keurig

Keurig 2.0’s DRM Broken With a Piece of Tape

   Adam Zolkover

Last year around this time, I made a post about how Green Mountain Coffee — the folks who make those wasteful Keurig single-cup coffee brewers — would be adding a digital rights management (DRM) scheme to their product to keep consumers from using third-party, unauthorized pods. They claimed that it was all about quality control and safety. And that, as TechDirt reported at the time, it would add interactive-enabled benefits (whatever that means).

In reality, the issue seems to have been that their overpriced pods weren’t selling as well as those of competitors, and they wanted a way to keep other companies from stealing the goodies from their playground.

Wasteful Coffee Maker Anti- Competitive, Too

   Adam Zolkover

So Keurig, amiright?

Green Mountain Coffee, the makers of those increasingly ubiquitous Keurig single-cup coffee machines, will be including digital rights management (DRM) in their next generation product (creatively called Keurig 2.0). This means that every time you pop a plastic pod into the machine, it will look for a tiny chip emitting a tiny radio signal that will let the coffee maker’s onboard computer know whether it is okay — with the company, not with you — to brew.