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from the seems-pretty-black-and-white-to-me dept.
A corporate squabble over printer toner cartridges doesn't sound particularly glamorous, and the phrase "patent exhaustion" is probably already causing your eyes to glaze over. However, these otherwise boring topics are the crux of a Supreme Court case that will answer a question with far-reaching impact for all consumers: Can a company that sold you something use its patent on that product to control how you choose to use after you buy it?
The case in question is Impression Products, Inc v Lexmark International, Inc, came before the nation's highest court on Tuesday.
As with many SCOTUS disputes, Lexmark is a devil-in-the-details case that could have wide-ranging implications for basically everyone who ever buys anything — so, all of us.
Here's the background: Lexmark makes printers. Printers need toner in order to print, and Lexmark also happens to sell toner.
Then there's Impression Products, a third-party company makes and refills toner cartridges for use in printers, including Lexmark's.
Lexmark, however, doesn't want that; if you use third-party toner cartridges, that's money that Lexmark doesn't make. So it sued, which brings us to the legal chain that ended up at the Supreme Court.
Source: Consumerist
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 27 2017, @07:20PM (3 children)
Wouldn't it be easier to ship something less buggy?
One of my work sites is essentially airgapped with no external access and we operate in airplane mode (not cloak and dagger stuff, actually much more boring related to being in the basement of a telecom facility in the absolute middle of nowhere, and there have been analog RF measurement errors blamed on personal electronic device interference hence mgmt signs everywhere about "airplane mode or leave it in the car") and I've never had a problem with an ipad tablet full of manuals and data sheets.
its amazing how many "official" (even governmental) PDFs are
Yeah not exactly a group known for high quality of work or motivation, but its amazing that in EE and software dev land I've never run into that. I can imagine it happening, I totally believe you, but I've never seen it personally.
The biggest problem I have is crappy scans turned into image format pdfs such that you can't search for text because its just like 10 pages of scan. Thats what happens if you ask a sales droid for a pdf of something and he scans an obsolete dead tree copy and emails it to you. Which I suppose is better than FAXing it to me. You know you're in for "fun" when your average data sheet is like 300K and here's some idiot scanning dead trees at 600 dpi full color and its a fraction of a gig for like 7 pages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @07:46PM (2 children)
When a font cannot be found, most PDF viewers silently substitute something else; in most cases, this works without anybody noticing.
So, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge problem; however, strictly speaking, it does mean that the PDF ecosystem cannot be described as providing "faithful" reproduction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @08:01PM (1 child)
Sooo.. Really its just someone splitting hairs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @08:07PM
It came to my attention when an important diagram was not rendered faithfully across devices.