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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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Why Stupid DRM Might Be Good
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(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