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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is actually much worse than I thought it would be from the title!

> HP rolled out a pay-on-price "Free Ink for Life" plan that gave you 15 pages every month for as long as you owned your printer. But this is HP we're talking about, so words have no meaning. Last month, HP notified its "free ink for life" customers that their life had ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to pay $0.99/month

And from what I can tell in a quick Google search, HP introduced the "free ink for life" plan less than a year ago. So "life" lasted less than a year!

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While that is awful, I think the 'free ink for life' plan was just as sneaky in itself. Having bought a cheap HP inkjet printer recently, I was curious about the free ink plan. But it's a trick - you can't agree to the free ink, then just buy 3rd party ink when you want more. No, if you go over 15 pages a month, the IOT printer will automatically order you the ink and bill your account. Buying cheaper ink will just be a waste of ink because you won't be able to print with it without ordering more HP ink.

That is truly evil.

That looks like a class action suit. I can't believe "free X for life" can be reasonably interpreted as "free X for a year and then you have to pay".

As if there wasn't a binding arbitration clause in the Ink for Life service agreement.

I always wonder if it is reasonable to assume that people are capable of understanding service agreements. Like, could a court make a decision that the customer was not a lawyer and therefore could not fully understand the agreement. Further, that the barrier to hiring a lawyer to understand such an agreement is too high (i.e. expensive) and it is unreasonable to expect the customer to do so.

A court COULD make that decision, but there're centuries of precedent that this is not the case, which is tragic. The court will assume that no reasonable person would agree to a contract without reading the contents and consulting with a lawyer on anything that is unclear during the contract's negotiations, and for major contracts between large companies, they would be correct.

It would be a nearly revolutionary change to introduce a law like "you cannot meaningfully agree to any contracts or agreements without a lawyer advising you and a representative of the other party empowered to negotiate the terms." I'm all for it, though.

You'd need to fix several other kinds of laws around liability for negligence and the like, but those things need fixing anyway. The current hack where everybody agrees to waive their rights to sue for negligence is stupid. You would, however, need a new kind of thing that handled common agreements like terms of a credit card. There need to be terms, hiring lawyers for each person is ridiculous, but "contract" is probably the wrong model since no customer could be expected to understand it all, meaningfully consent to it, or negotiate the terms. I would be interested in what an alternative system could be. I kind of imagine a government body deciding on acceptable terms for various forms of business, effectively acting as the customer's agent in negotiations, but that seems ripe for corruption and also really inefficient and hard to innovate around. Suggestions?

Suggestion: regulation. There are already many industries where what you can agree to is regulated. There should be more.

Seriously. Look at the car market. Every dealership has a binding arbitration clause in their purchase agreements and will not sell you the car without it. "If you don't like it, go somewhere else". But there is nowhere else to go.

You have it backwards. There is a mountain of precedent behind the idea that customers can't understand the fine print, and thus these "contracts of adhesion" are restricted.

That's another nasty hack, though. First, courts decide that not reading or not understanding a contract is not an excuse. Then, companies just start having their customers agree to ridiculous terms. So courts try and fix it by partially restricting those 'agreements.' "Okay, so you're allowed to waive the right to sue for negligence, but you can't waive the right to sue for gross negligence." It's a situation where companies can basically get customers to waive every right they have right up until a fuzzy "unconscionable" line. That's a quick hack around a terrible system.

Freedom of contract. FREEDOM!!

Americans have every right to sign horrible contracts. They can also done all thier money to doll museums, or gamble it away in vegas. Like it or not, any measures that sound like they are limiting consumer choice, even choice to make obvious mistakes, will face serious resistance.

The outer limits on contracts are things like slavery, children, and taking advantage of the disabled. Bad printer service contracts dont come close.

That is specifically the problem here; you don't have freedom of contract if there is no possiblity of negotiating a different contract.

The freedom is before signing. You are free to sign or not, make whatever deal you care to. That includes signing away your ability to get out of bad deals.

I'm a big proponent of freedom to do dumb things, but in general when MOST people freely choose any given dumb thing, that's a strong symptom that they are not freely choosing.

I like the German approach here (surprise, /me German...):

Non-negiotiable standard contracts that are applied to consumer contracts en masse are called "Allgemeine Geschaeftsbedingungen (AGB)" (roughly: common business conditions). A business may apply those, but if they do, they need to conform to a restrictive law (AGBG) regulating what is and isn't allowed in such conditions. E.g. no future changes without an exchange of equal value to the changes, no surprising clauses that are not "normal" for this kind of situation, no grossly unequal considerations to begin with.

Individuals and businesses still have freedom of contract however, if a contract is really negotiated freely, that is, in an equal exchange between both parties. If there was no negotiation or a very unequal one ("take it or leave it, we'll block any of your change requests but you need the ink now"), AGBG applies. In all situations mentioned above, the consumer had no opportunity to negotiate (a symbolic "negotiation phone number" in the smallprint doesn't count, etc), so all those fancyful clauses or the whole contract conditions would just be unenforcable, with the most consumer-friendly interpretation applied to the rest as a matter of law.

> Americans have every right to sign horrible contracts.

Sure, if you want to be known as Land of Horrible Contracts .. populated by people slavishly abiding by them in a state of learned helplessness.

If you call that "freedom", I truly hope that someone will take it from you.

An idea I have had is having a way to create a voluntary consumer association which can negotiate terms with other parties on behalf of its members. These agreements would override any terms a member accidentally agrees to with respect to that party unless the member explicitly informs the association that they are negotiating their own agreement.

This would provide a way for consumers to collectively negotiate these contracts in their own interest while still allowing companies to create specific non-trivial contracts that properly manage the expected relationship.

This has the desirable property that it supports heterogeneous solutions and encourages competition amongst contract negotiators to negotiate better terms or ones that more closely align with the interests of their members.

> The court will assume that no reasonable person would agree to a contract without reading the contents and consulting with a lawyer

That's what I always do when I go to the grocery store to buy eggs and to Office Depot to buy printer ink. I call my lawyer and say "It's that time again, I have to buy some printer paper, ink, carrots, eggs and cheese, so that's five contracts for you to read and verify, we should be done in less than a day!". With very reasonable price of $400 per hour, I don't even have to ask what the actual items cost, compared to the expense for the contact reading it's peanuts anyway. Oh, btw, need to call the lawyer about the contract for peanuts, I'm almost out!

Yes, that'd be ridiculous, and that's why my grocery store does not require me to sign any agreements when I buy produce.

Means nothing, it’s not reasonable to expect a customer to understand or read this

If enough people file individual actions with the binding arbitration company, they'll _wish_ it was a class action instead.

That trick only works the first few times. Language will be adjusted in new and even old agreements. Also, IIRC, in one of those infamous cases the arbitration company gave their client a bulk discount, because the arbitration company knows which side of their bread is buttered. Undoubtedly new contracts with arbitration companies already include special pricing for mass arbitration, presumably tailored to minimize the client's and arbitrator's costs while maximizing their client's customers' costs.

Arbitration isn't a magic wand.

If the arbitrator colludes with one side, the other side can file class action.

A more practical answer is telling everyone you know that HP is a sham company, and avoid their products like the rona.

If negotiating costs with the arbitrator could, per se, constitute cognizable collusion I don't think arbitration would be a thing. It is a thing. Therefore we're stuck with the system.

What really needs to happen is for Congress to legislatively overturn conservative justices' belated, radical reinterpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act, effectively preempting traditional state law-based policies that reign in unfair arbitration practices. But anti-trial lawyer propaganda has permeated deep into the American psyche, including among Democrats. Legislation that could be spun as empowering trial lawyers has become something of a third rail in American politics, especially at the national level. The alternative to fixing the FAA is to do like Civil Law countries and create more regulatory bodies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But 1) both conservative legislators and judges make it their hobby to cripple those agencies; and 2) I, for one, would prefer going back to a regime that permits more private actions because, at least in modern American politics, a centralized consumer protection process is politically impractical even without the disingenuous and baldly partisan efforts of politicians and judges.

The problem with regulatory agencies is that to be effective they have to stick their nose into everybody's business preemptively. That's not a good fit for American-style enterprise and politics. The nice thing about civil suits is that, at least in principle, they can only happen when someone has actually been wronged and suffered actual losses. Which means companies can move fast & break things, so long as they're prepared to pay for any damages.

It was conservative activist judges all along.

> Which means companies can move fast & break things, so long as they're prepared to pay for any damages.

Or go bankrupt, like the Upper Graystone Well 963A Fracking Co.

More like an FTC complaint.

It’s just like “unlimited data *”

This has definitely been available for more than a year, but no more than about ten, from my memory. Edit: Looks like it started in 2013, under Meg Whitman. [1]

Also, this user says it was ad-sponsored! [2]

[1] https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-launches-new-instant-in...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/874mi2/question_a...

Interesting, I've only heard about it ~3 years ago when I got a cheap (and reliable, fwiw) Envy AIO, but it was not free.

Thank you! I couldn't get an exact date, and made a hasty assumption because I couldn't find any stories about the program that predated January 2020. (But I didn't search for too long.)

It doesn't look like the "free" plan was available all the way back in 2013 though—it's not mentioned in your first link, and they presumably would have brought up something like that.

And more importantly, they were clearly still using this plan to sell new printers as recently as this past winter...

I imagine a robber growling "$0.99 or your life!"

It's hard to tell what is more insulting, the ending of a "for life" program or the amount because of which it ends.

Also, another big warning against stuff which is "free" or "for life"; in most cases, either is commercially unsustainable.

>> or the amount because of which it ends.

a buck to print 15 pages a month on the customer's printer is a sweet deal for HP. It's pure profit and likely adds up. 6 months from now they'll bump it to $1.29 and some executive will get a multi-million dollar bonus.

A typical inkjet cartridge prints around 190 pages. So at 15 pages per $1 this is like buying cartridges at $13 a piece, except way more complicated and obnoxious. Cartridges normally cost around $20 so it is still a slight savings if you're willing to deal with the hassle of counting your pages every month.

For me however, I give that whole plan a giant middle finger. That's way too much headache and hassle for a $7 savings.

But only if you print exactly 15 pages each month

They do roll over up to 45 pages, so it's not entirely unreasonable that someone would use all or at least most of their credits.

It has definitely been around for more than a year. We bought a printer three years ago that tried to get us to sign up for this. I remember it being pretty aggressive about it too.

I had a HP printer once. That was enough for me to learn that I will never buy any product from them ever again.

These kind of "we need to trick money out of you" methods are not limited to their printers. The one HP notebook that I installed half a decade ago was the worst bloated system I have ever seen.

Only their displays seem to be not cursed by that plague — yet.

It is too sad that there is no reasonable open hardware printer, so for now brother laserprinters will have to do. Costs <100€, toner cost per page is low and the thing runs for a decade (in my case) without weird issues.

Really shouldn't be surprised by the shit HP pulls... At least their workstations are still great.

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