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Trouble brewing: Keurig lawsuit says single-serve coffee makers are not open source
By adamg on Fri, 11/04/2011 - 10:26am
Keurig, the Reading-based maker of single-serving coffee machines, is suing a California company that makes knock-off K-cups.
In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, Keurig says the Rogers Family Co.'s OneCups violate two Keurig patents (here and here) for a "brew chamber for a single serve beverage brewer."
Rogers sells its single-serving containers as being fully Keurig-compliant and "rich and full bodied," yet a lot less expensive than the brands licensed by Keurig. Not only is Rogers violating the patents, by selling "cartridges" designed specifically for Keurig machines, it is encouraging end users to violate those patents by brewing up coffee, Keurig complains.
Keurig is seeking all of Rogers's profits from sales of the single-serving containers, lawyers' fees and enough money to convince Rogers to not do it again.
Recent years have seen a number of companies develop and sell this sort of coffee makers, all with incompatible cartridges or pods - just like printers.
The suit comes about a month after Keurig and Wolfgang Puck got sued by a New Jersey coffee distributor who said their Jamaica Me Crazy coffee violates its trademark on "Jamaican Me Crazy" coffee. Flavor Dynamics is seeking $1 million just in damages, charging its reputation has been damaged because people on YouTube are posting they hate its coffee, when they really hate the Keurig/Puck coffee.
| Attachment | Size |
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 Complete copy of the Keurig complaint | 0 bytes |
| Complete copy of the Jamaican Me Crazy complaint | 0 bytes |
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Comments
Problems of the 1%
Remember when companies would compete based on quality and cost?
Patent and IP law is really, really messed up.
Patent law is messed up, but
Patent law is messed up, but this isn't one of the cases where it's messed up.
Isn't this system just a small cup?
One which you punch a hole in, so it mixes with water? Where is the IP in filling a cup with a certain volume of fluids, punching a hole in it, and mixing with water in a bigger cup?
Isn't this just the same as buying different tires for your car? Maybe you don't want Michelin tires this time around, and want Dunlop tires instead. Well, suppose instead of tires, it's k-cups vs OneCups.
I don't know. Here's their
I don't know. Here's their story. You tell me if it's a lot of IP.
Edit: And I'm sure that for years, plenty of tire companies had plenty of patents on tire technology.
One year and counting
Heard on the financial news the other day that their primary patents expire in a year anyway - that and some questionable accounting is why their stock is off 40% in the last few weeks.
The patents are valid and reasonable, but if you know how to make one of these really cheap - or can figure it out in the next year, you too can be 1 percenter.
Agreed. K-cup technology
Agreed. K-cup technology does seem like a real invention worthy of patent protection.
Boston_res, everything is obvious and simple in hindsight.
Is it the cup itself though?
Or the process to figure out how much filtered coffee you need to put in one of those cups in addition to how the machine pokes the hole process?
Seems to me the cups are a pretty simple thing to figure out, but the device, cup puncher, and coffee product is that makes this thing work.
I have no opinion as to the patent law issue here.
a k-cup isn't just a cup and some grounds...
there is actually a lot of *stuff* going on inside those little plastic yogurt cups. you can read the patent here, but it explains itself as:
if you just had a cup and some grounds, you would be drinking a nice little cowboy-coffee full of ground beans. you need a way to force the water through, filter it out, and get it out of the cup. seems a little worthy of a patent to me.
Actually
They sell regular filter cups for K-Machines that you can pour homemade coffee grounds in and it works just as fine. ends up being hundreds of dollars cheaper too. but you have to clean the fliter, rather then use and chuck.
It helps to separate the reality from the marketing.
I'm still not convinced
I read the patents, read each post, and still am not convinced the K-cups are a novel concept. Filters have been around for a very long time. We have oil filters (filters oil, catches metal debris), and air filters (lets some type of gas through, and captures solid particles, used in cars, HEPA systems and the such). There are even filters in our own bodies. The liver is a filter. If we go even further looking for examples, we can look at a simple kitchen calendar. We take a boiling pot of water filled with pasta, toss it through this device, the water passes through, and our pasta (provided it isn't too tiny), stays behind. There are even electronic filters. In audio, a low pass filter sends bass to sub-woofers, a band pass filter sends mids to a mid range speaker, and a high pass filter sends high frequencies to a tweeter speaker.
This case is interesting.
They didn't patent the concept of filtering
They patented the ability to do it for a single serving of coffee within a self-contained highly preservable package that allows them to add high temperature water as part of the process of breaking two seals in it that don't require a lot of mechanical engineering (and thus a hugely expensive, giant machine like a Flavia does).
Look, I really don't get the anti-patent rhetoric. If we didn't let them patent the idea and exclusively make money from it for a while, then what impetus would they have to make it. "Oh, thanks for that invention, now everyone's going to make the same thing and you get nothing for your effort except this thanks!"
The point is that, now, nobody's stopping you from taking their idea and beating it (in cost or ingenuity) once you know what they've done. That's the beauty of patenting...everyone gets to know what you did. It fosters *healthy* competition...the kind that leads to even better stuff sooner!
There's definitely an ugly side to patenting. In the past 60 years (maybe even less), we've quickly turned into using the patent system as an overprotective blanket at times and companies definitely rely on the patent office's inability to always quickly parse through some of the extremely weighty legalese to deny patents that are poorly constructed, over-reaching, or should simply be unpatentable. This isn't one of those cases...not by a long shot.
Innovation
Forget innovation, people should be allowed to gouge each other for simply coming up with concepts, not creating products and services.
If someone else can make a similar cartridge, cheaper, with their own manufacturing process and machines not based on Keurigs design, why not? That's Capitalism!
Keurig's job is to make sure others designs can't be used by their machines. Not to try to ban everyone else on Earth from making a hollow container that contains coffee grounds.
I can't believe were even arguing this.
That's what this is about
The complaint from Keurig is that what OneCups made IS based on Keurig's design. It'd have to be otherwise why would it surreptitiously fit in a Keurig machine AND be sold as a cheap alternative to the K Cup?
You can't patent a shape.
at least, you shouldn't be. Historically you couldn't.
are you arguing that there should only be one patent holder for spark plugs, and they should royalties every time someone else want s to make one?
(Rather then having a patent on a machine and process of making them)
Spark plugs were patented.
Spark plugs were patented. This isn't hard to figure out.
I agree
So patent the device/machinery and physical process that makes the cups!
That's what patents are for.
And if someone else comes by with a generic cup, can do it cheaper, and does it with their own machine that isn't breaking the patent on the machine you use; tough luck! Thats innovation.
From the sounds of it they're trying to claim a patent on a cup of a specific size and volume with the ability to be punctured at both ends. That's baloney, historically speaking. It's how it works now after the patent office was gutted and the lobbyists changed the laws.
That's like one step away from patenting a cylindrical device to hold air. Or a tin device to hold vegetables.
And that's why this one is in the messed up category to me.
Judges that don't understand computer programming are doing the same thing. Instead of patenting the code and the process someone figured out to do something elegantly in code; they're allowing patent trolls to patent the idea on how to do something.
So instead of Apple being able to patent their code for "how to successfully and efficiently write a slide to unlock application", they're allowed to patent the whole idea behind slide to unlock.
Even though the physical version is non-patentable and has been around as long as humans have had hands.
OH!
Don't forget the "method of swinging on a swing" patent:
http://post.teledyn.com/method-of-swinging-on-a-sw...