Yep. It’s not music, or a movie, or book or picture or anything like that but they’ve jumped on the DRM protection bandwagon. Not that it will help for long. It all started when their K-Cup patent expired in 2012.
Boy was I glad to see that. More affordable and more variety K-Cups. Of course that didn’t make Keurig happy at all, and that may now explain the introduction of their ill-fated VUE pods and brewers. A stopgap to regain a stranglehold on the market by changing the pod design.
Hey KEURIG, it didn’t work! Or did it? Maybe it wasn’t meant to last, maybe it was just that, a stopgap in 2012 to get them to present day 2014 and their new DRM line of pod coffee brewers.
At any rate buy a new Keurig 2.0 coffee machine and try to use up your pre-2.0 bonafide Keurig K-Cup pods or aftermarket non licensed non royalty paying manufactured K-Cup pods, they won’t work in your brand spank’n new 2.0 brewer. Nope. Nada. Nein. Purposely. The display will says Oops! because it detects that it’s not a 2.0 K-Cup.
So, introducing the VUE pod in 2012 may have bolstered Keurig’s stranglehold on pods a little bit but albeit not for those of us that knew about the Solofill company and their Solofill V2 that let you use K-Cups in VUE brewers. Although that device might be why I had the coffee grounds plug up the water feed needle on my VUE brewer. I see the V2 was now replaced by the K-onverter and it looks like it has addressed and will prevent that coffee ground plug-up.
At any rate, Keurig’s game is to make you buy Keurig’s branded and licensed pods. Should have realized that, but then again, I don’t think that way, diversity, choice, etc. is good IMO, monopolization, proprietary, etc. not good. But already two K-Cup producing manufacturers have sued claiming anticompetitive practices (hope they win), and one has vowed to reverse engineer the system in short order.
Meanwhile, just take the foil top off a legit K-Cup once its been used and tape it to the generic ones. It’s the green dot on the top that Keurig says reflects light in special ways that tell the coffee maker how to brew the coffee. Of course Keurig’s spin on the whole thing is that they’re doing this to insure their high quality standards. More like their high bottom line IMO.
And if there is one thing for certain, there are people in this word that love a challenge and view this as just that. This may start whole new industries, green dot marking pens, green dot stick-ons, Keurig 2.0 hacks, rooting your coffee maker, etc. Who knows, the possibilities are unlimited…
I may just have to buy one. I love challenges… Tell me I can’t, and I will show you how I can…
Looks like the DRM has already been cracked as third party manufacturers are claiming and saying they will have pods out soon. Wonder if the DMCA authors envisioned they’d be protecting coffee? And if a lawsuit is coming for cracking the protection…
Hmmm… The green dot and light reflection was mentioned in a June 30, 2014 article I read, doesn’t look like that’s how they really ended up doing the DRM. Ian Tinkler, Keurig’s vice president of brewer engineering, explained in that article that an infrared light shines on the ink marking and registers the wavelength of the light reflected back.
However, people are now reporting it’s done by new small printing on the cups because that’s the only thing seen as being different. There has also been mention of any optical reader type device becoming dirty in that environment and then not working.
I still would not be surprised if the foil top itself was designed with antenna properties and resonated at certain frequencies that then being detected. RFID 101.
I will not rest till I know exactly how this works. That means I may have to buy a K550.