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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 r1348 on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:52PM (3 children)
So, I'm on the market for a new printer, HP used to be the best choice for linux but I won't deal with this shit. I'm looking for suggestions since the market is flooded with printers and the user reviews aren't very consistent.
Here are my requirements, if any of you can kindly make any suggestion:
- it must be an inkjet (laserjet can be considered, but I must print color and don't have a whole room for it) all-in-one with wifi support
- it must have open source linux drivers (not necessarily from the manufacturer, but with good quality)
- the scanner must work over the network
- it must have separate color cartridges, refillable ink tanks are a plus
- it must not enforce any DRM, of any type
My previous printer was a HP Photosmart b109n, worked fine with 3rd party inks and served me well for almost 10 years. Unfortunately one of the plastic supports of a belt pulley gave up and it's pretty much unfixable. I'm basically looking for a drop-in replacement.
Thanks!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:49PM
I'm using HP OfficeJet 8710 - it has separate ink cartridges (3 color and one black), works with the libre hplip drivers on GNU/Linux without blobs (double sided printing and scanning using flatbed and feeder work although feeder tends to cause paper jams when I tested so I don't use it often), has a removable printhead (I didn't remove it yet and simply run a script that prints a test page every few days so I don't need to clean the printhead if I don't print frequently enough) and at least the black cartridges can be refilled (I didn't refill mine yet but I purchased the ink). I only use USB connectivity and haven't tested network connectivity (if I remember correctly HP runs their own wireless network by default which I disabled).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:58PM
There are small color laser printers, but AFAIK, they don't have scanner/all-in-one of functionality.
If you care about software freedom, one important thing to remember is that the printer's own OS is all proprietary. Can you trust it on your network?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 30 2020, @08:32PM
My old Samsung "laser" printer (more likely LED) does color and isn't any larger than an inkjet printer. It's been a while since printing in color with toner required a behemoth.