How do you DRM a thing like a coffee pod?

Posted by BernardSwiss on Mar 24, 2014 1:55 AM EDT
Ars Technica; By Casey Johnston
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Keurig's next generation of coffee machines will have a way to prevent any coffee not licensed by Keurig from brewing in the machine as early as this fall. Locking down a thing like coffee seems both trifling and difficult to accomplish—no one has yet described how Keurig can differentiate its own pods enough so that its machines would honor those pods and only those pods...

To suss out the issue of coffee DRM, it makes sense to look at a relatively close analog product with its own rights management and interoperability issues—printer toner cartridges. Each printer company jealously guards its model of cartridges, doing everything it can to make them proprietary and unrefillable, because, of course, the real money in printing is in selling the ink at a very large profit.

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