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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: 5, Informative) by Unixnut on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:22PM (2 children)
> Been using an Epson and cheap knock-off ink ever since.
Be careful. I bought an Epson after many HPs precisely because of HPs ink DRM. I print a lot, so I have CISS installed on my Epson. Thing is, a few weeks ago a pop up appeared on my PC telling me a new printer firmware update was available and do I want to install it. I researched online, and found that the update breaks all non Epson ink cartridges, and prevents the use of CISS systems.
So I clicked "no", however I can imagine in future they will upgrade the firmware silently. I suspect the only reason they are not doing so now is precisely because they want to see how the lawsuit pans out. If HP win, then its open season on screwing us out of our ability to use third party ink.
If they ever lock me out of third party cartridges, it will be the last Epson I ever own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @02:16AM (1 child)
How does one block a printer from connecting to open internet access and downloading drivers?
Can it really be said I 'agreed' to it doing this when it never asked?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday May 01 2020, @04:33PM
Don't give it open internet access - that's probably a good idea anyway since the security on printers is very often... lacking. The easiest way is probably to configure your firewall to disallow any communication between your printer and the internet. Most people don't have any need to print remotely, so nothing is lost unless it's one of those cloud-based printers that *requires* internet access to function. Don't buy those. (Seriously. Who thought it was a good idea to consume limited internet bandwidth sending every possibly-confidential print job across the internet and back again?)
Of course, in my experience firmware updates are usually done using the user's computer as an intermediary - sometimes integrated into the driver, or more likely some aspect of the bundled software (there's often a management console or the like). In which case you *might* have an option within their software to disable updates, or at least automatic ones. Of course that will work no better than they want it to. As a final defense, assuming you have a software firewall with per-program restrictions, you could simply refuse internet access to any printer-related software. Though you may lose some occasionally-useful functionality in the process.