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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note Lexmark tried to (ab)use other kinds of so-called "intelectual property" laws earlier: the copyright law and DMCA. When they failed, they decided to use patents instead. And all this for what purpose? To prevent people from using cartridges manufactured by other companies, i.e. blocking competition and acting against free market and user rights. If this isn't abuse, I don't know what it is. If you can't build a superior product supported by good marketing, don't try to save yourself by legal action. If you do, you only alienate your customers, the very people you should serve first.

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They built their model around expensive ink and cheap printers. Of course they will try to protect that. And yes, it is abuse.

Didn't Gillette did the same thing with Dollar Shave Club?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/p-gs-gillette-sues-dollar-shave...

I would guess that this influenced their decision to sell to P&G, thus protecting the razor duopoly.

They sold to Unilever not P&G.

Anyone know if Harry's is owned by P&G or Unilever?

The company, HF Global, Inc., is privately held, and as far as I can tell with a Google search, no other razor company owns a majority of the stock, or any stock at all.

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.as...

Also to prevent refilling a Lexmark cartridge with inexpensive third party ink.

The thing is there are printers without the stupid on the market.

So the EFF is wrong, patents haven't savaged the printer marketplace, there are nice printers available that are not expensive. And it's wrong that the market will punish shitty products, Lexmark is one of the few survivors in the printer business.

Without (ab)using patents, DMCA, etc to prevent 3rd-party products their business model would not be sustainable.

If your business cannot survive without a government-granted monopoly, it's not a free market.

Sure, it's not a free market. What does that have to do with what I said?

My claim is that reasonable printers that are free of bullshit exist for most purposes (prior to Epson switching to reservoir printers, the home color printer market was pretty thin) and yet companies that do use bullshit tactics continue to exist. So the printers exist (patents have not particularly held them back) and for some reason enough people ignore these reasonable printers for companies using abusive tactics to survive.

The strategy people should be following is to buy the printer based on the cost of consumables. It's what I do. But most people do the strategy of

1. find the model where the company subsidizes the printer to sell the ink

2. Then try to work around the lockouts the company has on the ink market.

Both sides are trying to screw each other over. I see no reason to care. If the people trying to use third-party ink really succeed, all that will happen is that the market strategy will disappear, and so the third-party ink market will vanish. (I really wonder how you run a business where if you really win you go out of business. You need to hope the other side keeps on fighting just enough that you can attract all the people who enjoy fighting over pennies.)

You are assuming that the average customer knows that the company is subsidizing the printer to sell the ink. . . I don't think that is true. I think the average person sees a great deal on a printer and is genuinely surprised when they find it drinks ink like it's Octoberfest.

At the time of purchase you can find these things out by researching the price of the replacement ink cartridge and its page rating. (Page rating is soft/fudgeable but should at least be a reasonable way to ballpark the lifespan of the cartridge.) I would consider this cursory research when evaluating a purchase that takes an ongoing supply of consumables.

To me it sort of seems like you're saying "Wow this dryer uses way more electricity than I thought it would!" or "Wow I bought this razor handle and the blades are really expensive!" or "Wow Swiffer really screws you with the replacement wipes!" or "Wow this car takes expensive tires!" -- even though the numbers for the ongoing consumables were available at the time of purchase.

So every time I buy a swifter or razor or dryer I have to do thorough research on things like power consumption, cost of replacement parts etc. No! I have a life, I have other things to do. I buy from large brand names like Lexar because I expect them to be honest and engage in fair dealing and because researching every aspect of products I buy would be a full time job in itself.

I get where you're coming from, but this concept you take issue with goes by another name: "due diligence"

I'd even argue that selling a cheap ~$50 printer and then expecting to make it back on consumables is a legitimate business model. If you're the kind of person who prints once in a blue moon, it makes more sense than buying a ~$200 laser printer.

Printers are generally expensive and generally last a few years. They're not casual, off-the-cuff purchases. Much like a computer, they are a precision machine, but with many more moving parts. I really don't believe it's unreasonable to do a couple hours worth of research on something that'll be in your home or office, possibly doing Important Serious Business Things, for years.

Actually if you print that infrequently you'd probably be better off with one of those 'office stores' as a print service.

The problem is lack of knowledge, the average customer, including me when I bought my current crappy printer, doesn't have enough knowledge to know that certain printers eat ink. In fact, printer companies that use these sales tactics are relying on lack of customer knowledge. So it's not really reasonable to say that people are ingoring good companies and going to ones that use abusive tactics, its' more that people just don't know.

I get that the customer has some responsibilities, but it doesn't make sense to say that the customer has to exhaustively reserach the ethics of every single company they buy something from. That would make buying a full time job considering our complex modern economy where customers regularly interact with many many companies and buy many many things

The problem with the "it's not a free market" argument is that ultimately almost nothing is a purely free market when you drill down. Not only that, but wether a market free or not has only tangential relation to the question of if the market is competitive - which is what most people are actually after when they start talking about free markets.

It's arguable that Lexmark is misapplying patent protection in defense of its stupid business model. I mean, it's pretty obvious.

And yet, if Lexmark were successful here, what would stop competitors from using that against them? As in, "Only fools buy Lexmark printers."

I think the question is what would competitors find more lucrative, calling out Lexmark through marketing, or using the precedent set to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I suspect it's the latter.

Good point. So do you think that it's just legal uncertainty that's stopped them?

Given that it's a new tactic, I think previously they didn't consider it or discounted it as not worth pursuing, but now that it's in court they are waiting to see how it goes. It's not like other companies haven't aggressively fought against third party ink refilling in other ways[1].

1: http://www.therecorder.com/id=1202769608088/HP-Sued-Over-Mas...

2: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/hp-printer-drm/

3: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-G4w0dP...

> patents haven't savaged the printer marketplace

I'd _agree_ with you if the EFF claimed that, but they didn't in the article linked. The EFF here isn't making broad brush claims about market structures, except maybe for this section:

> "Courts and legal scholars have long acknowledged that such restrictions impair the purchasers’ personal autonomy, interfere with efficient use of property, create confusion in markets, and increase information costs"

But even here I argue that's the wrong reading. When taken in the context of the rest of the article, this appears to be a traditional consumer advocacy approach taken from the Ralph Nader playbook.

It is almost impossible for new competition to enter the printer market because it is so patent encumbered. That's why you can only buy a printer from Canon (inc. HP brand), Epson, Lexmark (inc. Dell brand), Samsung, and Brother.

Anyone trying to start a new printer company will get sued into the ground or blocked by a US court from even importing their printers. That's why countries without strong patent protections have a local printer brand that costs half as much or less.

It is also why we witnessed such a strong 3D printer marketplace for a while, different companies entering an unencumbered market and trying to establish a monopoly via IP protections.

Printer innovation is non-existent (outside of innovate ways to make more money, like subscriptions). That's because there's no threat to their position, nobody can go near printers and they know it.

That hasn't been true for years. HP's original Inkjet patents are long expired. That technology was a major breakthrough. They had to do fluid simulations on a supercomputer to get the ink control to work right. Someone involved once told me that intuition totally fails on that problem - fluid behavior on that scale is not at all like what one might expect.

That doesn't mean that HP wouldn't sue you for violating any number of possibly-applicable patents that are currently valid.

If you make an exact copy of that first inkjet they cannot sue you.

Including the serial port as the only connection method? Using parts that are no longer available for purchase?

cannot seems like a strong term.

They'd very likely try (hard), even if they eventually end up losing. Then try again a different way using a different approach, then again (etc). "Drown the opposition" in legal fees seems to be a commonly used tactic by larger (bullying) companies.

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