When Keurig fights “coffee pirates,” who loses? Loyal consumers | Hacker News Reader

When Keurig fights “coffee pirates,” who loses? Loyal consumers

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57 pointsdanso70 comments

I get it, their business model is to sell the appliance for cheap and recoup the costs on the K-cups. But this DRM "solution" is anti-consumer, anti-competition, and isn't something I'm comfortable supporting. When my Keurig dies, I will be downgrading to a coffee-pot style machine, and in the meantime I will be avoiding the non-"pirate" Kcups.

I hope they turn around with their next versions, I enjoy the convenience even at the higher cost. But I draw the line at new DRM. I concede there is already DRM in my home, but my goal is to eliminate it all, not add more.

Edit: To be fair not all DRM is bad. DRM in Linux that prevents modules I haven't signed from loading would be a Good Thing so to clarify, my goal is to eliminate harmful DRM. Defined as anything I don't have full control over.

DRM in Linux that prevents modules I haven't signed from loading would be a Good Thing

I don't think that has anything to do with DRM, can you explain?

The technology required to prevent untrusted modules is the same as is required for effective DRM. In both cases, you need to keep the computer operating in a known and approved state.

The difference is that in the Linux example, the user controls the keys that is necessary to determine what such a state is, whereas with DRM the user necessarily does not.

Oh, sure, the tech might be the same, but I don't think we should muddle the terms. DRM is defined by the purpose of the tech, not by implementation details. Calling security features "good DRM" is perilous.

I use trusted computing channels/methods to handle sensitive documents and prevent unauthorized programs from interacting with the data.

It's literally DRM, and I think it's a good thing, because it lets me protect sensitive information from theft.

If you're not trying to protect data from the user itself, I'd still say it's not DRM. What counts is the goal, not the technology. DRM was certainly a motivation for the development of TC, but that doesn't mean all uses of TC are necessarily DRM.

I agree that DRM is most often used against the user but I disagree that it has to be used against the user for it to be called DRM. DRM is Digital Rights Management, there is nothing in the name about being used against a specific group of people. I could use it to prevent you from playing a song just as I could use it to prevent unsigned kernel modules from loading on a secure system, the only difference is that DRM is so often used against us consumers that the colloquial definition is shifting away from including things which are technically DRM but which aren't used against you.

This is the same kind of thing that happened to the "native advertising" people who hide adverts as news stories and wonder why people have come yo loath the term native advertising. They've unintrntionally established a colloquial definition that is actually quite distant from the textbook definition through their abuse. I argue the same has happened to DRM.

DRM is Digital Rights Management, there is nothing in the name about being used against a specific group of people.

No, but we had those systems before, we just call it "security" and "authorization layer". DRM arose, as far as I know, to describe copy-protection mechanisms like SecuROM.

They've unintrntionally established a colloquial definition that is actually quite distant from the textbook definition through their abuse. I argue the same has happened to DRM.

Maybe so, but then I never got the original definition, and I don't understand why there was the need for a new term when authorization layers are old as dirt.

It's a shared system, in that other people can access the same server the files are actually located on. The DRM is definitely meant to stop other users of the system from accessing the files, and only permit me to view it through a thin terminal when showing the proper credentials.

You seem to have an ideological need to call DRM bad in all cases and tell me how every other use of DRM is not "True DRM!", but I'm using it to stop people with access to the server from being able to open certain files even if they somehow break other security features which should prevent them from even getting access to the bits.

I'm not sure how much more DRM you can get than stopping people from viewing content unless they show their credentials to prove they're an authorized user.

and only permit me to view it through a thin terminal when showing the proper credentials.

Yes, which is why I wrote it's not DRM if you're not trying to protect data from the user itself. In that case, you are.

I'm using it to stop people with access to the server from being able to open certain files even if they somehow break other security features which should prevent them from even getting access to the bits. I'm not sure how much more DRM you can get than stopping people from viewing content unless they show their credentials to prove they're an authorized user.

I'm using the UNIX filesystem permissions for that. Is UNIX DRM now?

As far as I know, DRM as a term arose to describe the technologies that tried to allow the user to view the content while preventing him/her from copying it.

You seem to have an ideological need to call DRM bad in all cases and tell me how every other use of DRM is not "True DRM!"

No, I'm just trying to make sense of the fact that people are using a term in a different way than I've always seen it used, and which happens to be (in my opinion) much less useful, since it turns any authorization layer into "DRM".

If "DRM'ing" cups was anti-competitive why haven't there been any third-party making cheap keurig-like machines for use with the cups on which the patent expired?

Because there's no money in the machine. The profit comes entitely from the coffee pods.

Then the price for "standard" or "compatible" machines need to increase. A company who offered this could potentially make some good money...

Only if they are able to convince people that paying more up front is worth while for cheaper cups. That's always been a tough sell, even if it's correct.

It seems like American consumers especially, have a hard time with the "higher upfront for cheaper in the long run" way of thinking.

Look at all these cell phone companies that lock consumers into a two year contract with a much higher monthly premium than an alternative prepaid service. $200 phone + $100/month is somehow much more palatable than $800 phone + $50/month.

There are some K-cup compatible machines available (like http://www.amazon.com/MCU-Single-Multi-Use-Coffee-Brewer/dp/... ). I think the reason you don't hear about them much is Keurig really dominates the market.

Here in Australia, there is, at least we have one at home. No idea what brand it is, but the cups are different to a regular keurig, and far easier to find (and cheap!)

There's tons. My wife found one for about $20 that also has a fancy basket thing, so we don't even need the "reusable coffee pod" junk for normal coffee

So what is the answer? Are we essentially rejecting the business model of "cheap appliance, recoup costs"?

Yup, I think we should, because it leads to the world where appliances suck.

Downside: the model is "progressive", where more people can afford to use the appliance because it is subsidized by people with high usage. So if we axe that model, product X becomes inaccessible to many people.

How about rejecting "cheap appliance; recoup costs with shady, anticompetitive business practices"

It's inherent to the business model to block out competition on the "recoup" item. What business sells the appliance at a loss and meekly accepts being overrun by third-party suppliers? Dead businesses, that's who...

In Europe, a similar situation existed with Nespresso. They are absolutely huge on the market here, and the machines are found in nearly every office place (and many homes, where the capsules are different, to avoid people stealing them at work).

Nespresso has lost nearly every attempt to protect exclusive control of the capsules [1]. In grocery stores, you can find many compatible capsules and a variety of flavors and choices.

[1] http://qz.com/200161/someone-is-finally-forcing-nespresso-to...

I've always felf the entire brew pod setup is an answer to a single question: "how do you get customers to accept cafeteria margins on their homebrew coffee?"

Healthy competition is the only thing that keeps customers from getting fleeced. Or skinned.

> I've always felf the entire brew pod setup is an answer to a single question: "how do you get customers to accept cafeteria margins on their homebrew coffee?"

There's also "how do we stop losing business to companies that don't abuse the shit out of their suppliers?" There has been an increasing amount of noise over the last 5-10 years about the phenominal margins that exist in the coffee business, with growers typically seeing the barest fraction of what companies like Nestle sell coffee for. As companies selling fair trade coffee become more profitable, what are companies like Nestle to do?

I work in this space, and I will say that consumers can do a lot here to change the behavior of these mega companies when it comes to treatment of farmers. Consumer choices and/or bad press makes big companies move, sometimes very quickly, especially on their premium brands.

Due to some earlier PR debacles, nearly all (all?) Nespresso coffee is now Rainforest Alliance certified. A very large amount of coffee at many supermarket chains in many european markets is certified by FairTrade, RFA, or UTZ.

Certification isn't the answer to all the problems in the coffee world. I'd rather drink coffee where the small independent roaster is buddies with the premium quality grower, but I don't see this becoming the norm. It'd really make my day to see all coffee from these big actors (not just their premium brands) certified under a 3rd party scheme.

It's pretty strange and wasteful. I'm just not seeing the advantage over your typical American electric drip coffeemaker. Insert filter, add ground coffee, press a button.

Or if you can't wait a couple minutes, there's some half-decent instant coffee available these days. If you're going to add milk and sugar anyway, it's perfectly fine.

Tossing a K-cup in the trash is way cleaner and easier than wrangling a normal filter-full-of-grounds into the compost. I don't find that advantage to be worth it, but it's an advantage.

You can throw grounds in the trash like a kcup

The fact that grounds can go in the compost is a plus for the normal approach. The downside is the wrestling of something comparatively large and more often dripping, as opposed to tiny and comparatively self contained.

Curmedgeon here, but if you want a small, easy to use, cheap coffee brewing system, what's wrong with a french press? I got on for €6 and it works great. Far less plastic waste, too.

but how will someone charge you 50c a cup for stale shitty coffee?

I've read reports that if you don't filter coffee through paper it can raise cholesterol. As a person with high numbers I've been using Hamilton Beech's Scoop to get a Keurig functionality from regular coffee.

Any references on what is being filtered out by the paper filter that is transmitted by the mesh in a cafetiere or in a moka pot or expresso machine?

Just interested, not challenging, I'd imagine it is a particle size thing.

Supposedly Cafestol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafestol http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1862798

Interesting that cafestol has also show anticarcinogenic and neuroprotective traits, so this may be one of those things where recommendations continually change over the years as groups study different effects.

I use a French press, then pour it through a filter into a liter thermos. Best of both worlds!

I've used Keurigs at work and I don't see the point. The coffee comes out weak and bland, to my tongue anyway, it's a waste of plastic, and it's a lot slower than pouring a cup from a glass pitcher on an old fashioned drip brewing machine. People at the office have to stand in line, or else come back later. Also, the Keurigs I've used offer exactly 3 sizes: small (strong), medium (diluted), and large (more diluted).

Now as to Keurig's right to proprietary supplies, this sounds counter productive. Surely they will be better off encouraging the adoption of their standards, like Adobe's PDF?

While a press is great at home, what is not so convenient is a work environment where storage and dispensing loose coffe becomes an issue. Carrying a cup and a press full of hot coffee introduces health and safety issues (opening doors, swiping keycards etc.). And then disposal of coffee grinds and cleaning a press is more complicated than a used cup.

Nothing is wrong with it.

But as we have to repeatedly point out, there is nothing that competes with the Keurig on convenience and speed. That's their advantage.

Their customers don't want a messy, time consuming French press.

Nothing wrong with it, just less convenient.

This would be more sinister if there weren't already hundreds of ways to brew coffee, most of which are cheaper - unlike the inkjet comparison, where there really wasn't much consumer choice at that price point.

Theree are hundreds today. The objective around systems like this and Nespresso is to move coffee making to the same kind of vertical integration inkjet printing enjoys. Loss-leading on selling the devices is a great first step if you're the prospective monopolist.

A lot of dominoes more horrible than DRM would have to fall before Keurig and Nespresso were the only ways to get coffee.

Unless you're talking about "monopoly" like how Apple has a "monopoly" on iPhones.

DRM exists for only one reason: to screw paying customers.

That said, can't you just take the electronics from a valid K-cup and solder its contacts to whatever detection mechanism detects that the pod is valid? I'd really love to see an analysis of the "security".

Meanwhile, I use a crazy system of brewing coffee involving inundating ground coffee with boiling water. No electronics involved! Primitive! The vendor of this brewing system also makes cool frisbees.

(Whoops, did I just use a registered trademark in a generic sense? Sic the lawyers on me immediately!)

I have the primitive coffee brewing system too .... its fantastic :-)

and cheaper even

You can get ridiculously good coffee, brewed strong, for less than a k-cup costs

If I understand correctly, the DRM system consists of a special ink on the lid of the cup. Therefore, some people have figured out that you can simply cut off that piece and tape it to the detector so that it will always think you have an official cup inside.

A work around for Keurig might be to include a serial number in the signed payload, and keep a list of recent serial numbers.

For those of you still using Keurigs, French presses or drip coffee, check out the AeroPress: http://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-aeropress/

So for people who "still" use Keurigs here is a product which is nothing like that, with none of the same benefits, uses up more space, and is incompatible.

This might blow people's minds but maybe a lot of people buy K-Cups even inspite of knowing about the alternatives and the relative costs/benefits of both.

Single-serving machines require near no cleaning, minimal setup, you can change drinks literally between cups, it is ready in 60 seconds, takes no space/are portable, and they remain much cheaper than Starbucks/McDonalds/Dunkin Donuts coffee (15c/cup Vs. 99c/cup or more).

As someone who has Keurigs at work, and enjoys coffee daily, I'd posted it for those of us who view the Keurig as a device to brew good coffee quickly. The AeroPress does this much better in my opinion (the flavor and quality difference is huge). To some, maybe it doesn't hit all the specific benefits they enjoy from a Keurig; to others, it's an excellent replacement.

Here are the steps to make coffee in an AeroPress:

1. Grind coffee

    - I do this in bulk with a big grinder, and have fresh grounds for the day. You could also buy previously ground coffee.

2. Put filter and grounds into AeroPress.

3. Wet the plunger.

4. Use a boiling water tap to pour over coffee.

5. Stir 10 seconds.

6. Push the plunger down, using air pressure to force the water through the grounds.

    - this should take ~30 seconds to get the optimal flavor

7. Remove cap, plunge grounds out of the squeaky clean tube (remember, we just forced an inverted rubber stopper through the containment, cleaning it pristine)

8. Rinse cap

9. Enjoy amazing, and amazingly strong, coffee/espresso

Process takes me about 30 seconds longer than Keurig.

In fairness to the parent to your post, single serving coffee machines make nearly zero mess. IF your break room hasn't got a sink and running water (your water comes from a water cooler), THEN a single serving machine is better than nothing. Even a super-automatic is going to get messy from cleaning out the grounds.

But if you do have a sink, there's no excuse.

And completely misses the point.

What matters to most people isn't that Keurig takes 60 seconds (or whatever) to make a cup of coffee, it's that it takes 60 seconds, including about 5 seconds of interaction to make a cup of coffee.

I don't use my Keurig any more, but its primary appeal was I could drop in a K-Cup, push start and walk away and then come back later to drink it.

If only I had specified the exact subset of users that would benefit most from reading my recommendation, then that might have allayed your concerns. Certainly, if it's not for you, then it's not for you.

It's a good recommendation. But perhaps the biggest leap in coffee quality can be achieved by switching to fresh roasted (<2 weeks old) whole bean coffee ground just before brewing with a cheap burr grinder. That will produce the best results with an AeroPress or any other brewing method.

The advantage of K-Cups is a consistently-good cup of coffee. If you like to experiment and become a brew-master, that's cool. But everybody else gets better coffee with K-Cups.

This is the automatic transmission defense. Some people don't know any better, or are too lazy/scared/inept to learn anything else. Others just enjoy putting it in Drive, and hitting the gas.

It's all about priorities.

Yeah its all about being lazy and scared, sure. Lets just put some loaded words behind it, to mask a total lack of anything interesting to say.

Folks do what they do because its good enough, and convenient. Which is a matter of taste, which I think might have been your actual point?

I think we will start to see more of this in any field in the futuere. I don't know if its reached the market yet but I've heard talk of it in the automotive engineering community. Car parts not related to electronic control get embedded RFID chips to strengthen the immobilizer, you can not start the car if some piece of plastic isn't signed. Might sound attractive at first as the car gets harder to steal, just replacing a few ecus is not sufficient, but what if you yourself want to replace a spare part using a third party workshop.

If you have a Keurig pre 2, and you want to save plastic, these work:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008XFE2YO/ref=oh_aui_detai...

Sounds like 2.0 will break these, which is evil; many people who use Keurigs don't have much choice or say in what the office coffee machine is going to be (e.g., I'm in a co-working space where I could only request that we not install a Keurig 2.0; and where any place I'd move probably also uses Keurigs).

Isn't this over before it starts? Lexmark lost the battle when 3rd parties reversed engineered their cartridge DRM and "reverse engineering for interoperability" was added to the DMCA?

Yep. Doubly so considering that third parties are already making compatible cups http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/keurig-competitors-crack...

The DMCA is a purely U.S. law. This article is in a Canadian Magazine about the situation in Canada.

Isn't this just an rfid chip?

Take it out of a real package and tape it to the machine.

Or is it more complex than that?

Easier: barcode

Even easier, it uses an infra-red light to detect a specific wavelength reflected from proprietary formulated ink markings printed around the rim of the K-cup (source https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140704/07112927780/keuri... )

With tea we do not have such problems :-)

The keurig actually does have tea pods, which produce pretty awful tea

"He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

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