No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.
We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business.
Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions.
Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.
I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority.
I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.
For this case, computing back:
94M printers are sold per year.
HP’s market cap is $29 billion.
So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)
Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant.
After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity.
As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)
I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments.
Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.
But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.
And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.
The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).
If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care.
A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.
Maybe we don't need to, but we should.
Maybe we don't need to, but let's.
What’s needed is regulation and fines, so that it’s not the “cost of doing business” and they lose money (the one thing that dictates their decisions) from this stunt. If there was actually a decent competitor, they could simply be forced to fully refund impacted customers who decide to switch, but HP has basically a monopoly on printers. This is a sign they need to be broken up or put under strict regulation like utilities.
That would a) fully repay affected customers, b) stop the practice for future customers, and c) discourage other companies from this practice. IMO 3 goals, and the only 3 reasons, we have a justice system and punishments in the first place. This isn’t an action which caused permanent, life-altering harm. This is an action which can be 110% undone (via extra fines), so no further punishment is necessary.
And yes, I know petty thieves and druggies serve jail time for causing much lesser problems. That’s wrong too. “2 wrongs don’t make a right”
If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this
In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first.
The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.
No, the way they get away with it is to collude, and make sure customers have no other choices.
I feel like these older, pre-dynamic security printers are going to be gold. Hang on to your babies, keep them safe, keep them running.
please name a situation in the past 50 years where a conpany went under or lost at least 10% of their revenue from'peiple not accepting' this behaviour
Boycotts can be immensely powerful, and strike fear into the hearts of those who would exploit us.
Personally, I will never buy an HP product again. Absolute, permanent blacklist.
It's simply way too disgusting to me that they would even consider doing this, let alone actually carry it out.
What must they think of their customers? It's unforgivable.
Also, of interest, is that HP and Canon printers can use the same toner cartridges:
https://www.shop.xerox.com/supplies-accessories?brand=6346
For the most part, HP does not make its own printers anymore and just sells rebadged printers running their own firmware. It would not surprise me if the ink for HP Smart Tank printers is identical to the ink for Canon Mega Tank printers.
They reportedly are selling some models using technology that they obtained from Samsung, but aside from that, very little of what they sell they actually make. They are basically a middle man.
I cannot find a single example of a successful boycott in my lifetime. Can you?
Making loss of business or minor fines the only mechanism for correcting behaviour, means that the leaders can view antisocial and unethical behaviour as a cost benefit tradeoff. And the lack of personal accountability means the company leadership has very limited downside, even if they completely screw up.
This seems to be the top vote comment here, demanding jail time for CEOs for printers not working.
Meanwhile, the top comment on an article painstakingly detailing how a company is using every dirty trick in the book to get mentally incapable or distressed, etc people to sell homes to them at far below market value has a top comment basically saying “well, they signed a contract”.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this affects most HNers, so it’s the worst thing in the world, whereas that doesn’t, so people it does affect are just suckers.
I'm not sure if it's hyperbole or not. If it's not, what law was broken?
(Honest question. I'm not a fan of this, but I was curious if it's actually illegal.)
I think we should pass the law and try it out, see how it feels.
It was immoral and unethical but those are lesser concerns than maximising return on capital invested. Possibly, no law was clearly broken.
We need to outsource some of our lawmaking to ethics boards/commissions if we want to keep capitalism. Otherwise, every other company is now looking to defraud its customers and that’s the only way an endless desire for capital growth (exponential growth expectations from investors) goes.
But how about some sort of environmental levy on any device prematurely 'bricked', or disposed of before reaching a certain lifespan.
Including those bricked by server shutdowns, or by the inevitable failure of non-replaceable batteries. Perhaps even those designed to be somewhat fragile but not economically repairable - thinking of all the phones and tablets discarded due to cracked screens.
The solution is really simple. Buy a printer that doesn’t do this. Many exist. They cost more, because HP sells these as loss leaders.
Funny how access to enough money to form a corporation, does in certain circumstances tend to clothe your subsequent actions in virtue...
There are plenty of low-friction ways consumers could be reimbursed plus the cost of lost time or energy spent on a now 'broken' printer if we wanted to solve this in a fair way.
No, prison makes zero sense. When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial. And punitive remedies exist precisely to make sure the "cost of doing business" makes it no longer profitable.
And if that's not happening, then that's the fault of the legislators and voters. This is why we need to vote people into office who ensure that consumer protection laws remain strong.
Not at all - when one party intends to cheat another, we call that fraud and we do send people to jail for this regularly.
Or just curtail every holder's shares by a fixed percentage, if/when a publicly-owned company is found to have engaged in anti-competitive behavior. If the incentive of maximizing shareholder value is no longer aligned with the interests of society, maybe that's how to fix it.
This is the sort of overreaction that kills reasonable responses, like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled, trebled, plus pay a big fine to a regulator and also enter into a consent decree. Hit them with a market cap decimating fine. Then let the Board eat its own.
won't happen, because most of the customers live in different countries with different law systems
> hit them with a market cap decimating fine
won't happen, because most of the costs is beared by people in foreign countries who don't matter to US courts, and most of the profits are gathered by people in US (company, owners, shareholders, employees, budget)
It's not an accident that most of the time google and apple are fined by EU and VW is fined by USA.
If it weren't for government contracts and Gartner quadrant payola I don't think HP would even exist.
If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free? And don’t waste your breath on fines —- those will only be passed on to the captive consumers as the “cost of business.”
And if it's a million $80 printers affected by this, it's an $80 million crime.
Prison is hard, on the other hand let the scale of damage and intention decide.. more human would be just stick to penalties. They just must be high enough to hurt really, not ridiculous amounts you can price in. Like do it once and maybe get away with it, but do it twice or thrice and you will quite certainly bankrupt the company.
This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.
and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles
On the other hand, if you live in a humid climate, toner can clump. This may explain the popularity of inkjets in Southeast Asia.
The printer just stopped working from most of my computers. I tried everything.
I was going to replace it, then decided to try a 1st party cartridge again. And it’s been basically flawless again.
Such a scam.
I now own a Brother printer that is perfectly happy to print to larger paper.
I bought an epson workforce back some years ago. When it had printing issues i was able to do some cleaning runs and reslove. I have used ink quite a bit over time. But probably not nearly as much as the imaging drum, rollers and other parts i ended up swapping trying to stop the darkened prints on my main machine. The original laser was about 400 bucks, inkjet like 89.99. I dont think i spent more on the inkjet, even after the swaps.
This is a really good situation for actual voting, like actual political action to have regulation, instead of pretend voting.
HP probably doesn't give a damn about the HN crowd, it won't affect their business line in the little, so there's no signaling here.
And assuming Brother gets enough of a loyal following, they can now (probably already are) jack the prices and push the envelope of what's acceptable as business practices, until you'll have to start looking around again at who's left to let you escape predatory practices.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.
Ethernet, IPP and Postscript support are requirements.
So that they can work with generic drivers, on a range of platforms, without much setup complexity.
> And their drivers aren't user hostile?
They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them (an i386 binary, which also works on i686 and x86_64); so, not great. The driver is mostly-reliable, although every once in a while it does kind of give out on you and printing fails, possibly until a restart. I suppose on Windows it's better.
> really good printers that are inexpensive and live a long life?
I bought mine about 4.5 years ago; hardware seems fine so far.
> happy life
yeah, so... not so much when it comes to toners. Either the toner capacity is really low, or the MFP becomes disenchanted with toners quickly. I get "Toner Low" extremely quickly - even with only a few hundred pages printed. Granted, I don't print much these days, but still. And I've already experienced a case in which I put in a new toner and was already told it was low.
Other than that no complaints.
I've not tried printing to it over USB, but over Ethernet it supports IPP and mDNS so all you need to do to print is connect the printer to the network and CUPS will find it automatically.
At some point in the last ten years, network printing has gone from dark magic to just working, and in my experience working better on Linux than Mac or Windows. Printing from Android took a smidge of manual set up but now also just works when called upon. It's almost disappointing, until I remember that while I quite enjoy tinkering I also bought the printer to actually print stuff.
The scanner? Also just works over the network. Mind blown.
I recently found that there is a setting in printer admin page called "Replace Toner".
By default the printer is set to STOP printing as soon as "Toner Low" status is reached.
But we can set it to "Continue" so that it continues printing with low toner instead of immediately replacing it.
Mine has been printing fine since last 1 year after this. FYI ... I print like 10 pages in a busy month.
It just gives me "Low Toner" / "Replace Toner" warning each time and still prints just fine.
And this cartridge is a cheap $15 toner refill i had bought off Amazon 2-3 years ago.
printer : Brother DCP L2540-DW bought 8 years ago for $100.
other than occassional connectivity issues like once a year that required reinstalling printer drivers on Win 10 ... I have been super happy.
Similar experience with their label printers, except they only had a i386 binary, which rather killed my idea of a raspberry pi print server. Also it was generally just terrible and froze after a few labels.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a decent printer, but short of what I would consider "really good".
Also, I read here in another thread that a recent firmware update also blocked third party cartridges.
> Ok now it says 01101101 and I need you to change it to 10001111.
Something to that effect. Ew.
The value proposition is especially relevant if the printers & refills themselves are simple business expenses.
Not saying the company is perfect, but there's a lot of room between the headlines and day-to-day use.
But, given advertising is legal, and HP advertises much more aggressively than Brother, we can't rely on "vote with your wallet" to solve this problem. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't work when one competitor is spending money on making quality products and the other is spending money on advertising.
The entire premise that capitalism brings the best products at the lowest cost is falsified by advertising.
HP is not bricking the printers. The printers will continue to work if you put the HP cartridges back in.
I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
But the verb "disable" carries connotations of permanence, so it seems like a disingenuous word choice at best, if it's not outright clickbait. Just so people aren't confused here.
There's no HP cartridge to put back in, unless I go and buy one.
The printer is disabled until I give HP money. I call that extortion.
At least they should be required to compensate the users.
If that meaning was intended, the headline should read "HP disables the use of third-party ink cartridges on their customers' printers with a firmware update", or something like that.
I agree with OP that as written the headline is misleading.
No it doesn't. I can disable the safety catch or disable the alarm just fine without breaking them.
That's semi-bricking the printers.
> I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
You're semi-condoning them.
I suppose you could say that, but it would mean something quite different from what bricking normally does. And I wouldn't advise it because it sounds like a soft brick rather than "beep boop replace cartridge".
> You're semi-condoning them.
No they're not.
It's this mentality that makes internet discussions so polarized. If you allow the slightest nuance or point out that something is factually incorrect, and it happens to go against the prevailing narrative, you're accused of being a shill.
By the way, Apple forcing users to install apps only via its 30% fee AppStore has provoked far less outrage. Probably because people are not directly aware of the Apple premium, in contrast to the HP premium.
Part of the difference here is likely due to Apple primarily penalising the developers (second order effects hit the consumer). If Apple were directly hitting consumers it would be a louder series of protests.
HP are targeting the consumers, not the 3rd party suppliers, which Apple hits.
It's because it's developers who piss and moan about the 30%, while most consumers get value from having to go through the AppStore, such as 1.) being able to cancel subscriptions quickly and easily and 2.) ensuring that developers aren't abusing permissions to siphon data from the device.
You get nothing extra from buying HP first party ink otherwise they wouldn’t do this.
iPhones and iPads, you still can do other things, it’s not a paper weight cause you rooted your device or sideloaded an emulator…
Then they shifted their focus to computers and began their long decent into the crappy husk of a company that they are today. The engineers who work there should be ashamed when they implement malware like this printer ink scam.
HP was definitely a player in the PC industry and has been the number one manufacturer at different times..
https://statisticsanddata.org/data/best-selling-computer-bra...
Literally everybody (except printer makers) hates the printer landscape.
All we'd need is to pool money to design a cost-effective open source hardware modular monochrome laser printer with open firmware.
This is clearly more economical construction compared to Xerox-style laser printer. It collects the powder firstly on separate surface, heats that and then presses adhered shit to the paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuWZWAfBsm8
Some 3D printers are open source.
Unfortunately, I suspect that most would not be happy with the results.
Oh you sweet summer child. Relevant cartoon, ignoring caption: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_U-39iprM4Cs/SfZWFzmSQ-I/AAAAAAAAA...
They ALL do it.
(Because of a hidden clause in the ToS? Can you hide "we'll install ransomware on your PC" in a software ToS and enforce that, too? What's the very fine distinction between "we'll remotely disable your printer until you pay for exclusive, cryptographically-signed ink", and "we'll remotely encrypt your files and demand payments for the key?")
(It's not a particularly new idea, to extort someone under the pretense of selling them a useful service (exclusive ink). That's just "protection racket" — I think?)
More recently, I decided to buy a color laser printer that can do copying so I do not need the HP anymore and will have the option of doing color prints immediately no matter how many years pass. I brought a Canon. Unlike HP printers, it lets you opt into mechanisms that disable third party toner. I just did some of the first prints with it and it is really nice.
You buy a product capable of using any toner, then the manufacturer disables this feature without your consent to push their own margins up?
Oh wait, you meant...
But I just have an old b/w laser
Also, when you clean the heads it ends up dumping the ink in a foam pad in the back of the printer, and that fills up and turns into a mess. I haven't looked at my pad, but that's what I saw on some YouTube videos.
Turns out, it was an official practice by HP.
I'll never use any of their products again.
Make your ink cartridge super high quality with reasonable price, I will buy it. Selling a printer at dirty cheap price and expect to recoup the discount via over priced ink cartridges? your sales and marketing department are doing it wrong, and it's not my problem at all.
Besides, who needs printers these days anymore?
That's particularly "fun" here in Italy, where (unlike in the rest of Europe), metal cylinders currently need to be removed from the car and sent to one of two national inspection centers for high pressure testing - which requires them to be empty, of course!
And unlike the oil change reminder, you can't reset it with just a button press, you need a computer interface (for which there's a fair amount of competition, but the cheapest for personal use seems to start at 60 € before shipping and is a "cloud" service)
The CEO and board who are supervising this ought to be barred from ever running a company again.
The "smash your plates" part is not adequate because the 3rd party ink cartridges are not being destroyed. If you promise to keep buying IKEA furniture they'll let you return to the house.
If you don't like the terms of this contract (I don't) then don't sign it. Easy!
Authentic HP ink cartridges now have an expiration date. Even when new in package, sealed, and totally fine.
A friend asked me to fix their printer. Error code was nonsensical. Eventually determined an automatic firmware update invalidated their cartridges. Only clue came from other complaints on reddit. HP had no useful info or troubleshooting advice.
Convinced friend to buy a Brother laser printer.
HP is now evil. Got the Jack Welch treatment. I blame Fiorina, Hurd, Whitman, the board, and all the other stooges, for turning a former tech gem into a punch line.
Happened to my mother who bought an HP-branded cartridge from ("shipped and sold by") Amazon, then got a warning message when she installed it a couple months later — it had "expired" a month after purchase.
Fortunately, on her particular printer at least, there was an option to ignore the warning, and the cartridge worked fine after that.
I say this as someone who has spent most of my career working on printing related software.
I use older Brother laserjet printers that I bought secondhand. A pack of 2 off-brand toner cartridges are about $20 on ebay.
Enough people are dumb enough to overpay for ink that HP stays in business. Jailing a CEO won't cure stupidity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN44n_F_CPo
Please do watch it.
His point is that this kind of horrible kind of practices corrupt and spread through industries so they need to be dealt with ASAP if you want to prevent it becoming standard.
Besides, you can't be savvy about all fields. Sure, you know about printers, but how many other facets of life you're NOT familiar with and you're duped in making choices that disadvantages you.
What business does an ink cartridge have containing any significant code that could act as malware? What sort of imbecilic or evil (or both) personage designs a system that makes this even remotely possible and then sells it to the general public?
Of course there is no answer to that because it isn't a real reason, it is crap regurgitated by a PR drone who knows next to nothing about tech details and has been told to drop the phrase in to make it look like the company is defending their customers from something rather than being a something their customers need defending from…
(or worse, the PR person knows a bit about tech, so knows the malware angle is complete bunkum, and was actively lying.)
Revising/restricting the features of a product after it is sold can have legal consequences.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sony-settles-linux-batt...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
Low-end cartridge printers are often sold at cost or a loss. Why? Because they make the money back on cartridges. That's why you see silly things like this because third-party ink and cartridges destroys that business model. But that business model only exists because users make decisions based on sticker price for the printer. Running costs rarely enter the picture.
I saw once a camera store owner said he might sometimes make $1 selling a DSLR and then $10 on a $17 UV filter to go with it. Fast food burger places suffer from this too. McDonalds sells burgers at cost pretty much. They make all their money on the drinks and fries. The so-called "value" in meal deals is pretty much pure profit.
If you print any kind of volume, never ever buy a cartridge inkjet printer. Buy a tank printer instead.
As an aside, this issue isn't as simple as people make it out to be. The issue comes up with (for example) iPhone accessories. You can't justify Apple's prices but it's also not true that all third-party products are produced equal. Anker, in general, makes excellent products but some third-party chargers have killed people [1].
I'm sure most third-party cartridges are fine but that's not necessarily true either. Third-party manufacturers are incentivized to make things as cheap as possible. Will that ink print as well? Will it degrade printer performance over time? Who knows? It's another thing you have to worry about and that's also why these companies don't like third-party products because if poor ink clogs up a printer, who is going to get blamed?
Obviously though it's mostly the greed thing though.
[1]: https://www.macgasm.net/news/miscellaneous-news/another-man-...
The EU had forced other things nicely like walled gardens.
I would love to see a law for inter operability for third parties.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/windo...
https://www.classaction.org/news/class-action-claims-hp-prin...
It's not quite "renting", but it's not really "owning" either because when you "buy" it, it's not just yours, but you actually share some degree of ownership of it with the manufacturer.
It would be fascinating to watch how HP responds.
I was looking at printers a year or two ago and noticed that HP's were cheaper, but it was clear from the packaging they were selling "internet" connected printers & ink subscriptions. Those were immediate red flags to me.
If inkjet printer “technology” hasn’t evolved in 25 years enough to not have to worry as much about third party ink, they probably aren’t competent at printers.
Or perhaps the corollary that inkjet ink is among the, if not most expensive retail substance per ml/oz.
Fortunately we don’t print that much stuff anymore, even with kids’ assignments.
It would be an interesting case for courts indeed and solve a lot of future problems for consumers.
I accept there is more to this than that, but it's the first step.
One might have thought that the basic IP on ink expired somewhen in the 12th century.
Owning a printer in XXI century is waste of time.
So it’s easy, just buy a new printer one from a non-criminal company.
