Published at LXer:

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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The absolutely pernicious, absurd and offensive end result of allowing the greed driven concept of "intellectual property" to exist unpunished!

All this means is that I would never consider owning a Keurig product or knowingly drink their stinking coffee.

Just as I do not own a printer with DRM'd ink, or pay the fruits of my labors for DRM'd anything else!

When I was a kid I heard the grown-ups joke about how "If this continues we will soon have to pay for the air we breathe!"... it isn't a joke any more.

The concept of intellectual property in all its forms must be abolished before intelligent life can again advance on this planet.