How do you DRM a thing like a coffee pod? | Hacker News Reader

How do you DRM a thing like a coffee pod?

arstechnica.com

26 pointsOWaz43 comments

Adding a basic DRM to coffee pods would be trivial for Keurig to implement. There is no need for RFID on each pod. That would be a waste of money in my opinion.

They can simply print a unique QR code on the bottom of each pod, and the Keurig machine could read it with a cheap webcam. The content of the data would be an encrypted message, signed with Keurig's secret key. They sign one unique message for each pod. The machine can remember all the messages it has seen, and refuse to brew any duplicates.

Granted, this isn't impossible to circumvent. The secret key could get leaked, but at least thats a known vulnerability. There is one more obvious weakness: every code can be used once on each machine, and not just the one that brewed the authentic code. IE, if a counterfeit outfit buys one thousand real pods, they could then distribute up to 1k pods to each customer which would act as authentic. Fortunately, this is a pain that will probably slow the production of fake pods and persuade customers to buy authentic ones.

This is the only sort of DRM that I would actually be OK with in this instance. It's not really a waste of money, and if the DRM-reading system works reliably, it has no negative impact on the user experience.

What? You would be okay with that? And after 6 months, you find that their coffee doesn't taste that well anymore and you crave different coffee. What do you do with your coffee maker then? Dump it?

As far as i understood there weren't any "fake" pods, the third-party pods where properly labeled. Also, some might consider it a negative impact on the user experience if they cannot use third-party pods any longer, or if the original pods get twice as expensive.

My spidey sense tells me that this isn't "DRM". In other words, it's "rights management", but it's not digital. If you follow the link chain back to the original report, it just says that the new machine "won't work with unlicensed pods."

All that would be required is a patented physical feature that can't easily be worked around. After all, they probably don't care about someone 3D printing a compatible reusable pod at home. Rather, they want a cut of any mass-market pods that work with their machine.

Apple, for instance, has effectively prevented anyone from making MagSafe-compatible chargers without using any sort of DRM. They simply threaten to sue anyone who makes a compatible charger for patent infringement. I don't see why this would be different.

> My spidey sense tells me that this isn't "DRM". In other words, it's "rights management", but it's not digital. If you follow the link chain back to the original report, it just says that the new machine "won't work with unlicensed pods."

Not sure if they still do, but at one point Nescafé/Nespresso started adding notches to pods (and machines) which would pierce through un-notched "compatible" pods and ruin them.

Of course that "only" invalidated the current stock for new machines, it'd still work on old machines and was simple enough to reverse-"engineer".

> All that would be required is a patented physical feature that can't easily be worked around. […] They simply threaten to sue anyone who makes a compatible charger for patent infringement. I don't see why this would be different.

I'm pretty sure Keurig's moving to an RM system because their k-cups patents are expired (the basic ones expired a few years ago, I guess those for "upgraded" k-cups are now dead) in the first place.

There are a lot of ways they could do it without using chips. For example they could use a type of of patented ink that reflects under a certain under a certain wavelength, some type of barcode, symbol, patented cup etc.

However, I think they are going about this all wrong, their not going to stop people making similar cups and will just create negative impressions with consumers - first time a valid Keurig cup that a customer purchased fails the test and you'll have a very angry customer.

> However, I think they are going about this all wrong, their not going to stop people making similar cups and will just create negative impressions with consumers - first time a valid Keurig cup that a customer purchased fails the test and you'll have a very angry customer.

I hear this argument a lot, but I just don't buy it. If anything, the customer will be upset with the manufacturer of the coffee cup. But as is, all of Keurig's cups are clearly marked, and I suspect that the vast majority of customers will just continue to buy those (and therefore be totally unaffected by this change).

My point was actually that Keurig's own cups might fail validation 0.x% of the time causing angry customers.

Are you saying that all of the magsafe chargers you can buy from China are original Apple chargers?

Well they've done a thorough enough job of cracking down on them that I wasn't aware they existed (that said, I haven't been shopping for electronics outside of North America in the last decade or so).

If they can keep it technically illegal to sell a compatible pod in North America and Europe, they've probably pretty well captured the available profit.

In a way, it's good that things like this happen. Makes it much easier to convince gullible laypeople that the Imaginary Property laws they are brainwashed to believe to be universally good for the society are, in fact, directly contradictory to the actual tangible property and ownership laws and common sense, bearing more hope for the DMCA anti-circumvention clause to eventually get overturned.

Sigh... I am being too optimistic... I know.

Wow.. next thing you know some pirate will introduce an espresso machine where you can "refill" the pod with bulk ground coffee. (sarcasm)

Or maybe a DRM chair to sit on while you drink your DRM coffee. http://hackaday.com/2013/03/04/drm-chair-only-works-8-times/

Now that their patent expired they want to have DRM, luckily for the world people can just manufacture their current gen device and sell it for the current gen cups.

Bad coffee with DRM isn't any better than just bad coffee. Just stay away from Keurig.

Incorporate encrypted brewing instructions (e.g., number of seconds to inject water) on the container. Circumventing these becomes a copy protection issue, subject to the DMCA and so forth. It's functional, and getting it wrong means mucking up the coffee.

That'd be easy, just rip the RFID tag from a legit cap and stick it on the fake one. Circumvention without any interaction by the manufacturer of the second party capsules. People have been doing that sort of thing on printer cartridges as long as I can remember.

No, the machine could store and reject the capsule ids that have been used to prevent this. And maybe write a 'used' bit into the tag memory to prevent its use on other machines.

Anytime you set a ROM to allow writes you are opening yourself to circumvention. If they can write to record used capsule IDs someone else can rewrite with 0s. If you can write a bit to make the capsule expired or used someone else can rewrite the bit back to full.

Repeatedly, the market has spoken and no one wants DRM if it doesn't provide a superior product. iTunes Fairplay is dead, replaced with iTunes Plus.

This is so sad. Really? I know there's market for the non original coffee, but Is already non-trivial to find a decent taste, that is compatible and is cheaper than the original. Do they really need this stuff?? How much is going to cost? Because, honestly, sooner or later brewing it will become convenient again.

TLDR: Buying nespresso feels like buying cigarettes, isn't that enough?

At $0.75 per pod vs. $0.15 = $0.25 per shot of espresso you would pay down the roughly $400 difference between a Nepresso machine and a proper Rancilio Silvia in about 800 uses. Maybe a year elapsed time if you drink 2-3 cups per day. And the espresso machine will make a much better drink and probably last much longer.

Pod machines are the "razor blade" and "printer ink" model taken to coffee. Yes you are being exploited.

If you try to cheap out with the espresso machine, I'd say go for pods. "Consumer-grade espresso machine" is worst of all possible worlds.

I'd say that capsule machines cater to the people that don't want to spend time making their coffee. For them, I'd rather recommend a good super automatic than a manual like the Rancilio.

There's no cheaping out.

Either you pay upfront, or you get dimmed with ink jet coffee (pun intended) until it's way more expensive.

er, really curious.. would a moka pot be considered a viable alternative? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot

no, it doesn't produce the same kind of coffee

It is very viable alternative! Contrary to sibling I think difference between Moka vs Espresso and Pods vs Espresso is about the same. And I suppose the marginal gain from buying expensive espresso over moka would not be that big for you.

But moka is: cheap, easy to clean, lasts forever, takes virtually no space and about as fast as my kettle.

Great example machine. The Silvia I use has made 10-15,000 coffees. It has had 2 services at $50NZ each, and came with a grinder. Both together cost $1000 about 15 years ago. Its cheap to run and excellent to use.

Doesn't Tassimo already do this with their TDiscs?

https://www.tassimo.co.uk/Help/TASSIMOTips/KnowAboutTDiscs/U...

Print an 'illegal number' on the top in the form of a barcode and include a scanner in every machine, copywriting the number and taking legal action against anyone who uses it without license. It's trivial to break on your own but very difficult for a proper business to break legally.

Another option would be to put a 5mm embossed "K" on the bottom of the container, and call it a trademark, or trade-dress. Then make the receptacle require that exact "K" as a physical lock.

We can combine the two ideas:

Print a trademarked image on top, and then print a digitally signed digest of that image (as a barcode) on that same top.

The coffee maker verifies the signature, and verifies that the digest matches the image.

This also makes it easy to control who else can manufacture the coffee pods.

It's a great idea, but probably over complicated for the environment that this coffee maker operates in. You'd also have a tricky optical problem capturing an image of the cap at close range (such as inside a closed lid)

That would almost certainly not be upheld in court - Sega v. Accolade found that the use of a trademark as part of a security system cannot be prosecuted as trademark infringement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

Capsule summary: Sega's Trademark Security System, which was present in some versions of the Sega Genesis game system, would check for the string "SEGA" at a particular location in the ROM. When it found this string, it would display the text "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD." on screen; if it did not find this string, the game would not boot. Accolade reproduced this to make their unlicensed games work; Sega sued them for a variety of things, including trademark infringement, and lost.

Thanks for sharing that. I was never aware of Sega v Accolade and the impact it had on reverse engineering under fair use.

Remember that a precedence is not law. More importantly, sega did not have the bribe money nestle et al have today.

Remember that the term is precedent and not precedence. Witty replies work better when you use the correct term.

Nintendo also tried this with the Gameboy's DRM.

The gameboy would copy a section of the ROM onto the screen then checksum it. The gameboy would only jump to the real start address if the displayed bitmap matched the nintendo seal of quality. This went a bit further than Sega's system by displaying it verbatim. Every ROM needed to includ the full trademark and it would be show in full to the user.

I think they get this system for the Gameboy Color. I'm not sure of the timing between the lawsuits and the GBC. In general the GBC is a GB with double clocked CPU and palleted color so they might have kept the same scheme for developer ease.

It seems unlikely that copyright would be upheld for a non-creative part of a system like that. A number by itself is certainly not a creative work. Even if it was a creative work, like a poem, I've gotta imagine it'd fail in court given the intended usage.

Maybe if there was an advanced image recognition system and it examined the entire pod. But then I'd still expect (or hope) a court would override any protections given the motivation.

(very nearly) Every creative work can easily be encoded as a number. Anything that can be represented on a computer is a number. A jpg is a number, an mp3 is a number... you get the picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

The numbers are not illegal to have for other purpose, but only if you're using them to construct (or act as) the actual work of art, or to break other rules.

In all the cases that were presented, there was malice in the actions involved, by intending to circumvent rules by pretending it was something else, rather than honestly happening on the equivalent number.

You can copyright a number, and you can't copyright a short phrase.

The most cost-effective way to stop consumers from loading alternative pods on their machines is to stop selling the machines machines altogether. In the long run it will have the same effect.

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