No.

The coffee machine is real (we've got one in my office), the DRM is real (it won't brew 3rd party cups), the hack works (we did it the first day).

Despite it's Onion-iness it's completely true. That's just where the world is.

The real joke is using DRM to prevent competition. Printer companies have also been doing this.

Printer companies have tried doing this. IIRC, they lost in court.

What Lexmark lost in court was a case that they brought claiming that the DRM circumvention violated the DMCA. There's no law or case prohibiting printer makers or coffee machine makers from implementing locks like this though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._Static_Control...

Ah, yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. So they can't prevent circumvention by law, but they can make it as hard as technically possible.

But as Cory Doctorow points out, DRM can never succeed, because in order to sell a working system to your customer, you have to give them the encrypted content, and the decryption engine, and the key (otherwise, they can't use it). But if your customer is your attacker (or your competitor), you just gave your attacker the encrypted content, the decryption engine, and the key, so now they have everything they need to build compatible cartridges...

I think Keurig's and Lexmark's definition of success might be different than yours though. They don't need the DRM to be unbreakable. They just need to protect their market enough that the benefits (to them) of the DRM exceed the costs.

In the case of digital media, any weakness in the DRM means game over, because file sharing is so easy. But when talking about physical goods like printer ink and coffee capsules, it's a battle at the margins. They just need to discourage enough competition that their business stays profitable.

You might be thinking of Lexmark v. Static Control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int%27l_v._Static_Cont...

where the courts ended up rejecting Lexmark's theory that a particular way of making refilled cartridges work with Lexmark printers violated the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions.

However, you could still say that the printer companies are succeeding in using DRM to prevent competition (to some extent), even if it's difficult for them to sue companies like Static Control for circumvention.

The real joke is the Marketing concept: that making coffee starting with water, those dirty, scary soil colored grounds, and having to wait 5 minutes is too much work for a cup of coffee.

Why would this be a joke?

It just seems so trivial, both in terms of the item being targeted and the workaround, in comparison to the presentation of the website with its custom domain and all, that it most likely has some satirical element to it.

Domains are cheap, and some people just have a flair for the dramatic. I think the satire here is that Keurig spent a lot of money on drm, and it was broken with a $0.01 piece of scotch tape.

I'm wondering if the average k-cup consumer would even try this or just buy cups that work. I know a lot of people that have antivirus protection, but never press the button to actually scan. It is simple, but they don't do it.