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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!
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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
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!
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.
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.
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...
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
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?
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.