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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 bzipitidoo on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:53PM (1 child)
I too just installed Ubuntu (really, Lubuntu) 20.04, and it found my network printer (a Dell E525W all-in-one color laserjet), and ... would not work with it. Keeps giving me this "cups-pki-expired" error message. Lubuntu 18.04 works just fine with that printer.
I am afraid to update the firmware on that printer, in case they too are trying to sneak in DRM. It does have a problem easily worked around. Seems after a few weeks of use, it gets into some strange state and refuses to print. I blamed Windows at first, because that's where the difficulty started. Was still printing fine from Lubuntu 18.04. I reinstalled drivers in Windows, and that didn't help. Then a few hours later it stopped printing from Linux. Power cycle it, and it's fine again. Argh. All that time I wasted fooling with Windows drivers, and the problem was the printer all along. Perhaps the update would fix that problem. But now that I know what to do to work around it, I'd rather live with the problem than risk having all my 3rd party cartridges instantly rendered unusable.
Really, I'd rather not have a printer at all. Age of Information, Paperless Office, hello? But damn it, sometimes the fastest way to fill in a form is print the stupid thing out, fill it in by hand with a pen or pencil, and scan it, because electronic document handling still sucks. Lot of PDF forms weren't made fillable. Even if they were fillable, PDF is still a poor format. It wasn't meant for editing. But businesses get really weird about letting customers have the source document, be that Open Document Format, LaTeX, or even (ugh) MS Word. Afraid a competitor might "steal" it, as if they couldn't recreate it from a PDF. Also afraid to admit that's what their real issue is, preferring to fob customers off with excuses that don't hold any water. True, there are compatibility concerns, especially with MS Word's doc format. Hit them with the suggestion that if they believe that's a big deal, then they ought to switch to LibreOffice, and they'll squirm and find another excuse.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:55PM
Oh, I meant to mention a big prob with 20.04. LibreOffice Export to PDF does NOT work. They even say so in the release notes. Ouch. There's a workaround, but I think they ought to have delayed releasing 20,04. Major problem for office work.