There are plenty of companies from which you can buy printers that don't do this shit. Just don't buy HP products. Problem solved. Of course I also think that this practice should be illegal, but you're overstating the problem by a fair margin.
The way to deal with business practices that harm the consumer or public is to regulate or legislate them in some way. This is why we don't allow child labor. We didn't just tell people "well, choose a company that doesn't employ little children".
The patent deals started with HP, Canon and IBM having a cross-license. Lexmark inherited that deal and was able to enter the market after it spun out from IBM but took the printer patent licenses with it. Things evolved a lot since then, but the same tactics are employed to keep out new entrants.
Except that Brother can do the same if they want. Also, lets me clear to talk about profit, and not sales, as "money they make" can be interpreted either way, and locking someone into your product is a classic way to increase profit. Even if brother sells twice as many printers, and makes three times as much money in profit on hardware sales, are they really better off than HP if HP is making even more money by locking people into ink sales and making 6x the hardware cost on ink?
Vilifying behavior doesn't incentivize companies to stop doing it, it incentivizes them to keep the public from learning about it or making it so they can't do anything about it once they do.
Capitalism and the free market are predicated on accurate information that people can assess in a timely manner. When that breaks down in some way, whether it be negative information being hidden until it's too late or information that is just very hard for the average person to acquire and assess, that's where the government comes in.
> They might be unit profitable, but it doesn't help if you move much fewer units.
It depends entirely on how much more profitable each unit might be, and how much having guaranteed ink sales can be used to leverage other opportunities, and other opportunities that may come up from having a captive customer base.