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 Nuke on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:43PM (3 children)
Surely, the fact that he is taking them to court is in itself an allegation that the alleged benefits are outweighed
by the injury he suffered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:15PM
My read is that the judge agrees with you, and suggests how to put the allegation in the correct form to be heard.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:20PM
I hear you and I wish that was the case, but there is a thing called "frivolous lawsuit". Not everyone is fully rational. Or, they may be caught up in whatever the issue is, and not fully understand the other side's case. (which is why we have courts and judges). You would hope a lawyer would advise them, but lawyers want to make $, so they'll pretty much go along with anything that someone pays them for.
If lawyers were only allowed to charge minimum wage plus collect a percentage of winnings (contingency), we'd have a much cleaner legal system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @09:56PM
In court and Federal Courts in particular, you have to be explicit. In cases like this, you can only win in court if you have damages. Therefore, you have to tell the court you have damages. Same with the CFAA, he says they weren't authorized to access the machines. So he loses, despite it being obvious that what he probably meant was that HP exceeded the authorization he gave them with such a change to his system.