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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: 3, Informative) by hoeferbe on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:11PM
I see that at least one snide detractor has already jumped up to belittle your question. He/she just does not get it.
I own a Brother MFC device. Although I commend Brother on their work in supporting the GNU/Linux community, I have to say my experience would likely be dozens of times better if their work was open source.
Brother's LPR driver is a 32-bit RPM. So the 32-bit glibc tries to get pulled in as a dependency. To get around this, Brother actually instructs one to use the "--nodeps" option [brother.com] to get around this!
Ultimately, I discovered that I had to use Brother's Driver Install Tool script to install the official driver RPM files (and not try to install them, directly). This is because those RPMs were not created with SELinux in mind. Thus, one needs the script to set the SELinux contexts after installation.
Brother's online instructions refer to Fedora 10, which reached its end of life over 10 years ago!
If these Brother drivers were open sourced and released to the community, I strongly suspect the above hacks would be done away and the user experience would be vastly improved. But until that happens, we are beholden to Brother's good graces for support. (Again, I don't want to take away the kudos that Brother deserves; their support of GNU/Linux is far better than Epson or HP. But they also have a ways to go before that can be the best that they can be.)