HP avoids monetary damages over printers in class-action settlement
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is exactly the kind of bullshit "win" that makes class-action lawsuits a total joke for anyone looking for justice, and why corporations continue to engage in user-hostile behavior. They stand to make a lot more money screwing over consumers than they have to fear from lawsuits.
If that is not the case, HP’s lawyers are fantastic.
It’s better for both HP and the class action lawyers to get a resolution that doesn’t cost HP too much, doesn’t bind HP’s future actions, and pays out nicely to the class action lawyers.
You need to break apart the class action members from ”people they hurt”. The members of the class can be more narrow and easier to prove. The lawyers should have incentive to maximize damage x members.
> the class action lawyers to get a resolution that doesn’t cost HP too much
Naively, the incentives should be aligned with the class action members at this point. Why not? Can the lawyers negotiate directly with HP to increase their share of the pie?
> doesn’t bind HP’s future actions
Yes, but isn't that just water is wet? Like, the members want compensation, not different behavior in the future. (Unless it’s a defendant you need to continue doing business with like an employer). I thought class actions was supposed to act as a deterrent.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/gloria-allred-sex-abuse-cele...
I just started to realize that law firms are businesses, and what they care about the most, above everything else, is making a profit. Are these lawyers warriors for women's rights? Maybe. But what I know for sure is that they want to make money more than they want to be warriors. Which explains why they can directly talk to the other party's lawyers and get you a decent settlement, instead of actually going through litigation, at all.
I know of a few here in Montreal, Canada, that will go after any big company (Mastercard, Facebook, Google, you name it) with random class action lawsuits. Then they settle as quickly as possible and cash out, usually with a payout in the $500K to $5M range.
To keep costs low, these firms often rely on interns, who are either unpaid or minimally paid and may only retain one or two actual lawyers.
It's become a whole cottage industry, kind of like patent trolling.
But only on certain models.
Yeah, they totally got away with it.
… HP has agreed to continue making certain disclosures to users of Class Printers about Dynamic Security and data collection, and to continue to allow users of Class Printers to either agree to install or decline to install firmware updates that include Dynamic Security features. The disclosures that HP has agreed to continue making include the disclosure that HP collects printer cartridge data from Class Printers through the HP Smart App, and that HP’s Dynamic Security measures are designed to block cartridges using a non-HP chip, and may be delivered to printers through periodic firmware updates.
Most people are the parents of students going to school, teachers, trades people opening a store… they walk into BestBuy and they recognize the brand HP.
HP has massive marketing budgets and gets to package and discount their printers.
Most people think they’re getting an amazing printer at a great deal.
During this time, I noticed that the ink costs were ridiculous, so I brought a Samsung laser printer and stopped printing with the HP printer, only using it for scanning. 19 years later, it is still around. The ink cartridges no longer work, but it is used as an occasional scanner.
Since having to use xsane to make copies for my father was annoying, I brought an AIO canon color laser printer a year or two ago. Now I have three printers, and they all work, except for the HP, which is not given the new ink cartridges that it needs.
That said, I now realize that the secret to HP printer longevity is to not use it as a printer. That is how my relative’s printer lasted so long, as he likely printed infrequently. His was a print only model, so he did not even use it as a scanner like I do with mine.
The main problem is that I have to buy a new ink cartridge basically every time I want to print, because I print so rarely.
I plan to use them when my printers run out of toner, although I use them so infrequently these days that I suspect I might never need to replace the toner cartridges.
No wonder they need to get the money back from ink.
Isn't this exactly the shenanigans being discussed? You should be free to use third-party toner without having to do this.
I should add that I sent a note to the vendor about the problem and they were eager to send a replacement. I didn't bother since I was already set.
Lower end printers are really low quality. They have low monthly output thresholds, have lower quality ink, and have low end hardware which needs firmware on every boot, etc. They wear out and die. I worn one down, I know.
Their higher end printers are good. They use better inks. They cartridges are more reasonable (Ink Advantage Series), they work really well with anything from mac OS to Linux to your kitchen sink, because they talk PDF over well defined protocols, and they're reliable. They last more than a decade, and they don't wear down. My 4510 still goes strong, for example, and it works like the way I bought it the first day.
If you go even higher end, these models use full pigment ink sets for even more durable and color correct prints. Higher end home printers use pigment black and dye color sets.
Aren't there other good brands? Oh yes. Lexmark's lasers are good. Samsung used to make terrific laser printers with Xerox. People say Brother is also good. I didn't use them, I can't comment.
Lastly, I always say and will always say so. Not all ink is created equal, ink is not simple science. There's a specific reason why HP and Xerox have their own labs and patents on ink/toner formulation and delivery.
It’s not cheap, but it just works.
I can’t defend the bullshit business practices, but the “medium” business class Laserjets are high quality. I wouldn’t touch anything SMB or residential with a 50 foot pole.
Will you build your own printer when the other brands all go the HP way ?
Brother's as a company had slim profits and it went down 10% in their last call. Their shareholders sure would want some more juice to the stock...
I will avoid printing as much as possible --- which is about what I do now.
I have a Canon color laser for business use which accepts 3rd party toner. For photos and the occasional large print job, I outsource to Walmart or Office Depot.
Ink jet is totally out; essentially worthless for my needs and nothing but an exercise in frustration.
I feel like the root cause is a system built for the 1700s that actively rejects the principles of efficiency, effectiveness, right and wrong in favor of an it's-too-much-make-it-go-away bureacratic moral equivalency.
In no universe should HP be allowed to continue this practice. And yet, I also identify with class action plaintiffs stuck in a system that does not care one whit about providing even them reasonable access to justice after years of litigation.
The root cause is that lawyers are expensive a corporations have more money than just about anyone else.
Couple that with a legislature which pretty much only passes laws in a reactionary manner and the fact that corporate lobbying has been a mainstay in US politics for the majority of the lifetime of the US and you get what we have now.
If I told you coding was unsatisfactory in a scenario where a human compiler was required to process each instruction, the correct response is not "developers" and "corporations". There is a right and wrong and our judges and lawyers demonstrate over and over they have not constructed a modern system for doing or finding it.
Law isn’t like programming. There’s no compiler. There’s no specific target machine code to which all laws must boil down to.
You can’t automate law, since the desired outcome for each case is not known from the start. That’s the whole “justice is blind” saying.
The issue is that the laws governing corporations were written by corporations and have lots and lots of loopholes.
To match your analogy: You’re suggesting an entire codebase rewrite when, truthfully, we need to refactor our laws surrounding what corporations can and can’t do and what punishment should be for corporations and the people that run them.
A rewrite always sounds appealing when you first join a project, before understanding why architecture decisions were made in the first place.
What specifically do you think is inapt or archaic about our legal system other than the individuals that make it up?
The legislative stuff is unfortunate, but partially brought upon by the people. That one more falls to lack of understanding from the voterbase that put those people in. Someone like Nancy Pelosi or Matt Gaetz should not have been so easy to keep winning more terms if you spent 2 minutes researching them. But alas.
The issue is that a corporation can afford to hire teams of 10s of lawyers to pour hours into any given case.
The real problem is what to do about it?
Suggesting some limits is akin to suggesting that laws shouldn’t be explored, dissecting, and understood down to the letter, which it should.
I could not disagree more, but anti-government extremists are happy that they have captured the supreme court for the rest of our lives.
HP didn't even "brick" the printers. They only prevented them from using third party cartridges. That's not "brick" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's also unclear how that's something obviously illegal if it's done by an individual.
To their point, the phone in this analogy was not bricked (nor were the printers in this case), even if such an update is incredibly user-hostile. At least, many people will think that the phone/printer no longer functions at all when they see that word, so they’ll think it’s not the right word to use.
1: still calling it mine even though the courts will let Nintendo treat it like it’s theirs
Also, consider a layman's perspective. They won't read into the error codes and all that stuff. They update a printer that was printing paper yesterday, and now it won't print paper today. The printer says ink is fine but it's not printing. That sounds like a "brick" to them, right?
Here:
>to render (an electronic device, such as a smartphone) nonfunctional (as by accidental damage, malicious hacking, or software changes)
A printer with ink not printing would seem like a brick to a layman, no? under this colloquial definition, at least.
FTR lest someone think I'm defending HP here (I don't know why so many people, including on HN where we're supposed to be more contemplative and analytical, think everything must be 100% black or white, but I digress), I think HP is a despicable company and this practice of theirs is beyond abhorrent. I will never buy another HP product short of them fully reversing course and issuing at least an acknowledgment of the change in course if not a full-blown apology for being evil.
The above poster didn’t say he’s banning HPE, either. Just HP. I doubt anyone will really suffer from banning HP products.
We have a policy of only buying Brother, Epson, and Canon desktop/office printers with an exception for Lexmarks that are laser printers and have specific built in features. It means a lot less drama supporting them and getting supplies (even though we only use OEM supplies, or else get service and supplies through a click charge maintenance contract).
There’s still a fleet of ancient HP printers, including a workhorse 20-year-old LaserJet still printing 11x17 sheets.
The whole org has been gutted in the last decade.
*to be responsibly recycled/disposed of.
Why should that be taken into account?
> don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions
Why not?
If you only consider one aspect of a complex issue and make your decisions around that one aspect only, you might be missing out on the bigger picture.
Take Trump's "Dumbest Trade War in History" as the WSJ calls it. Why are e.g. Canadians not buying US goods and why are they cancelling vacations in the US?
Is it because they have better vacation options in Canada? I do not think so.
They are doing it because they take the bigger picture into account. They do not care about temporary discomfort it might bring them. They know that they need to send a strong message to Trump. And they are doing it with their own wallets.
A consumer boycott is a personal, values driven choice. The goal is to express disapproval or take a stand, even if that means some inconvenience. It is about signaling, not about making the most efficient or practical choice.
Business decisions, especially around infrastructure, are made within a performance and value focused framework. The goal is to choose the best tool based on reliability, cost, support, how well it fits the business need and whether it brings value. If a business starts picking tools based on emotional reactions or symbolic gestures, it risks undermining its own operations without achieving any value.
So why not let irrelevant factors influence the decision? Because doing so leads to worse outcomes. You end up with inferior tools, higher costs, and more complexity, all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest. HP’s enterprise printers products are fundamentally different from their consumer inkjets with different support models, economic models for parts and supplies, and so on. Ignoring that difference just weakens your argument and leads to poor decision-making.
Possibly, yes. These are the tradeoffs that the businesses are sometimes willing to accept. In exchange for achieving something else that is beyond their own short-term business success.
In general, I think that businesses should take the broader picture into account because if they only think short-term and prioritize local gains, they might go bankrupt in the long term.
Take the Chinese 5G chips for example. They might be great value for money. But they might also contain backdoors exploitable by the Chinese government. Should the US mobile carries, for example, be using them? Just because in the short term that would make them more money? I do not think so.
> all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest.
Why would you think that?
If business customers stop buying for instance the HP enterprise products, I am sure that HP will notice. And then HP will either have to adjust to what their business customers actually want and take into account the reasons why they are boycotting their products and services. Or HP may continue to lose business customers.
This is admittedly recent. Within last 5-6 years.
Also, why is the article misusing the term "bricked"? Bricked means a device doesn't work at all, and that it can't be fixed with a reset or further update -- not that it loses part of its functionality. These printers work as soon as you put HP ink in them, right? Their functionality has been limited, not bricked. (I'm not defending HP at all, just saying let's use the right words for the right things?)
Also, the complaints about lawyers enriching themselves seem exaggerated since their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.
>their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.
paying themselves high 6 figures to just shake hands with oligarchs is way too much, imo. There was no justice here, they just wanted a cut of the heist.
The touchpad had support for edge-drag, but the Dell ones didn't expose it. And it's not that the Lenovo driver did something special. In fact, they did less work. Instead of creating a custom UI, they just exposed the Synaptics UI.