of 15 seconds. I'll give that try using the Keurig machine for hot water. The Keurig coffee is definitely mediocre.

Definitely doesn't do away with waste, although compostable paper filters are better than plastic pods (unless the pods can be composted?)

Most people just throw away those compostable paper filters and they wind up buried in an oxygen deprived environment where they will never biodegrade. I wonder which one compresses into smaller land fill space: the paper filter or the plastic k-cup.

We're hippies so we use an organic cotton one, unless it's 4am and it's dirty we have backup paper filters.

That's a good one.

Also try the AeroPress: faster brew, smaller filters (reusable metal available), fast clean, excellent results.

> My time has value

Well, aren't you special? There's no difference in time spent using a standard all-in-one grinder/coffeemaker vs. a Keurig, and the results are going to be better-tasting.

> I waste 7 pounds of petroleum driving to work .. My time has value

Why do you value time in the car (or monster truck) so highly?

Incidentally, a gallon of gas seems to weigh about 6 pounds. So 7 pounds is a bit over a gallon, which probably gets you around 30 miles or so in an average car with decent fuel economy. On the commuting statistics I can find, look like around 8% of Americans commute about that far. So OP is probably a standard deviation or so past average for either distance or fuel economy, but nothing crazy.

Assuming he didn't just make up the weight number, of course.

Yeah, I don't think it is odd for an American in general just in the context of valuing time.

You don't think about the 30-60 minutes in the car because you are sitting there killing yourself faster, but wasting less bodily energy than sleeping.

The time spent making coffee is probably good for your lifespan, but standing around, moving and cleaning things feels bad for us lazy apes..

I was trying to use the US average. A 15 mile commute each way is about 1 gallon of gas per day. I thought that was 7 lbs, but my memory was incorrect as that is the density of diesel/jet fuel. Gasoline is closer to 6 lbs per gallon as you say.

How is using a good old coffee maker with beans a waste of time? You're getting better coffee and you're only spending a minute on brewing.

Well part of the problem is the claim about better.

Craft beers are superior to generic domestic lite beers, right? No, it's strictly subjective to every individual's preference.

I've known some people that prefer cheap or generic coffee, made in a clunky old coffee pot, slightly burnt. Is their taste wrong / worse / inferior? It can't be, it's their taste.

Well if taste is your only metric, we can probably conclude that perception is _less_ objective than one which factors in freshness of beans (oxidation), amount of mycotoxins, waste, etc.

Interesting that you view it that way. I also compare my convenience to time, and every time I use a plastic container I think about how it came from peat that was built up over millions of years and took a certain amount of energy and fuel to travel across oceans to reach me in final product form and now I will handle it for approximately 15 seconds and it will proceed to the landfill where it will stay for a few hundred years and outlive my children's children.

If you can afford a Jura, they're just as easy as a Keurig, better tasting, and a much less wasteful. You can use any beans you want, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Jura-13626-Ena-Micro-1/dp/B008RZFQKO/r...

At four cups per day it pays for itself in about two years.

I guess value is relative. I prefer good coffee and preparing it is part of the experience.

It's like writing this comment on HN, what value does it bring to you ?

I was referencing the "actively dissuade" part.

I don't mind if people adopt environmentalism as a religion where all trash is a sin, I just don't want to be a part of it. I want to think about environmental impact broadly and go after the high impact items. Talking about K-Cup trash is a distraction from what is important.

So you're saying that you're going to stop burning so much petroleum to get to work, and to do that you have to ignore anything that you do that has a lesser impact on the environment?

I can't say that I understand the single-mindedness, but congratulations on the electric car or the not commuting so far or whatever.

Unless what you're saying is that you're going to ignore everything that pollutes less than the important high-impact items that you're also going to ignore.

Yes. I use logic and reasoning and order of magnitude estimation to think about environmental impact.

I also think people who obsess over polyethylene grocery bags are bad at math. Unfortunately, many of these people manage to influence public policy to my inconvenience. It is religion, not science.

I am sure there are some who claim the small amount of oil that went into the production of a grocery bag is a problem, but my impression in general was that they were being legislated away in many places because of littering, hazards to wildlife, etc., and not so much that they are wasteful of fossil fuels.

I'm afraid it's an inherently proselytizing religion.

The restrictions on minor consumer items are a penitential hairshirt.

I think your "big-picturism" bypasses the immediate absurdity of consumer environmentalism, but leaves the deeper contradiction untouched.

"Rational" environmentalism implies some cost/benefit analysis. Is it "bad" for one person to burn 100 gallons of gas per day in his commute? Is it "ok" for 100 persons to burn the same amount? What if the one person produces as much "benefit" as the 100 persons? Who gets to define benefit?

Yeah. I have a nice burr grinder, and I loved the ritual of preparing coffee every morning. Then I had a baby. The Keurig machine we got as a Christmas present two years before got pulled out of the closet, and we've been pod people ever since.

20 mins a week roasting beans (10 mins a batch), and a morning ritual of espresso making and then drinking. Id have it no other way.

Chemex[1] is hard to beat. I recommend it to all of my aspiring coffee-aficionado friends. Easy[2], inexpensive, and very high quality.

1: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/ristretto-chem...

2: http://www.bluebottlecoffee.com/preparation-guides/chemex

Shame about the name -makes me think it's something for the car or to unblock a really stubborn drain.

Just ordered a Chemex for the office today. We're probably gonna take the Keurig and dump it on the New York streets to fend for itself. Not because of this news, just because it's such a hunk of shit.

The new pods (Keurig Vue pods) are recyclable[1]. Also, I don't care too much about my coffee taste, so it does a great job getting my caffeine with coffee flavor, especially when I'm the only person in the house that drinks coffee.

[1] http://www.vuerecycling.com/

Honest question: If you don't care about the coffee taste, why not drink a glass of water and pop a caffeine pill?

Or Coke (and a caffeine pill), or whatever you prefer. Bad coffee is a perplexing choice.

Thermogenic diet pills are crap for direct weightloss but they are effectively an energy drink in pill form without the water or sugar.

Well, I partially like the taste of Keurig coffee. I can drink keurig coffee, or fancy coffee shop coffee and they end up tasting pretty close to the same for me. I like having a hot beverage with a bit of flavor, but I'm not all that picky about the flavor.

You and me both, brother. The coffee infused taste of cream and sweetener and vanilla is what makes my morning.

Thank you for having the honesty to say what I've been ashamed to admit all these years.

While my instinct is to agree with you, I suspect the waste and emissions from producing and transporting the coffee greatly outweigh those from the half-ounce plastic container .

I think Keurig coffee is terrible, so I've never seen one of the reusable pods. But what's the point, if you are going reusable isn't it just as easy to make a normal cup of coffee?

I've only seen 1 legitimate use for a Keurig machine. My company's office used to be on the 9th floor of a very old building (built in 1914). The plumbing is subpar and our office had no sink, despite being otherwise very nice. Having a regular coffee maker would mean cleaning it in the only restroom on our floor, which was a women's room. So we got a keurig.

Exactly. We have no sink or restroom on our "floor." (It's a floor between the first and second floors of an old warehouse.) They have a Keurig and bring gallon jugs of water. To clean a regular coffee maker would mean walking down the stairs and halfway across the building.

Along the same lines, I've seen a lot of touring light & sound techs put a coffee pod machine in their tool roadcase, so they can have good coffee right by the stage / mix position.

Keurig coffee is terrible. It violates two of the most important principles of making good coffee: time and pressure. Making good coffee in 3 seconds with a ton of pressure that destroys the bean is impossible. 10 seconds of extraction at the pressure that Keurig does it at will only ever yield flavors of "burnt" and "chocolatey-ish-I-think?"

While I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate given that I don't like Keurig coffee much, your numbers are so far off that you're being kind of unfair. It takes about 35 seconds to brew an eight-ounce cup of coffee, not ten seconds (or three!), and AFAIK only uses about 1.5 bars of pressure, hardly enough to "destroy the bean." This isn't that far off from the speed and pressure that an Aeropress brews with, and it's really a fairly comparable method.

"But (nearly) everybody loves the Aeropress! It can't be comparable!"

I'd argue the Keurig's weak spot is not the brewing methodology, it's the coffee itself. The K-Cups are sealed with nitrogen and do their best to stay fresh, but no matter how many tricks you use to try and preserve the flavor of coffee that was ground three months before you brew it, it's going to take a massive quality hit -- and y weren't starting with beans that would bowl a coffee snob over in the first place. When I actually used the correct amount of fresh ground coffee from a good roaster, though, it produced a surprisingly good cup of coffee. And I've cut open a K-Cup and brewed the coffee within using a French Press; what came out tasted, well, a lot like what you'd expect out of a Keurig, just s slightly grittier.

(Then the pump broke and I bought a Chemex and lived happily ever after. The end.)

I actually don't like aeropress either. I found it convenient to use early on in my coffee obsession days but I find it has several flaws. The two biggest in my opinion are the filter actually being too good at filtering and the body of the aeropress dissipating heat poorly.

I use the Chemex when we have company over, it's the best combination of quantity and quality that I have found so far. As for one to two servings, I swear by the Kalita Wave[0]

0 - http://kalita-usa.com/wave_series.html

I do like the Aeropress, although it took me a while to decide that. My quibble with it was that I tend to brew twelve-ounce cups and it really doesn't seem to be that good at that. (And I think I know what you mean about the filter.)

I've heard good things about the Kalita Wave, but I'm not sure I want to add another coffee brewing device to the collection at this point. :)

And for the rest of us that are not coffee snobs, the Keurig is a great way to get a consistently good cup of coffee without wasting time and effort that could be better spent doing something else.

A consistently mediocre cup of coffee. I drink it every day, but it doesn't fool me into thinking it's good coffee.

Actually, by the time I put in my creamer and sugar it tastes damned good. The thing is, taste is completely subjective. I couldn't give a rat's about all the subtleties of coffee. Same for wine. I want something that tastes fine to my unsophisticated palate and I want it with minimal fuss.

This actually reminded me of a friend of my father. This friend was a chef at some over-the-top fancy (or in my book, prissy) restaurants in his heyday. Anyway he pretty much lost the ability to just eat and enjoy food because he would constantly judge it. If I recall, he would generally just eat some bread and some cured meat for most of his meals. I honestly imagine he would jump over a chance to have Soylent. My thought on the matter is that if I ever get my head that far up my ass that I can't enjoy something that tastes good because of some stupid ideal of what something "should" be, well then I've seriously screwed myself over.

I've never heard this "pressure destroys the bean" theory.

Are you claiming all espresso is burnt or chocolatey?

Espresso machines are designed much differently and as accordingly they are several hundred to several thousand dollars. Really you're looking at $1000 and up for a decent espresso machine in my opinion. And don't even get me started on the amount of skill it requires to pull good espresso shots consistently. Between grind size, tamp, the bean and altitude you have a lot to deal with.

It's because it is also linked to temperature, the higher your pressure the higher your boiling point. It also effects how fast the fluid travels through the ground coffee which effects not just how strong it is but also can have an effect on the balance of what has diffused from the ground and various other characteristics.

There's a lot that can go into making a good cup of coffee. New Zealand (where I'm from) has one of the higher coffee shops per capita in the world (mostly non chain) and you may be surprised how much a coffee can change from barista to barista even using the same beans in the same shop. If you're spending the money every day on that little moment of luxury you can notice the difference. (Whether or not it's suffering from the same biases in experience as expensive wine can I'll leave for someone else to speak on).

Yes! The one with the tattoos always makes the best coffee. If 2 have tattoos, the grumpy one does it better. Once you do your own espresso for a while it become a ritual such that extraction can be very consistent.

I don't know about the other folks hanging around these parts, but I'll go along with that claim. It's also caffeine deficient.

I have a Keurig but buy my "pods" from various other sources which are cheaper. I think they taste good in general and are very consistent and quick to make.

Other than the 2 reasons you mentioned, why else would you dissuade someone from buying one? I own one and don't mind the coffee. I agree with the garbage aspect, but for me I'd either buy a coffee everyday, or make one in the Keurig with a reusable cup. Equivalent waste in my mind (for my situation)

They appear to have the tendency to fail at around 18 months, even if they undergo routine, recommended maintenance.

Got a Keurig for my wife as a Christmas present three years ago. Generated about 10 cups of coffee per week, and was very happy with the product. Performed the de-scaling maintenance regularly....still broke down after about a year and a half. Went online to see how to repair it, and wasn't encouraged by the number of similar stories.

I see. It's bad, but when I read "fail around 18 months" I think to myself "I only paid $60 for my Keurig, 18 months sounds pretty good."

I guess the manufacturing giants have succeeded in making us believe electronic consumer goods shouldn't last long.

Wow, I feel like a lucky man! I bought one of the low-end models for ~$110 3 years ago, have used it making 8-10 cups a day between my wife and me with the re-usable plastic cups, and it's still going strong!

I understand the concept of cheap/fast/good - pick any 2; but K-cups are only one (fast.) The cost per cup is significantly more than traditional brewing and I find the output to be undrinkable. There are better solutions. I have a drip coffee maker that brews into a travel mug in about 5 minutes. Are you sure that the saved 4 minutes is worth the extra money and poor flavor?

2/3 of those are subjective and in reality for me personally, the Keurig meets 3/3.

"Good" - Keurig coffee is good enough for me. I don't think I have the palate to discern the difference between my K-cup and the $7/cup coffee in the high end cafes.

"Cheap" - I don't have the time to prepare drip coffee in the morning (or prepare the night before) so for me it's either Kcup or purchase at work. So Keurig is the cheapest option for me.

I have to second the cheap. I can either make a full pot of coffee for ~$2-3/pot or I can make a single cup for ~$.75/cup. I understand it might not be the best bang for my buck but I'm only interested in drinking one cup so it's pretty cost effective in my eyes.

Waste from a traditional coffee maker is biodegradable or compostable (paper filter, coffee grinds). Coffee pods combine that with foil and plastic, to make it practically impossible to separate and dispose of in an environmentally friendly manner.

Keurig machines do have reusable pods.

For people whose main complaint is watery coffee, but are not opposed to pod systems in general, try Nespresso. I find them a lot better than the coffee I have had from Keurig and Starbucks machines.

The coffee is pretty good -- better than most coffee shops, but not as good as a great one. Apparently they are actually used by a lot of restaurants when you order a coffee.

I have a Lavazza machine from AEG. The coffee is amazing, so the pods don't bother me anymore than my printer cartridges that I can only buy from Epson. It's a hoop I jump through because the perceived value obtained is worth it.

Conversely, I drive a 3.0 CSL because I won't drive something with a chip in it that I can't control.

M3 CSL? Jesus you have my dream car.

Unless you have an e9. If that's the case, my jealousy just went through the roof.

It's an E9. It's one of the 500 right-hand drive variants exported to the UK so has the stock E9 bumpers (pity) and soundproofing (happily).

I just use ground coffee in the cup-sized filter. My wife and I wake up at different times so this prevents wasted coffee without the pods.

to something that doesn't need to generate any waste.

What do you consider used coffee grounds? Product?

In Spain a company is using them to make a kit for having your own mushrooms at home and then reuse it (again) as compost : http://www.resetea.es/#!el-kit/cgmn (sorry only in spanish and the google translate wasn't working)

Used coffee grounds are great compost, and are good as a scouring agent for pots and pans or to scrub off dead skin and stronger odors (garlic, onion) from your hands. Out of everything that ends up in your trash can, they're one of the last things to truly be "waste".

Yes - they make great compost.

Mine doesn't come out watery.

Keurig is free to do what they want, just as a consumer is free to choose whichever coffee maker they want.

Maybe this will blow up in their face, or perhaps given their market share it will all work out.

This practice isn't what copyright was intended for when it was written into the constitution. The idea is that copyright is a time-limited monopoly to make money of immaterial property, it mustn't serve to lock out the secondary market for printer cartridges and coffee.

There is no indication that copyright is the mechanism here. What copyright was intended for is not remotely relevant.

The way it should work is, Keurig should be able to do whatever they want in terms of DRM on their hardware, and other companies should be able to do whatever they want in terms of reverse engineering that DRM to produce compatible products.

I don't know if that's how the law actually is, but it sounds like it might be.

With the DMCA it is illegal for competitors to reverse engineer the DRM to produce compatible products.

It's illegal for them to reverse engineer (and reimplement) hardware DRM for interoperability, but software DRM circumvention is protected by DMCA, only for the purpose of interoperability.

In my jurisdiction, interoperability is a valid legal reason to ignore copyright restriction. Actually, I believe that none of the current global copyright agreements would prohibit anyone from distributing products that flagrantly circumvent that DRM, there's only the USA-specific DMCA.

> Keurig is free to do what they want, just as a consumer is free to choose whichever coffee maker they want.

The issue isn't whether Keurig should be free to add DRM to their product or not. The issue is whether they should be able to use the law to prevent competitors from circumventing that DRM. Printer manufacturers tried a similar stunt with adding DRM to printer cartridges and suing the makers of after-market cartridges for DMCA violations.

IIRC, the EU took a different view on printers and printer cartridges. Those can no longer be 'DRMed'. I don't see why they would take a different view with coffee machines.

To add to this, manufacturing and ultimately disposing of all these units carries costs that are not entirely reflected in their price. (Limited resources, pollution, etc.)

Designs that deliberately hinder their performance and perhaps artificially shorten their lifespan, may be viewed as against the public good -- especially if and as this becomes standard practice across a range of products.

Society may indeed decide that they are not "free to do as they please", in this respect. Just like your car is required to have adequate passenger restraint systems, and many other conditions that are "imposed".

Ah, but the question is whether the consumer is free to choose whichever coffee maker REFILL they want.

The ethical and legal question is whether there's a good reason why Keurig should be allowed to forbid anyone else from manufacturing compatible refills (if they want to) or forbid customers from buying these refills (if they want to). As far as US law is concerned, do you think that prohibiting the manufacture of these compatible refills will "promote the progress of science and useful arts"? Because that is what Keurig is (effectively) claiming by relying on copyright law in this way.

I'm not sure why they would attempt this. If they think they're going to get DMCA protection out of it, Lexmark already lost a case that seems to be this exactly:

Lexmark Int'l v. Static Control Components http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control...

All they can do is make it harder for competitors to make compatible cups, but that sounds like a fool's errand.

IANAL but the Lexmark case doesn't seem like it necessarily says the DMCA doesn't apply to physical products, just that it doesn't apply in the way that Lexmark implemented it. Also isn't part of the case still pending decision of the Supreme Court?

I feel completely out-nerded here. I shall just spoon some fine ground coffee from the local shop into my moka pot tomorrow and pop it on the hotplate.

As others have said, I actually like the reflective few minutes the process takes early in the morning with the back door open...

I'm guessing that you live someplace where, unlike where I am, the temperature outside the back door is warmer than -15F ;-)

UK: Spring like weather at present, an invigorating 5 degrees C this morning at 7am.

Regular Coffee: Grounds inside a tin can you scoop. Depending on your process, a thin paper filter. Coffee to volume is very dense for shipping.

Pod Coffee: Single use plastic pods with a foil lid inside a plastic bag inside a cardboard box. Coffee to volume is very sparse for shipping.

The benefit of not having to use a spoon is worth all the extra trash? Now with DRM?

Living up to your username there.

Well, if you like coffee and are in the US (or Canada maybe now, I'm not sure) I'd recommend checking out Tonx (www.tonx.org) I've been subscribed for about a year and a half now and can say that I really love everything they send us.

It's not going to get you some instant Keurig coffee but honestly you don't have 10 minutes in the morning to brew something decent? Like put it on and then get dressed or something.

So what is an option for easily brewing a single cup of coffee without pods that will lock you into a specific machine? The things that I like about my Keurig are that you can get 4 to 6 cups before having to refill the water tank and that it’s easy to clean. While I don’t mind having to throw away a filter I would like to avoid having to refill a machine with water every time I want another cup of coffee.

French press. 0% packaging garbage, extracts 100% of the good of coffee. Numerous suppliers. Compatible with any hot water devices and coffee packaging. Larger models are easily configured to produce single or several cup amounts. Portable models can get you out the door as soon as the water is hot and you can drink on the way.

Clean up takes a little longer than hand-dripping, though.

This. You can even get travel mugs with the press bit built in. -eg: http://www.bodum.com/gb/en-us/shop/detail/K11102-01/

A modern electric kettle + small cup-sized drip cone / french press?

Modern electric kettles are awesome, they're insulated so can keep the water at the perfect temperature for ages... most have a "90degC" setting that's right for coffee. They're perfectly suited to cup-at-a-time usage (and often have a form-factor designed for dispensing into a cup without lifting the kettle).

I use a drip-cone on top of my cup, and love it... :]

[Offhand, this seems like such a simple task that complex and expensive solutions like the Keurig seem a bit silly, unless they yield clearly superior results—which the Keurig apparently doesn't....]

What a lot of people are ignoring deliberately is that Keurig offers convenience. Pop in the pod and push a button and coffee is ready in a minute. In that minute, I can either do nothing, or make a sandwich for lunch, or go tie my shoes so I can grab the coffee and run when it's done.

I don't think anyone is buying these things for their quality, but it's a quick, one stop method of getting acceptable coffee.

I don't think people are ignoring it so much as doubting its real worth. Sure it's a bit more convenient, but the question is whether there's enough of a difference to be worth the downsides. Given hot water, the effort of sticking a filter paper in a cone, adding some coffee, and pouring water over it isn't particularly great...

[If you want to grind the beans for better taste, that's of course a bit more effort, but not something the keurig offers anyway.]

The Aeropress is a great device for brewing a single cup of real coffee.

I'd be interested in knowing of a Keurig alternative as well. I realize everyone in here is saying the coffee is terrible, but frankly it's good enough for me. If that makes me a philistine, so be it. Personally, the convenience trumps a lot of other factors when it comes to coffee.

The current machines will continue to work, and have a large ecosystem of coffee pods available.

I've had mine for two years. If it breaks I'd consider getting something else to replace it out of principle.

I could never justify the cost of a Keurig when a traditional coffee maker costs just 20% the price. After using a drip machine for many years I finally decided to brave a more unique solution, the Aeropress. Now I know what great coffee tastes like. I tried a Keurig equivalent recently and I can't believe how much worse it tastes. With a Keurig you pay a premium price for poor quality coffee.

For me, my Keurig is a combination of speed, convenience and utility. The coffee it makes is a method for caffeine delivery, not coffee enjoyment. On the weekends or when I have more time, I'll make a better cup of coffee. Monday morning when I'm trying to get to work, I'll grab a travel mug of Keurig.

I suppose that one of the benefits of not drinking coffee is not needing to worry about all of this.

The lunch room at the office has a Keurig machine and it gets jammed a lot because of the air pressure differential (Denver is at 5200 feet). If you don't properly puncture the package when you insert it, the air pressure causes something to go wrong and the machine jams up.

Good luck to them. Their coffee machines/designs are horrible. Hopefully this will cost them a huge market share and people will drink less plastic.

http://www.coffeedetective.com/is-the-plastic-used-in-keurig...

So now I have to ONLY buy approved pods so I can drink coffee and tea that tastes like shit? No thanks. I'll keep buying my whole bean and using my AeroPress. Not as convenient but they're also not greedy doucecopters.

This strategy seems kind of backwards to me. Keurig isn't a dominant household appliance marketer using that position to jumpstart a lucrative tie-in sideline. While that would be regrettable for consumers, it might actually work for the marketer. Rather, they are a food marketer who will attempt to defend their "primary" business with a tenuous temporary lead in a kitchen appliance category. How long will it be until Hamilton-Beach, Panasonic, Oster, or KitchenAid notice this market oddity and stomp them flat? Maybe Keurig should just roast better coffee?

Well, that's disgusting. Like printer cartridge vendors.

Luckily, this applies only to pods and guess probably can't do anything like that with the machines using whole beans.

This reminds me very much of the situation we had here in Switzerland. Two years ago Nestle's Swiss patent on their capsules expired, so now the market gets flooded with third party 'compatible' capsules. Lately they've introduced new Nespresso machines that automatically eject the used capsules using an electric motor. This has introduced much smaller tolerances, so the machine often gets stuck on third party capsules.

I think I'll stick to my Chemex and compost my grounds.

>third-party pod refills that often retail for 5-25% less than what Keurig charges

How expensive are these pods? I certainly understand going generic to save 25% but a K-cup machine strikes me as a premium product. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd think the people willing/able to pay extra for a high end coffee maker wouldn't waste time experimenting with generics to save 5% (what, a couple cents a cup at most?).

It's about convenience. Also consider that many workplaces provide the Keurig machine in common areas (kitchens, cafeterias) for employees to use their own k-cups with. One of my former employers actually had a contract with their vending machine provider where the Keurig machines were provided for free, but they were required to purchase a minimum monthly k-cup amount from the vendor.

The reasoning was that "a lot of coffee is being thrown out in the afternoon", so they wanted to cut waste by using the Keurig machine in the afternoon when fewer people were making coffee. When you actually do the math, an entire pot of coffee (10 cups) cost the same as a single Keurig cup. The logic didn't seem very sound to me, and I suspect it had more to do with the convenience of making a single cup and not having to clean up after yourself.

The k-cups cost about 30 to 50 cents each, unless you buy thousands of them.

Many of the third-party pods for these kinds of machines aren't exactly downmarket, they just have less of a markup than the official ones.

Didn't their patent on the keurig machines expire recently? These machines were invented decades ago, only hitting mainstream in the last 5 years.

Yup. Hence this move - they still want to be the only ones selling K-cups.

After the patents expired, I noticed that Kroger released their own "Simple Truth" coffee pods that are the smaller, paper-lined ones that you can recycle. Oh, they also taste better than the Keurig K-Cups.

"Such lock-out technology cannot be justified based on any purported consumer benefit, and Green Mountain itself has admitted that the lock-out technology is not essential for the new brewers’ function. Like its exclusionary agreements, this lock-out technology is intended to serve anticompetitive and unlawful ends."

This is not different from any other DRM mechanism. Unfortunately, that also makes it legal.

Well, I guess it's back to the good old coffee machines, then.

Does anyone know of a source for generic K-Cups that are decent quality? I seriously thought about doing it as a startup as it seemed untapped when I was looking.

This may not be what you're asking, but my wife and I have found that San Francisco Bay's single serve coffees[1] are quite good (better than most K-cups) and are cheaper since they don't use Keurig's design. A win-win from our perspective.

We buy them at Costco.

[1] http://www.sanfranciscobaycoffee.com/index.php/thoughts-on-o...

I'm pretty sure this is the one I bought for my coffee maker, works great, never had an issue. Be sure to check to see if your model is compatible.

http://smile.amazon.com/Ekobrew-Refillable-Keurig-Brewers-1-...

...and now, nobody technical will buy one.

I believe both Tassimo and the "Nespresso" already have DRM, although they pitch it under the premise that it's a coded system for the perfect brew.

So in many ways the Keurig is late to the party.

Chris R. Chapman did some reversing work on the Tassimo barcodes - could be a fun read: http://www.chapmanconsulting.ca/post/2007/11/29/Hacking-the-...

Note that the new Nespresso "Vertuoline" capsules have put the barcode in a more difficult place. DRM escalation?

http://www.singleserveespresso.com/pictures/NespressoVertuoL...

Pretty sure the Nespresso ones don't. Source: I own one at home and we have one in the office and they haven't got any barcodes on any of the capsules. Heck, it'll run without any capsule at all.

Tassimo does, though.

To play's devil advocate and stop the circle jerking, let's do an intellectual exercise and try to think about why this might not be the dumbest decision ever. Maybe it could be more than just a ploy to increase sales of 1st party cups. Maybe it's about Quality control.

I grew up playing a lot of Nintendo games. SNES. N64. Gamecube. Wii. There was one thing I noticed about it. Nintendo always made the best stuff. They made the best controllers. The best games. The best memory cards. I had a 3rd party memory card that said it stored "56 blocks." But if you tried to put more than 20 on it, you'd sometimes find your data magically lost in the morning.So despite the GNU/Linux ethos (I'm typing this on a Linux machine), freedom to use 3rd parties does not always give a better user experience. More than that, I found Nintendo also had to approve every single game and accessory that was compatible with their system (seal of approval). So even that was considered the good stuff. This seal keeps a certain floor of quality control. Back in the days of the Atari, people were making all sorts of shit for it. Stupid consumers would buy it, use it with their Atari, and be frustrated. Nintendo forbade this and made sure everything that was associated with their product met a certain standard, thus giving a good experience. So maybe, Keurig will use their DRM for this. A way to help consumers, perhaps, figure out which cups are good.

>freedom to use 3rd parties does not always give a better user experience.

This is either a straw man or only very pedantically correct.

Is anyone here claiming that 3rd parties always give a better user experience? If not, it's a straw man.

If you are actually referring to the "freedom to use 3rd parties" not giving a better user experience - the user experience is either going to be equivalent or better, because freedom to use a 3rd party != must use a 3rd party.

Back then it was more difficult to tell the crap from the quality stuff. Crap substitutes don't last too long on the market these days with online reviews. I'm rarely hesitant to buy something with a ton of good reviews, and further that means more to me than would a Keurig Seal of Approval.

Kind of like Apple's app store...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com