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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: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @10:06PM (2 children)
How many of these problems are problems introduced by Adobe? How many of these can be traced directly to a crappy company that co-opted an open format to force their crap software into everyone's computers?
The only thing wrong with PDF is Adobe. If you create a properly standards-compliant PDF it is absolutely guaranteed to view exactly the same in any standards-compliant PDF reader. Note that Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader are NOT standards compliant by any definition of the term "standards compliant." They put out a file that claims to be a PDF but in reality is little more than an ad for their shit software.
Stay away from Adobe and you will find you have fewer issues with PDF files. I've never heard "I can't open your PDF" from anyone who received a PDF file I've created in LibreOffice with it set to create fully standards-compliant PDFs. I have, however, received many "PDF" files from other people that are little more than an over-bloated ad telling me to get Adobe Reader. (Don't get me started on the Adobe Digital Restrictions Management. Nothing like getting a corrupt PDF...) The best part? I was eventually able to strip the crap Adobe proprietary extensions off one of the files and optimize it, and the end result was a proper standards-compliant PDF that took up about 5% of the space of the original. The images were slightly compressed but still completely legible and the text and layout was exactly the same.
Fuck you Adobe. Seriously, Fuck. You.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:13PM
I've been using Acrobat 5 & 6 for many years now -- my impression is that they don't suffer all the problems you describe. Or in other words, Adobe wasn't always evil??
These even include a decent OCR system (Paper Capture), so that scans can be made searchable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:16PM
How many of these can be traced directly to a crappy company that co-opted an open format to force their crap software into everyone's computers?
Holy shit, do you not realize that that open format they they "co-opted" is one that Adobe themselves invented back in the early 1990s? How does a company "co-opt" its own creation?