One man's effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.
Florida man John Parziale was furious when he discovered in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party vendors – cartridges he had already bought and installed.
That month, HP emitted a remote firmware update, without alerting users, that changed the communication protocol between a printer's chipset and the electronics in its inkjet cartridges so that only HP-branded kit was accepted. The result was that Parziale's printer would no longer work with his third-party ink. He saw a series of error messages that said he needed to replace empty cartridges and that there was a "cartridge problem."
Parziale sued the IT titan in its home state of California, arguing he would never have bought the HP printers if he knew they would only work with HP-branded ink cartridges. At the time, the cartridges he bought to go with the machine did in fact work and were printing merrily right up to the point the DRM-style update was sent.
[...] But feeling ripped off and beating a tech giant in court are two different things, as Parziale found out this month [PDF] when federal district judge Edward Davila threw out most of his claims against HP. Four of five allegations he had made were under America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), accusing HP of abusing its "authorized access" to his devices. These were rejected because, the judge noted, he had granted HP remote access to his printer.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday April 30 2020, @09:37PM
Confirmed. It's only a little over 20 years old, but an HP Laserjet 4000 w/ Jetdirect gives you a networked attached printer in 1997. I've never been worried about the inkjet mafia, because I had access to laser printers from the beginning. Except for the dot matrix stuff with the punch holes and built-in carbon copies. I do kind of miss those.
Other than some large format inkjet printers, and photo printers, that same printer has been with me now for over 20 years. Had it serviced exactly once to fix something that got bent, but otherwise has printed millions of pages.
Never had a problem yet printing to a network attached printer from Linux. HP's software supports the communication protocol really well, and it's 20 years old. So the generic network printing drivers have always worked for me.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.