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Lexmark Invokes DMCA in Toner Suit
Rhyas writes "Seems as though Lexmark has decided it wants all the pie when it comes to the printing world, as they are suing a company that does reselling of chips that allow third party toner cartridges to work in Lexmark printers. Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she expected more cases like the one brought by Lexmark. 'We have long said that the DMCA's potential use as an anti-competitive tool has been great,' Cohn said. 'Now we're seeing it happen.'" The European Union is taking action against the practice of embedding chips in printer cartridges which make it difficult for third parties to sell refills.
This is very reminding of the recent article on Xbox keys, and how it restricts others from develping games without the MS overhead.
Lexmark, I dub thee the MS of printers!
--------
Free your mind.
Seems as though Lexmark has decided it wants all the pie when it comes to the printing world
Isn't this fair? I don't know if it's a fair lawsuit under the DMCA, but it's fair for Lexmark to try and protect their interests. Lexmark is not a printer monopoly, and it certainly does not have 'all the pie' in the printing world.
The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges.
This is not new. All console makers do the same thing. The XBox costs more than $149 to make, but MS sells them as loss leaders so they can make money on the games. Sony does the same. Nintendo does the same.
Yet most people would agree that hacking/chipping consoles so you can play stolen games is illegal, even if you don't think it's unethical.
What's different about the printer industry? They're just trying to make their money in the best way possible. After all, it's consumers who have forced them to offer printers as loss leaders rather than having expensive printers and cheap ink.
mogorific carpentry experiments
My trusty old epson stylus color 640 still works perfectly, and in Linux too.
Didn't HP get sued for attempting to corner the market on toner sales? I'm pretty sure they were sued for selling 1/2 empty cartridges with their printers, but could swear they (and others) were sued for having a monopoly on toner cartridges.
I like Lexmark printers, but knowing they're chipping their carts is going to keep me from buying or recommending them to others.
I hope this gets thrown out of court and whoever passed the DMCA into being a law (so loosly written and obvious that it'd be used for the greater good of corporations) get voted out of office.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Lexmark claims that Smartek "mimics the authentication sequence" of Lexmarks printers. That is classic backward engineering by observing the effect and trying to re-create it. If Lexmark succeeds in this, what effect will it have on other backwards engineering efforts? Will Microsoft be able to sue the Samba project because it "mimics the authentication sequence" of NT/Win2000?
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows, etc., over the internet, for absolutely no good reason?
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
First of all, MS is the *only* console vender that loses money on its consoles: both Nintendo and Sony made profit for each unit sold.
Secondly, if Lexmark let consumers know that only their toner cartridges worked with Lexmark printers, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But they don't. In fact, I'd bet they even tried to supress the lawsuit beacuse of the bad publicity it causes them.
Finally, consumers haven't forced them to do anything. They chose their own business model, and now they have to lay in it.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
(My italics)
So if they decided that a copycat cartridge stuffed up your printer they may try to wriggle out of fixing it.
I bought a Lexmark a few months ago, a E-320 (it's at home, I may have the last digit wrong, it's basically a low-end sub-$300 laser.) There was a seal on the supplied cartridge itself, which was in the printer but not installed (if that makes sense) with a note to the affect that if I broke the seal I would be agreeing to return the cartridge in the supplied box once I'd finished with it. Apparently Lexmark have two types of toner cartridge, one for users to keep and one "recyclable" that's "owned by Lexmark" that's cheaper. The one bundled with the printer is the latter.
As Lexmark hadn't actually supplied a box, I took the EULA to be nonsense and broke it anyway. If anyone at Lexmark reading this would like to contact me and send me a toner cartridge box as required per your licence, I'll happily return this 50c bit of plastic once I'm done with it. I don't do that much printing, so this'll be in a few years I guess, but you can wait that long can't you? ;-)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
NOT A TROLL! This is my own personal experience with Lexmarks.
.wav's that say things like "You are now printing!" WOW! Really? I'm printing??? Gee, I didn't know that! Thank you strange man, for blaring that over my speakers! I never would have known that otherwise.
I've gone through a few Lexmarks in my time, and let me tell you -- they absolutely suck. The most recent one I've used is a total bitch to work with. Slow, requires almost 100 megs of free hard drive space (yeah, that's right, a 100 megs for printer software), has a bunch of custom widgets and window controls... It actually has Skins for gods sake! Printer software with skins? WTF??? It also has
Anyway, I guess DMCA business is just another reason to hate Lexmark. Get a Canon, or an Epson, or whatever, but please don't get a Lexmark.
These products need to be labeled as "Non User Serviceable Supplies" when they are displayed for sale. This would inform the potential customer that they must purchase all replacement and support goods for this item through the manufacturer.
I'm not saying I agree with them, just that if they wish to conduct business in an underhanded fashion, consumers should know about it upfront.
I think I may go back to a dot matrix printer for most of my junk printing, yeah they can be slow with graphics (I don't print graphics too often), but you don't need to worry about paper for sometime if you buy the big box. A reinker for the cartages is fairly cheap as well.
Paging through a Tiger Direct Catalog there's a little article about 3rd party imaging products voiding warranty. It mentions that we the consumers have a legal right to choose our supplier. There's something called the Warranty Improvement Act, Section 2302 (C) which clearly states that it is illegal to require or force the equipment owner to buy only the OEM brand of supplies. This is so that if say Lexmark finds out you were using Brand X ink, they can't void your warranty. Not sure if it applies to this situation, however, but I still thought it was worth mentioning.
Many years ago I worked at a company that did large format inkjet printers/plotters. The ink bags (yes bags) had little Dallas Semi chips that we could identify and keep a count of ink usage.
... hmmm $100, $150, $1000, $1500. Which would you pick?
I suggested that we burn in "Copyright xxxxx corp" into the chips, and make the software look for it. If you weren't xxxxx corp and you made a copy chip, then you would have to copy a copyright notice that wasn't yours.
As has been said by others, the printer companies don't make money on printers at $150 (or less) per unit. If you wan't to pay $1500 for the same printer (think of all those cartridges) and buy your ink just anywhere, that's a possibility. I wouldn't take bets on that as a viable business model, though. Can you imagine walking down the aisles at Comp USA,
Software is a set of instructions and the explanation provided above is a set of instructions, therefore making it illegal because it has now become evident how to bypass the car manufacturers anty piracy protection.
Your argument makes no sense. We the consumer are loosing our legal rights. We are no longer sure if we purchased or rented a product. We have completed our legal obligation (PAYMENT) only to find out after the FACT that the terms of the contract were not those which were presented upon the sale of the product.
Could you imagine having to pay the architect who designed your house a royalty when you sell it because you have sold his intellectual property. Or that the builder of the car you just sold claims that you infringed on ther Copyrights because you painted the car Pink when that car does not originally come in pink.
Everything we build is based on a set of instructions (software) therefore your argument applies to all and everything.
Once the SALE, and note I did not say RENTAL, is finalized, the manufacturer of the product no longer has a say in what I do with his product.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Not that I agree with the lawsuit, but it's about the chip itself; not the toner. Lexmark doesn't have a problem with you refilling a toner cartridge bought from them (other than the fact that it voids your warranty). What Lexmark is suing for is that the company has duplicated Lexmark's authentication chips so that you never have to buy a cart from Lexmark to begin with. It's pretty asinine, but it's not as simple as them saying that you can't put whatever you want into the printer.
>>In general, the business model to almost give away some piece of equipment
>>and then afterwards cash in on the required consumables
You can thank King Gilette of disposable razor blade fame for this business model.
Sell the razor itself cheaply then soak people for replacement blades.
Mind you, almost immediately some enterprising soul started making a machine ( my G'dad had one ) to resharpen the "disposable" blades
Of course there was no DMCA back then.
I bought my Optra E310 because their tech support has no problem dealing with Linux, and because it uses standard memory (so you can add 64MB for a pittance).
Sorry to see that Lexmark has decided it no longer wants geeks' goodwill.
Just one quibble: this is a tried and true business model. It's also a model that works very well for consumers since it allows them to spread the cost of the purchase over the lifetime of the base unit that's sold as a loss-leader.
In the traditional razor-and-blades model, there's no reason why you need to buy blades from the same company you bought your razor from. Many people do, so it generally is a good buisness model. But you can only charge so much, or people defect to off-brand blade makers.
The problem is that makers of consoles and inkjet printers are using technological measures to artificially inflate the profit they can make from the consumables. That's the problem, not the business model itself.
-Esme
Gillette was also a pioneer in lock-in. Once the patent expired on the disposible razorblade, the only way to keep competitors from selling blades was to continually change the interconnection between the handle and the blade, a practice which continues in the modern razor business.
Gillette also was one of the first pioneers of the now time-honored technique of achieving marketing dominance by selling to the U.S military. He got a contract to supply the entire U.S. Army with Gillette razors in WWI, thereby cementing the sales after the war.
So, it's an old, old game. I guess the difficulty is in determining what sorts of lock-in are ok, and what aren't. Is razorblade lockin ok, but car dealership lockin not ok? I'm not sure exactly what the difference is.
What if car manufacturer inserted a digital chip in the opening to the fuel tank such that it would ONLY accept fuel if you used say a "Shell" fueling nozzle? Could they then claim that filling your tank at any other service station but the "approved" was an attempt to "circumvents the technological measure that controls access to the"...er fuel tank?
I sell printers because I work in retail. I often tell customers to NOT get a Lexmark, because the cartridge yield is round 200 - 250, where as HP is 500 -550 and the price of the cartridge is almost the same. Still some people buy the Lexmark saying they won't use it that heavy anyway. Shame on them!! They are choosing themselves to be ripped off. But Lexmark is using the razor blade model and therefore they need the money from the razor blades. I am sorry for anyone who bought a lexmark, lexus, lexon (whatever I hear customers call it) and didn't know this fact, but talk to any knowledgeable sales rep and they should know this. By the way, I own an HP laserjet 1200 a 50 dollar cartridge gets me 3,700 pages on 5% coverage.
Since when was a statement "(c) 2001 ACME Ripoff Printer Company" itself copyright? If that was the string checked for, then sorry, you just read part of a rom string saying that this "Is not (c)....".
See my journal, I write things there
If I remember correctly, Sega used a similar system with bitmaps to enforce their ability to control who could make games for the Genesis. Accolade copied the bitmap, and was thusly sued by Sega.
The court ruled that since Sega had intentionally placed their mark in the way of Accolade's legally protected right to interface with Sega hardware, Sega couldn't turn around and sue Accolade for infringement on that trademark.
Sega played with fire -- and got rather burned.
Caveat: IANAL, and it's been a long time since I read about this case.
--Dan
Supposedly some company was told recently, and I think it was Sony, that you can't use this trademarked requried string protection.
The theory is that trademarks aren't descriptive or functional. You can't trademark "camera", or "press play". If you make your trademark either descriptive (let people use it for the generic class of product like kleenex or escalator) you will lose it, if you make it functional, you lose it as well.
Doing anything that requires use of your trademark makes it functional, so requiring it in the boot code of a CD or ROM means you'll lose it as a trademark.
So the company was told by the judge how the same would come out... "If you continue to push this, you'll succeed in making your trademark a functional part of the spec. And _Sony_ and _Playstation_ won't be trademarks anymore. You choose."
And supposedly companies now rely on trade secrets they can sue over having released, or cryptography, because of this trial and the fairly obvious outcome, if you think about it.
the printer should work for: 5 years
average color usage in %: 10
average pages you want to print a day: 23
Lexmark Model X: $$$
HP Model Y: $$$
[now someone wants to do it ?]
if the consumer would get a chance to estimate the REAL PRICE of a product EASILY than the companies would gain nothing by making unnecessary complicated and more expensive buisness models (like chips in cartridges)...
This model is also used in the healthcare products industry. A company like Ivac, who makes digital thermometers, provides the hospital with a large number of top of the line thermometers, no charge, and the hospital buys the probe covers from Ivac.
The difference here is that there is a contract involved. Ivac's distributers and the hospital sign a contract. If the hospital finds a cheaper solution, they tell the supplier, who comes to round up their equipment.
I am pretty sure I never signed a contract with HP when I bought their printer, locking me into using only HP consumables. I would just about bet the hair on my head that Lexmark purchasers don't remember signing such a contract, either.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
WAY TO GO LEXMARK!!!! THANK YOU THANK YOU!
Please, as many companies that can possibly do this need to. Please, if you own a company and can use the DMCA for anti-competitive reasons do it! MORE MORE... WE NEED MORE!
The anti-competitive use of the DMCA brings it into the limelight. This is the fastest track to DMCA reform! Using it like this will bring about reform YEARS sooner than our complaints of it blocking fair-use rights. This stepps on people's toes... sooner or later someone will use it against a company who makes large campaign contributions and BAM! We will have reform. I don't care why they reform it, as long as they do.
Have you noticed the MPAA and RIAA have been VERY CAREFUL to only invoke the DMCA against small companies and individuals, people they can defame into pirates even if they aren't. It's because they KNOW uses like this will put thier ace-in-the-hole in danger...
This is a good thing folks... a very good thing.
Phoenix
This reminds of a quote I read by Henry Ford one time that something to the effect of "I would give my cars away if I could have a monopoly on the replacement parts. This was in consumer reports, and then they did a break down of a Ford Explorer and showed how it would cost $70,000 to buy it part by part. Interesting stuff, as I see it Lexmark is trying to do the same thing. The problem is these printer companies aren't really slashing the prices deeply, the keep them high and just take extra profit. It's a pretty established business tactic. Video game companies do it all the time, and cell phone companies do it with their contracts.