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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

I generally like the EFF, and I'm a member (albeit at a low paying level)... but if you're really unhappy about this, isn't it better just to stop buying HP printer products?

Rather than being so activist & "omg outrage!", why doesn't the EFF publish a list of printers that the EFF currently does recommend? Almost like the Wirecutter does with their product testing reviews. (It sounds like Epson might be one alternative with the EcoTank range.) They could evaluate products against EFF values (driver compatibility with Linux / BSD maybe?) and it would be a more positive & productive response than social media outrage.

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Because consumer choice is a very weak weapon against your freedoms being taken away. Political action is what corporations fear, in particular the threat of organized support behind ideas to regulate them more heavily.

Edit: RMS quote: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people’s rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That’s what democracy was invented for!"

Why would they fear regulation? Their competitors become subject to the same restrictions.

Their competitors may be subject to the same regulations, but new regulations force companies to develop products that comply with the new regulations. R&D is a huge expense, and you can't guarantee the product you develop is going to be better than your competitors.

Furthermore, their competitors might already have a product which meets the new regulations, or one which can be easily modified to meet them. This can lead to a financial advantage, but it can also mean the competitor has a period where they are the only product on the market.

Regulation demanding not to screw your customers doesn't seem like such a big burden to me.

I fear it would never meet the paper as "don't screw your customers." It would be something more along the lines of, "Cartridges should be at least the size of (exact dimensions of existing HP cartridges) and work a reasonable amount of time." To which HP could easily counter, "reasonable" is dependent on freshness and quality of the lines or some bs like that.

Edit: to clarify, I agree with you that regulation to the consumers benefit would be good, but am assuming that the law written would just be to HP's benefit anyway

> to clarify, I agree with you that regulation to the consumers benefit would be good, but am assuming that the law written would just be to HP's benefit anyway

A more hopeful, less cynical view would be that consumer protection laws do exist, and it's reasonable to assume that in the absence of any such laws, sellers would certainly try to get away with much more than they currently are. So regulation does work, at least to some extent.

To be sure, I don't know that new regulation is needed in this particular case. HP may have broken an existing law already, but I'm not a lawyer. The bigger point is that lawmakers deal with ambiguity all the time, and if they can be convinced to make a law for a purpose, they surely have the means to do it. The convincing is the hard part, which is why taking issues like this one into the political arena is sometimes necessary.

They'll still need to spend resources (and so will earn reduced profit) updating processes/code/etc to comply with the regs, plus ongoing costs to ensure compliance.

They actually _spent_ resources to ensure that non-hp cartridges are treated differently. If they had been prevented by law to do it (and maybe they are), they would have saved money!

That's kind of overstating things, isn't it? Yes, what HP did was balls-up stupid, and I'll think hard before buying anything from them, but companies have liberties too. They have rights to free speech (you don't want the government telling newspapers what to print), and they have rights to sell what they want, just as we have rights to not buy the merde they try to force on us. Twitter has the right to shut down speech on its network that it doesn't like, and that's not a First Amendment issue. Nobody's liberties are being taken away: rather, someone's liberties are being exercised.

Now, I do think that a lawsuit may be in order here, because it seems quite plausible that HP acted deceptively. But that's not "our rights being taken away", which is primarily an issue related to the guys with guns (i.e., the government). This isn't that: rather, it's a company lying to us, and trying to get us to buy their product on false pretenses.

How about we start characterizing "company lying to us" as theft, and put them in actual jail for it, then?

If you want to treat corporations like people with liberties, let's make basic laws like fraud and theft have consequences. We shoot and choke to death people selling cigarettes or cds 'illegally' on the side of the street why can't Wells Fargo executives go to jail for theft?

But financial crimes are illegal. Could you point out a specific person/case?

Wells Fargo fired 5300 employees and paid a $185 million fine.

Wells Fargo's shareholders fired 5300 employees and paid a $185 million fine. As far as I'm aware the CEO kept his job and bonus.

> and they have rights to sell what they want

No, they don't. They cannot sell a device that harms you or your neighbours, for instance. More to the point, they cannot sell a device that prevents competition.

You're taking that statement too literally. When people say something like that it's with the understanding they imply legal provisions apply.

So, in this case, if it's not legal and HP committed some commercial offence they can and should be sued for non compliance.

The GP post is suggesting we make what HP did illegal, so that companies will be discouraged from doing it in the future.

> companies have liberties too. They have rights to free speech

Maybe they shouldn't. Companies are not people, and as such don't have the same moral standing. Only the people that comprise them do.

But then the US government would be able to tell the NYT, CNN and NBC what to print and what not to print (No, you may not print that news which embarrasses the President, It's against Regulation 5v).

> Only the people that comprise them do.

That may work to defend Facebook and Twitter (which allows anyone to post anything, Copyright stays with author, so perhaps it can get away with "safe harbor"). Once the newspaper decides anything (and definitely if it owns the IP), it's now their freedom of speech which is impaired, not the authors.

Stallman never said to avoid using consumer choice. People publishing lists of bogus printers is stronger than just choice because it could coordinate a larger group.

I wonder what would happen to stock prices in printer companies if it became common practice for the the EFF, FSF, and several other noteworthy, but not yet large groups published lists quarterly saying not to buy HP printer and recommending good competitor devices.

It would be a good service to the public and could possibly attract more donations and if just a few news outlets ran with it there could a few % points dropped from HP stock price. If the shareholders ain't happy, then nobody at HP is happy.

The specific problem here was that this was a booby-trap feature that users couldn't prevent from happening because it got "added" to the product months after the purchasing decision. HP was able to go forward in time to modify the product, post-purchase, but you can't go back in time to get a refund.

Why can't you get a refund? Has HP denied refunds to customers who wanted to return their printer over this matter?

Will HP really refund a 2 year old printer that got this security update?

I don't know about in the US, but under Australian consumer law companies are required to provide a 2 year warranty against defects.

I think the number of customers who are genuinely affected by this is so low that HP might be happy to just pay off the handful of customers who complain to them. If you're using 3rd party inks, you're probably not a customer that HP want anyway. If no one actually tries to get a refund, we won't know.

Considering that HP tells in its instructions that you must use HP cartridges, there's no way they'd accept the premise that not using HP-branded cartridges is a defect. That's the point of the exercise.

If there's no defect, there's no reason for the EFF to call them out!

As it is, I'll probably cancel my EFF membership over this (my renewal is due in a fortnight). I'd rather they support manufacturers who share their values and provide buyers guides to help customers decide.

Boycotts are a pretty weak weapon compared to the ability to tarnish a company's reputation. I've yet to see a boycott really have any effect in the tech marketplace, but negative publicity often elicits some sort of response when it starts to get mainstream media coverage.

I didn't mean a boycott as such - I have an HP printer, and I knew when I bought it that it requires proprietary/DRM ink. I'm surprised any customers who care about ink DRM would have bought an HP printer. Their website is full of pages about the "anti-counterfeit" ink security in their printer products.

I do hope the customers this affects can get refunds, but it seems to me that if you want a printer where you can refill the ink yourself or use third-party cartridges, it would be better to just buy a printer from a company that already supports that.

Because they've already defrauded existing customers?

Doesn't seem like they are mutually exclusive. Why not do both?

That is an option for folks for their future purposes. And some of them will indeed go with another company. This seemed a bit more underhanded.

Ok, maybe the package had things telling folks to always use HP ink and not a different sort. I personally would just pass most of that off as a marketing ploy. I mean, shampoo recommends I use their complementary conditioner after all.

Folks were indeed using non-hp ink with success - it isn't like the printer just refused to print with the replacements. If HP clearly stated that the machine wouldn't work with non-HP parts, it was obviously untrue.

Then a security update introduced the 'feature' that bricked the printers using non-HP ink. So one day, you find you simply can't print. Which is an annoyance if you are printing whimsical stuff, but not so great if you are printing off papers you need to take to work tomorrow or that you need for an immigration appointment or something like that. Suddenly, the printer doesn't work.

I think if it were an upfront, out-of-the-box thing (honesty and stuff) it wouldn't be such a big deal. It would be much like the DRM coffee pods. New machine, now with DRM! They didn't give the old machines an update, however, and take away the ability to use replacements.

Sure it's nice to boycott them but doing it this way has the (slim?) potential of getting that change reverted, restoring full functionality/compatibility to current customers.

That said, I really do want to see someone compile that list you suggested.

I'd love this kind of report with various things. I'm thinking phones would be extremely helpful too, how easy is it to unlock the bootloader on this phone? How hard is it to repair it? What proprietary blobs does it rely upon?

HP has just bought the Samsung printer business. That's one less choice if you want to simply stop buying HP printers. If HP is allowed to keep doing its dirty tricks (sneaky firmware updates and all) then things are only going to get worse.

A chart like they did for messaging apps would be nice. Show the pros and cons, let the consumer decide and even bring light to little known, well behaved players if there are any :^)

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