We’ve told you about Keurig’s ridiculous attempts to control what coffee pods people use in their machines, and how shoddy the system has turned out to be. To defeat it, all you need is scissors and tape. But one coffee company has created a more elegant solution that won’t look like a kludge.
And that is the Freedom Clip. The Rogers Family Company, who, by a total coincidence, makes a whole line of third-party K-cups, is giving away this hunk of plastic completely free to anybody who signs up to receive one. It basically just blocks the reader and presumably has some form of authorization on the inside, but once you click it in, there it stays, and you can enjoy any coffee you want without needing to clip wires or tape old lids to the inside of your machine.
As we’ve noted previously, you probably won’t need the Freedom Clip for very long. Green Mountain has been discovering the hard way that nobody cares about their desire to retain a patent, and it seems likely the Keurig 2.0 will either be retired in favor of a DRM-free model, or they’ll just give up and go back to the 1.0 model. Which, let’s face it, is all anybody really needs. Unless they’re a coffee snob, but then they wouldn’t be using a Keurig in the first place.