We covered the Keurig's DRM'ed Coffee Pod three days ago, but today Blackmoore provides us with a link to a Cory Doctorow article: Why DRM'ed coffee-pods may be just the awful stupidity we need.
In it, Doctorow argues that this case might conceivably lead someone to initiate legal action which could eventually, given a technically-savvy judge, result in common sense being applied and legal precedent being created. Blackmoore also provides this quote from the article: 'But of all the DRM Death Stars to be unveiled, Keurig's is a pretty good candidate for Battle Station Most Likely to Have a Convenient Thermal Exhaust Port.'"
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r00t writes:
"Taking a page out of Lexmark playbook, the Keurig company, famous for it's one-cup coffee making system, now comes with new and improved 100% DRM. Apparently, Keurig is upset over re-usable third-party 'coffee pods' which allow the consumer to escape the Keurig throw-away models which carry a retail price 5% to 25% more. Keurig's CEO, Brian Kelly referred to the move as 'game-changing performance.' Perhaps this will finally be the year of Linux on the Coffe Maker?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:13PM
Still can't write his way out of a paper bag.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:36PM
But he's got the stupid part down pat!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:53PM
Agreed, the guy is full of himself, as are the people who fawn over his every word.
He fails to notice that the last time such DRM was challenged, the DRM imposing company LOST in court [eff.org]. Yet that didn't prevent Keurig from attempting the same exact thing.
There's no reason to expect a different outcome this time around, other than consumer rage.
Further the SCC vs Lexmark case [arstechnica.com] was directly on target:
That is a complete Green Light to any competing Keurig Cups vendor that wants to sell a competing product.
Personally, I suspect Keurig is going to embed Brew-adjusting data in their K-Cups, probably encrypted and transmitted via a NFC printed on the foil cap. (They have pretty much hinted [foodnavigator-usa.com] about this already).
Then they are probably going to claim that breaking the encryption of this data circumvents the DMCA. But You don't have to break the encryption to produce a NFC foil top that delivers the same payload.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SleazyRidr on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:22PM
The people at Keurig, rightly or wrongly, have decided that the risk of consumer backlash against a DRM system will be less than the potential increase in profits from such a system. The crackers working to break DRM are reducing the potential profits companies will see. Keurig would potentially take DRM out of the realms of computers into everyday objects and are a lot higher profile than Lexmark. If it goes badly for them it could swing future calculations about consumer backlash. I'm possibly being wildly optimistic here, but it's something to hope for.
(Score: 1) by wonkey_monkey on Friday March 07 2014, @03:03AM
But not, it should perhaps be noted, for imposing DRM in the first place.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 07 2014, @04:50AM
The previous case that you cite was lost because the judge determined that the DRM on the cartridges was not protecting the software (which could be dumped via other interfaces) and so was only being used for vendor lock in. The ruling Doctorow wants is to say that DRM can't be used in a specific situation, with wording sufficiently broad that it can be used as precedent in other situations.
It's difficult, without completely suspending any knowledge of how the legal system works, to understand how he thinks this will happen. In most other industries, the players providing DRM are not the ones forcing it on you, so they don't have the same kind of lock-in requirements (and, unless you can prove a cartel, it's generally not a problem for manufacturer A to require their customers buy things from manufacturers B or C if they want to interoperate).
The reason we got rid of DRM on music was that the studios finally woke up to the fact that DRM wasn't reducing copying or increasing revenue for them, it was just working towards granting Apple a monopoly on music distribution. They were heading to a world where only Apple could sell music and you could only play it on Apple-provided devices, at which point their bargaining position would have been very weak. They wanted to be in a situation where there were lots of competing retailers and device makers, all cutting their margins razor thin and keeping the price of the music stable.
The best hope for removing DRM on video is for Netflix to keep growing. Eventually, the movie studios will realise that they're creating a monopoly in the channel. Unfortunately, with both Amazon and Google playing in that market, all with DRM, and little consumer demand for moving videos between them it's less likely to happen.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by githaron on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:23PM
More likely, a non-technically-savvy judge will be presiding over the case and we will be screwed by one more unfortunate legal precedent.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:57PM
The legal precedent [arstechnica.com] is already on the books. And it doesn't work favorably for Keurig.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:58PM
Exactly. Those who put their faith in our legal system to rectify a wrong, fail to understand what it is about. It isn't about being right or just or fair or logical. It's about certainty -- the ability to pick a topic, ask "should I do this" and get an answer. Often a very stupid answer.
Now, stupid answers are their own problem, but even worse are the situations in which there isn't an answer. At that point, a lawsuit is basically a ticket to a gambling match where it is impossible to pin exact odds of winning/losing. A very expensive and potentially devastating gambling match in which the worst possible option could very well the ultimate answer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:38PM
No, you've missed the point. It is precisely because coffee makers are about as non-technical as you can get that such a case has a chance for a favorable precedent. Chances are good that any judge drinks coffee, they won't need technical knowledge to realize that forcing customers to only use one brand of coffee in their coffee maker is ridiculous.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:28PM
Outside of some wise judges, I think we're going to be waiting another 20 years before today's recent crop of lawyers join the judicial ranks. Those who grew up as "digital natives" will probably be judges a bit later, and only then will courts be able to understand these concepts at their deepest levels consistently.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [dev.soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 06 2014, @04:48PM
And by then, today's issues will be 20-30 years stale.
(Score: 2, Funny) by iWantToKeepAnon on Thursday March 06 2014, @05:52PM
And inside of same judges, we find the recent crap of lawyers.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 3, Funny) by hamsterdan on Thursday March 06 2014, @06:30PM
DRM running on the exhaust port will prevent unauthorized torpedoes
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 06 2014, @07:17PM
I don't actually have my names on any patents, but only because the goat fuckers I used to work for were to cheap to apply for a patent on my invention. That's the last time I turn my inventions over to an employer.
I understand that Arnold Beckman - I think it was Beckman - was experimenting with electrode chemistry when a fire broke out in his lab, thereby destroying his laboratory notebook. He completed his dissertation on some completely unrelated topic, then after graduation, uh, "invented" the Ph meter, thereby, uh, "earning" metric fucktons of money without having to split the proceeds with the Institute.
Just to set foot on the fucking campus, one must sign a patent agreement. :-(
Anyway:
There are ALL KINDS of ways to break a patent. The reason we have patent trolls is that most don't bother, they just don't want the hassle so they pay off the troll.
That actually happened - indirectly - to ME, as not long ago I asked a now-wealthy former client to lend me a few grand. In my request I pointed out that by paying me maybe five grand for my software consulting, he was able to retire completely from the computer business then start a completely unrelated manufacturing business.
He actually wanted to lend me the cash, but sadly pointed out that he was not nearly as rich as I thought, as a patent troll ate his lunch. While he was the first to sell, and I was the first to implement this invention, which for a while was selling like hotcakes, some joker had previously patented the exact same invention, before our product EVER hit the market.
So anyway:
It's not so much that a patent must be "novel and unobvious", that that each individual claim must be. So even if the invention as a whole is clearly novel and unobvious, you may be able to defeat at least SOME of the individual claims.
Everyone seems to think that one can only do that by turning up prior art. That will defeat the novelty. But I have never once heard of anyone even attempting to overturn, not a patent but a claim, for being unobvious.
Lots of patented claims are obvious to you and I. I expect they would be too to a jury, were an expert witness able to lucidly explain their obviousness.
Also, each patent must include instructions for actually making the invention. I don't recall the exact wording, but the instructions aren't expected to enable just anybody to follow those instructions, only those who are knowledgeable and experience in the field. So you are I would be expected to read a software patent, then after it expires after twenty years, we should be able to bring our own identical replicas of the invention to market it, release as GPL code or what have you.
So I was quite excited to discover the US Patent Office Clearinghouse that used to be in Sunnyvale, California. The USPTO put that there specifically to encourage Silicon Valley.
So I dropped by one fine day, so I could drop my then-meager life savings into photocopying all seventy pages of the LZW compression patent. That's what GIF uses, and was the reason one could not until just a few years ago release binaries of GIF code as free software.
(Fortunately, CompuServe designed GIF in a way that enabled one to produce standards-compliant uncompressed GIFs. There's some C++ code for that in ZooLib [zoolib.org].)
So I got home and cracked open that patent. It was fucking Greek to me.
Many years later I helped a friend write his patent. He carefully explained that one could erect a, uh, "barrier to entry" by making those instructions completely incomprehensible to anyone, even experts in the field, other patent attorneys and so on.
Just about always, it is only the claims that are contested in court. My thesis is that one should be able to overturn a patent because the instructions for making the patented invention do not comply with either the patent laws or international patent treaties.
In general, USPTO patent examiners aren't experts in the fields whose patents they examine. Even if they are, they just don't have the time or equipment or tools to actually try out following those instructions. Other than checking to see whether those make grammatical sense, I expect they don't ever really examine the instructions.
A good way to overturn a software patent then, would be to have a few expert witnesses who were all experienced respected software engineers with impeccable credentials.
Give them a month or so to write code that implements the invention, while at the same time you also have expert witnesses who are project managers, QA and the like. Bring the commit logs and bugbase to court with you.
(Score: 1) by monster on Friday March 07 2014, @06:32AM
Like that time when the "DRM" lock in the iPhone was found to be illegal, leading to users of other smartphones being able to also root them?
Oh wait...