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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, Interesting) by TheReaperD on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:41PM
Some more history about HP for you. Decades ago, they did a survey as to why they were losing printer sales and who their chief competitor was. The result came back that HP was HP's main competitor and the reason they were losing printer sales was because the old ones were still working well. So, atter a board meeting with many lawyers and engineers, HP decided on a new official strategy: "planned obsolescence." They would make products designed to fail within an expected timeframe. In addition, they would change from making their primary profits from the printers to the consumable components. All was well with this strategy until ink/toner refills came about. First, they tried to sue to copycats but, as they weren't using their patents or products for the ink/toner refills, no IP violation took place. The only area HP might have had a case was covered in the "compatibility" exemption in patent and copyright law. So, HP lost the case on all counts. Thus, the war between printer/ink/toner manufacturers and refillers began. This is just the newest round.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit