Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit
theregister.com
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My kiddo bought a new printer in 2015 because he had to print something for high school and the toner cartridge was empty. It was cheaper to buy a whole replacement brother with the starter cartridge than to just get a cartridge (and it was delivered for free within the a couple of hours!). I still have it, still use it once in a while, and it's still on that same starter cartridge and maybe the same ream of paper. Two more kids have finished high school using it...hardly at all.
In the past year I can remember two printer jobs, each a single page.
“Printer mfrs”
As we all know it isn’t just an abbreviation for “manufacturers”
Work stuff requires offline archives for contracts and legal stuff
Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
Lifehack: you can annotate a PDF with a signature and just send it to the receiver.
The only time I couldn't do that was when I needed a notarized document.
> Regarding travelling, is no fun when something happens trying to show the ticket from an app that for whatever reason decides not to start, or having the phone dying on me. Paper to the rescue.
Yup. I save screenshots of barcodes for tickets and other stuff instead. I have a second phone as a backup :)
No I cannot, because they won't be accepted by the receivers I work with.
The previous comment was just trying to be helpful.
Nobody thinks you're clever or cool for shutting down someone trying to be helpful.
Easy enough for anyone that decides to read before doing clever comments.
Should we also discuss the semantics of what offline means?
In Germany we have a word for it, Besserwisser.
I'm solely printing my stuff to stamp a date and then scanning them back... Haven't found anything yet.
Which is a pain in the ass to automate but effective.
I told the credit card company that demanded that I mail them letter with a wet signature to just accept a scanned PDF or lose my business and after a few emails back and forth they simply relented (admittedly, this was a few years ago).
In addition and on long distance trips I upload everything important to Dropbox. So, even if I lose the documentation I'm able to print it from a hotel or Internet Cafe (yes, they still exist)
This may not actually be the case, 'starter' cartridges often have significantly less toner than full-size. Also, Brother is among the better actors in the printer space - I believe that Louis Rossmann has one, and talks it up in [1] at around 11:30.
But it definitely is the case. They still haven't exhausted the starter cartridge.
If a new printer costs the same as a new cartridge but the cartridge contains twice the toner, then the new printer is twice as expensive per page. That's true even if they haven't gotten to the bottom of the starter yet. It just means they don't print much.
Toner is just a container with little balls of plastic.
Ink, sure, but this conversation was about laser.
Who cares? Your bank account can't see your cost per page. It can only see the money you actually spend. Paying additional money for capacity you will never use doesn't save you any money.
Last time I bought one, Brother was the only brand I would buy, it wasn't even close. I hope they are still as consumer friendly now, because they made me very happy.
Maybe in your little corner of the world, but for the rest of us we need ink (or toner) on paper to just conduct life.
If that is the case, it is more because of a failing on our part to teach people the benefits of printing than anything else.
I'll hold onto my printer and print language stdlib and API reference docs til the day I die. There's just something about having it in print that helps me navigate the corpus of information more effectively.
That's a lot more open than they used to be.
Ps: my printing needs are also minimal these days. A boarding pass here, a form there. A couple of pages a month. I have a Brother laser for that reason, no heads to dry out and consumables are cheap.
Sometimes what you said is true though, because they want to sell you a product that keep you buying their cartridge so selling the printer "at a loss" can be profitable.
There is nothing new in this space. HP hasn't exactly been the beacon of customer satisfaction thanks to their restrictive policies. Most of these printers are probably made in similar factories (probably a handful of places), somewhere in China. I'd buy from a brand that offers more flexibility when it comes to ink/toner than anything else.
This way the printer market is really shrinking and consolidating, like HDD market.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
I doubt that tbh - the wikipedia article above shows Reality Winner got caught printing (presumably) black/white NSA documents because the printer was able to print the color tracking dots.
Therefore, not being able to display the dots shouldn't be an obstacle to the printer operating in B/W mode, as it would effectively be a B/W printer in that case. The more likely explanation is simply that HP wants to sell more overpriced color ink.
Interestingly, the Reality Winner documents were actually in color: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Report_on_Russia_Spea...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
Are we at the same stage today? An open source ink printer would be particularly hard to make because of the nozzle, and laser ones are complicated because of the drums?
Just curious if someone in 10 or 20 years might come back to these threads and reminisce at this unattainable open hardware ideal as they grumble about HPCanon's latest dystopian ""innovation"".
I think "open source" doesn't need to mean "every component from scratch", much like a lot of open-source hardware relies on MCUs whose designs are decidedly not open. There's been some attempts at using existing inkjet cartridges with integrated printheads:
A fully open source printer (hardware and everything) is likely still infeasible....but how hard would it be to design and sell an open source control board replacement?
According to that thread, the hardest thing about an open source printer is the patents on all the hardware, but I'm pretty sure that it is legal (in the US at least), to buy a printer and swap out the control board if one so desires.
And I'm also pretty sure that, as long as you are not using copyrighted firmware or something, that it would be legal to sell such a motherboard with new, open source software on it.
This moves the goalpost from "design a completely new printer" to "create new control firmware and software". The downside is that you lose the full repairability options one would have if the entire thing was open source/open hardware, but honestly, hardware doesn't seem to be the primary problem with modern printers.
This feels like a 95% as good solution with <5% of the difficulty, unless I'm missing something.
But I do feel like (in the case of printers) building on top of hardware from hostile companies is too risky. And yeah, you wouldn’t be able to get replacement parts. It’d be a devil’s bargain.
I’m definitely envisioning/dreaming of something as open and tweak-able as a 3d printer. That world is full of customization and innovation. And it seems to be truly built from the ground up. To me that’s the goal.
If such a thing ever started to get traction, I'd expect HP would likely bury the people involved in litigation.
Just off the top of my head they could probably start with the DMCA angle. "Your control board is a bypass for our DRM". :/
Probably similar to how console modders get arrested and thrown in jail.
So unless there's some kind of lock-in agreement, there would be no issue with a bulk order from some other party.
Although given how printing is becoming a legacy tech, I doubt there would be enough interest to make it worthwhile today.
We've had printers 25 years ago, patents are hardly an excuse.
I can buy practically anything off-brand from Alibaba, but not laser printers.
Seems like a strange omission.
A budget 3d printer is like $200, plus $70 for the inkshield. And it isn't really a good printer. A consumer laser printer for half that will do 25 pages per minute actually feed in the paper reliably and the toner lasts longer
enough to know I'd never buy anything with an HP logo ever again. I don't care how good their laser printers are. They can fuck right off.
I'm not even sure I feel that great about their laserjets lol. Every time I came across one in school or college they'd have issues with goofy rollers causing paper jams.
Later, their printers became flimsy, driven by marketing whims not engineering. I gave up on them when I looked at the small mountain of dried ink that was inside from the constant cleaning cycles, and realized that it represented more money than I had spent on the entire printer.
I replaced it with a canon, where I could hold the ink tank upside down and squeeze more ink into it with a really cheap refill kit lol. The HP required you to drill a hole in the cartridge and then use a plug to seal it (which often leaked).
HP's inkjet printhead also makes a distinct annoying sucking air sound. Nobody else's inkjet does that. I don't even like their plotters for the same reason lol.
The second reason was the rollers were made out of cheap rubber and my dj500 seemed to rather often need attention.
Dude I have a 13 year old canon where I've never cleaned the rollers, never replaced the print head (maybe once? I forgot), and I have always used cheap generic ink from amazon in it. I've probably spent less than $100 on ink the entire time I've owned the machine.
Sadly, newer Canons don't seem to be that good. I 'replaced' mine with a new one that I got free with a laptop, and it died after a year lol. Like, totally dead.
Anyway, I stand with the Brother laser printer crowd lol. It seems like you either are small enough on printing that you can get by with a Brother... or you're big enough that you rent a Konica or a Minlota or a Xerox or whatever from some company that does all the maintenance for you.
Outside of the inkjet printers, I understand the reverence for oldschool HP gear. Their power supplies and scopes were awesome. Still nice to use keysight gear.
I've since replaced it with a standalone Brother b&w laser printer and an HP ADF scanner and lo and behold both devices just work, I can scan and process my mail using scanline and python and print the occasional document and both devices take up less space than the Canon pos.
How can they still sell you a product that doesn't use a little digital green man on a circuit board to cross his arms and demand you pay rent to use the hardware you legally bought and now (in theory only) own?
Those fools. Don't they see that there's rent to be extracted here? If you teach a man to fish, he might fish without paying you.
If you build a fishing pole that refuses to cast unless he inserts a quarter... fishing and paying you become inseparable! Genius!
You're on a board frequented not just by technical types, but MBA's as well (VC).
Sometimes, as tempting as it is to post a sarcastic remark, it's better to just remain silent rather than sowing the seeds of misery by making $exceedingly_bad_idea tangible to the PHB who'll eventually try to get people to implement it for them.
If you don't want to see it, don't bring it up in any way. Lord knows, the fool is out there that'll think "that's a revolutionary idea!"
This has become the bread and butter of digital age capitalism: Sell a fancy device. Include digital green bouncer on board. Make the device stop working (or cut off features) using the digital green bouncer if payment stops.
Why do work when you can just keep charging for the work you already did?
Personally - it's WAY too fucking late for mere obscurity to stop this. It's time for "Fucking nuke it from orbit with regulation" type approaches. Or, more likely and also much sadder - feudalism.
My bet is that feudalism is going to come back in a major, major way. But your lord is going to hand out keys to digital devices instead of titles to land.
My hope is that we manage to enforce legislation requiring manufacturers to provide all keys to a device. In the same way that it's not legal to sell a home and refuse to provide the keys.
It's so infrequent it's hard to even generalise what I use it for. Very occasional government forms, things that absolutely have to be sent by snail mail, stuff like that. What is everyone else printing?
People with young kids seem to print a lot too: colouring book pages, pretty pictures, and all kinds of forms.
Pain is that it blocks up if not used for 3 months - and the cheap ink fades for any photos we printed - but cleaning it is really easy, literally stuck the print head in the sink and wash it.
And I'll often print out draft writing of mine in order to revise it with a pen. For whatever reason, I'll notice totally different things on the screen vs. on paper.
Second, the only scannable QR code I've ever seen has only been for Amazon returns. Never seen any other retailer or shipping service support that. (I'm sure there are, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule.)
Third, scanning a code at UPS etc. requires waiting in a line behind everyone else, which is often 10+ minutes. If you print your own label, you can just drop off.
We have a ~10 year old compact Brother laser multi-purpose. Back when Brothers were mostly not full of dark patterns. It was cheap-ish and it’s been reliable. Leagues better than any HP or Canon we owned previously.
Recipes to mark done parts and note modifications/clarifications.
Text for copyediting.
Checklist to do in the morning before starting computer.
Tickets as a backup (not used so far but if it will be used one time in 100 of cases it works then it will be still useful).
Some paperwork.
So far I haven't exceeded their free weekly page-allotment of 10 greyscale or 3 color. (After that, $0.15 per greyscale, $0.50 per color.)
Also, I'm surprised that your inkjet printer works well with you printing infrequently. Usually the nozzles will clog up or dry out over time if not used.
What printer would be the good one to go these days?
For (rarely) printing photos I just send them out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_n...
Every now and then I'd like to print out a map or whatever in color but it's just not often enough to maintain an inkjet printer.
If everyone who did that just bought a brother B&W laser just once instead of re-upping their inkjet I bet anything the consumer market for cheap inkjet printers would disappear forever. Inkjets would only survive as a high end commercial colour technology.
No complaints. It just works. 3rd party toner also works should i need it.
* they're transparent about this, was just pointing out how efficient they are.
Sometimes I don’t even replace the toner when it complains; I just take toner out shake it and it keeps working (a bit lighter than usual)
So yeah, black and white laser multi-function and online printing services for me.
I wish I'd bought a laser
Mine just sits there until the rare occasions when I need to print something.
It's still on the original toner cart that came with it.
I've not needed to install a printer driver for any of the 4 platforms we've printed from on it.
No photo storage, no ink drying out, ink subscription service and no multi-gig downloads before you can use it.
A totally, wonderfully boring product. I wish I could buy more stuff like that.
I'm fine with only B&W and no scanner. When I need to scan something, I grab the insanely good camera I have in my pocket all the time and use the Microsoft Lens app. Works great for scanning a few pages.
There were some posts online that pointed to reflashing firmware fixing the problem but it wasn't clear how to do that and the required utility is apparently only distributed to licensed technicians.
The issue with any inkjet is that you need to use them. The eco tank makes sense if you print a lot.
Be careful of some Brothers models as the ones to avoid have "Refresh" option.
"Refresh" is just a way for a centralized Brothers server to monitor your printer and your local subnet (for what ever purpose they wanted). HP/Epson/Canon have few or no models without "Refresh" option, unless you spring for a more expensive business-class printer.
>"I got tired of the user-hostile shenanigans, bad software, low-quality output, and high TCO (5 or 6 HP or Canon devices over the years), finally came to my senses and bought a Brother. It "Just Works", is fast and quiet and reliable, does exactly what it's supposed to, and is in such stark contrast to the typically terrible printer UX it's almost funny."
Coincidentally, just yesterday it warned of low black toner (for the 1st time) and I realized I actually believe it, given all the printing my family's done this year. I've read that it supports non-OEM cartridges, will find out for myself in a day or two.
Luckily I was able to remove the DRM chip off of the expended starter cartridge that I hadn't yet thrown out and swap it into the 3rd party toner cartridge which got it working again.
I'm honestly confused at how they were able to do this. I'm pretty sure that several years ago HP lost a class action lawsuit about exactly this kind of behavior. I'd have thought that, having another company lose that lawsuit, there'd be a lawyer just waiting to jump on this. Is brother just too small market share to attract a class action lawsuit over?
For the very rare occasion I do need to print something (exclusively, of course, things that could have been digitized 20 years ago), the one in the office works fine..
What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
A toner cartridge lasts me years and it's obvious when it's getting somewhat low--and can generally be revitalized for another number of months by shaking it a bit.
It's really tiresome that some people seem to think there's is the only reasonable lifestyle.
Nearest Staples is in the nearest bigger city, a 30 minute drive.
> What do you do if you realize once every n months that you need a print that the ink has dried out / toner is empty?
Laser toner in home use lasts for years, and the printer will tell you percentage levels and warn about if for the last year of operation. Shaking the toner cartridge lets you print a few hundred pages more. There's plenty of time to order a replacement.
It just works. Even The Verge agree: https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
"...it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me..."
1. The tech has been around long enough that any/all patents should be done with.
2. In general they are much more eco-friendly, the 'cartridge' is just a specially shaped wax block.
3. Prints wind up being extremely robust due to the wax ink, I remember when salespeople would spray photo prints with water and show it just run off.
Of course, the challenges would be providing a sufficient filter for ink, any foreign particles can clog up the print heads after all, as well as making sure users understand that there are processes in moving them.
I'm no expert and can't vouch for any of the details, but this is what I encountered in multiple online discussions when I looked into it last.
That being said, I'd probably be willing to pay up to $500 for a simple black and white open source, open hardware laser jet printer, assuming that it worked as well (from a pure mechanical perspective) as current consumer grade printers.
It has no consumables other than the thermal paper which I believe is easy to come by from any vendor. The printed documents look like trash and obviously aren't in color, but they are readable and frankly, they'll do.
I have yet to run into a situation where this thermal printed document is not accepted by the other party in case the other party requires a printed document and I can't work around that requirement digitally.
Aaand I don't have to deal with any sort of ink or anything of the sort. Someone downthread mentioned the idea of an open source printer and how complicated it would be for the maker community to build one. I wish people gave building an open source thermal document-sized printer a shot, because the only thing I don't like is that I need to use a Chinese app on my phone to print through this printer. I am sure it would be easy to reverse engineer, though, so I could reuse the hardware and just get a clean app, but I didn't put the effort into that.
[1]: https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-pr...
Unless you are printing color, a Brother laser is the way to go. I purchased my printer 5yrs ago and purchased only a single toner replacement over the years. Best no-nonsense purchase ever.
Unfortunately, it's hard to buy a new printer that isn't evil. Brother has gone down road too, it's no longer the non-evil option.
Thus, I never ran out of ink and did not face the situation of a non working printer/scanner. And I got blinded by the good working service, that I did not realize the lock-in situation I am in. I dislike vendor-lock-ins like these, but for home printing I got used to it, due to the many benefits.
If so, then you're special, because the cheapest tier is $0.99/month, and has been since 2020.
They are too busy min maxing the profits. All big and great companies today that survive and endured the years survived because they put the product first. A sign a company is about to die is when they start cutting corners to maximize profits. A good executive only gets paid when his/her ocmpany turns a profit. Of course a living expense is always given, you can't eat ramen noodles forever. Not the Japanese kind.
We want to be able to print things once in a while, but that's not enough to sustain a manufacturing business and certainly not much innovation.
Either someone comes up with a reason for people to print more and makes space in the market for innovation... or printing will just kind of suck forever.
The simple business that makes a good product for a fair price and pays fair wages and keeps going forever is a romantic myth for the most part.
Why? I'm not sure exactly, but it has something to do with growth.
I have an epson printer that I have used for 2 year during the pandemic, I never had to reinstall drivers both on my computer running linux and my partner's windows.
I have one of those ink tank printers and it has been revolutionary in the printer space. I can’t believe we went this long with cartridges
1. You get DRM inc, which increases the cost even you buy the "required toners" [^1]
2. Don't get to control what they print:
- Adds stuff to your page [^2] - Won't let you print certain patterns [^3]
[^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/chip-shortage-ha...
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
The Brother has proved to be just as bad, and in some ways even worse.
Once it decides the (genuine) toner must be empty it basically refuses to print without some complex reset procedures. At least the HP would just happily print faded pages all day long.
They should not allow settlements in cases like this. There should be a ruling and one that forces companies to not continue these bad practices.
Yes it works against the creation of precedent, but the court system is meant to provide a resolution of dispute between parties. The creation of precedent is a side effect of that process, not it’s primary goal.
Edit: And just to end on a note of positivity, the courts aren’t really the place to make changes like this anyhow, which is out of most people’s hands. Instead we can lobby our Congress people etc to make laws that can end these practices (which is where most of our consumer protections have come from).
For instance you buy a dishwasher that is faulty. There’s a class action settlement, but for you, the dishwasher ruined your apartment and the neighbors downstairs. You can opt out and sue directly even if there’s been a class settlement.
If you didn’t, then you can bring your own suit. But in order to bring a suit you’d have to show you’ve been harmed, so you’d have to have been a customer of one of these printers.
(Sorry couldn’t resist)
This case is exactly the same. Don't be fooled - despite HP's name on the printers, they're not HP's printers anymore - they sold them, and have no more claim to them than I.
Tangentially, and orthogonal to the issue of if settlements should be allowed, undisclosed settlements should be banned. The public has a right to know what terms are reached through the threat of and with the sanction of the legal system. Because in a democracy, the public is ultimately responsible for reforming or maintaining that system, and how can they do that when they don't know how it's being used?
The government could bring a civil suit as plantiff, (like the attorney general’s office) but the government would have to show its been harmed. Perhaps for instance through cost of printers used in government offices, or if some specific statute was violated.
Also regarding any settlement. If it’s class action it’s public. If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.
That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.
> If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.
And the public has a right to transparency in the legal system. The rights are in conflict, and given the obvious risks of a black-box legal system, the right to transparency should prevail.
>> Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act.
> That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.
Breaking into someone’s office and physically damaging their property as in your example is different than a machine that disables itself. The machine can’t commit criminal acts. If you’re arguing that the CEO of HP commited a criminal act, that’s a stretch, as I have no idea what criminal law you’d say he broke. On top of which criminal cases have a much higher burden of proof, so civil litigation is likely to provide a better outcome.
And anyway, again, the proper venue for this, is to create better consumer protection laws in the first place. The judicial system isn’t going to magically police companies. We as the people have to hold them accountable and that means voting, lobbying etc, just as is being done with right to repair bills. The judicial system can compensate for harm, which hopefully will happen here, but it’s only part of the solution.
I hear what you are saying, but a contract is only private while both parties agree that the other is not in breach. The minute you want to enforce a contract its contents are made fully public.
TBH, I don't think anyone who got a life-changing amount of money from a settlement would want to jeopardise that by breaching the NDA and forcing the other party to sue, making the contract open to public inspection.