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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> It's not like HP can revoke a digital license to all of the ink I've already received

That is literally what they are doing through printer firmware. They are literally preventing you from printing freely.

HP also region-lock their ink like it’s a dvd or something.

As I discovered when my UK printer was accidentally shipped with US ink. The printer permanently locked itself and refused to accept any HP ink sold in the UK.

Will never buy anything from HP ever again.

And they can continue to do it, even revoking their own print cartridges if they want to. "Oh, that's 2020 ink, it won't print in 2021."

Shhhhhhhhhhh, don't give them any ideas.

It'd be way too easy to claim that the ink is past it's best-by date, and that they want you to have a trouble free experience with their ink, so they are disabling that bad expired ink.

Doesn't ink expire normally after a few years?

toner cartridges last forever. I've only used 3-4 over the past 20 years, including the replacement stored for years after I bought it my printer because I assume they would pull that intro-cartridge horseshit but they didn't - they still won!

"Oh, not ink bought in Utica, no, only Albany ink."

“Oh that’s Word 8, it doesn’t work with Windows 10.”

Lexmark already does this with their toner cartridges on mid-size business machines.

It's horrifying to think that any ink that I might have stocked up maybe 2 years ago during a sale could be unusable.

Plus, since it's a consumable, it's much harder to return a defective ink cartridge once the packaging has been opened.

Well I must say, after coming back to check the thread later on I've learned a lot about HP's awful business practices. Based on the article (and the fact that I've had the same HP printer for over a decade now) I had no idea that they were using DRM in their ink cartridges. I guess when I finally update my printer I'll be switching to a different brand.

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