Is Keurig 2.0 cracked?

Keurig’s decision to apply DRM to their upcoming 2.0 coffee machines was, originally, met with scepticism. Whilst some quarters may have been happy with the decision to secure their market position, a large opposition immediately presented itself; locking away rival pods and capsules wasn’t warmly met by those in favour of a free market, and the ability to buy cheaper non-brand products.

It was always going to happen though. At some point it would get hacked or circumventing dismissing the idea of digitally managed coffee and reopening everybody to ride the Keurig wave.

That time could be now.

At the tail end of August Mother Parker Tea & Coffee, the company that works alongside Marley Coffee and Tim Hortons announced in a press release that they “will launch a new version of the RealCup capsule that is compatible with Keurig Green Mountain’s K2.0 brewer.”

TreeHouse, who over the popular Grove Square range, has also announced that they’ll be released supplies that work with the popular brewing system.

If you can’t make it, you can break it.

But, it might not be a case of circumnavigating the installed protection protocol. The announcements were fuzzy in their wording, but the consensus amongst those within the industry is that it probably is a hack.

If so, it puts Keurig on the back foot and forces them to initiate legal proceedings against these companies. That won’t be easy, and there’s no definitive conclusion.

The move to adopt this digital technology to authenticate licences K-Cups has been a reaction to the company losing their K-Cup patents a couple of years ago. Once the patent ended, third-party suppliers flooded into the market and began to (legally) takeaway profits from the original licence holders.

photo:By Dee. CC-BY-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons