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North Carolina Fights Back Against Lexmark
ngrier writes "Seems that at least some aren't sitting idly by, while printer manufacturers try to assert total control. The North Carolina legislature just approved a measure which guarantees the consumer's right to refill ink cartridges. For history of the Lexmark DMCA-related story, involving the company placing copyright-protected code in their printer cartridges in order to prevent competitors from producing compatible cartridges, there are previous Slashdot posts about it here(1), here(2), and here(3)."
I doubt it, although Lexmark would be a fool to push it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I'm glad someone's deciding to finally act on this. Ink cartridges should not be costing 20,30,40 dollars. It's ink... the technology has been around for several hundred years. Now granted, printer technology has only been around 20 years, but still, it's not like it's rocket science (or rocket fuel, for that matter :)
hookers and grits.
Oh please....consumer choice doesn't have anything to do with this. A North Carolina company may get shut down, costing 1,200 jobs, which is why there is soon going to be a law protecting it.
I half expect Kentucky's government to jump in and ban the sale of replacement ink cartridges to protect Kentucky jobs or some other nonsense.
Why not fix the whole DMCA? Or at least codify something stating that DMCA doesn't cover cases where the intent was clearly only anticompetitive?
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The DMCA is federal. No matter how much we wish otherwise, we need to make the change at a federal level.
Even though California or Oregon voters may be in favor of medical marijuana, the federal prohibition on marijuana trumps that.
Repeal DMCA on a federal level, or otherwise the efforts are meaningless.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If you have a G4 or whatever you DO have a choice of OS. Either an Apple OS or Linux or Darwin.
w are. htmlo ftware .htmls _softwa re.html
If you buy a computer from SGI what OS choice do you have when you order it? For the workstation, it don't look like it
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/fuel/sys_soft
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/tezro/sys_s
http://www.sgi.com/workstations/octane2/sy
What Lexmark is doing and what Apple/Sun/SGI are doing is like comparing Apples and Oranges.
Yea, when you buy a G4 you get stuck with OS X and Classic. But Apple doesn't use the DMCA to keep you from installing Linux on the box.
Is it really the job of government to pass such narrow, precise laws like this? Or, instead, should they be passing higher-level laws which a) most of us can even keep in our heads to start with and b) cover a whole lot of smaller, more specific cases?
Normally in the computer market, high end features trickle down into comsumer product features, I was hoping for a home printer that could hold a ream of paper and have separate trays for labels and envelopes and plug and play networking. Instead we have the mess that is the printer market today.
That only works until every vendor does the same thing, which they are well on the way to doing.
That free market stuff is only good in a carefully regulated environment. Laissez faire capitalism was successfully debunked in 1929, and many times since then - think Microsoft.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Since when is take it or leave it the only option in a free market? What is so wrong with wanting to be able to buy something and do whatever the hell you want with it? Absent corporate welfare laws like the DMCA, Lexmark will spend money developing more and more complicated technological lockouts while companies like Static Control will profit by selling workarounds. Eventually Lexmark will realize that it is wasting its time and put the effort into making higher quality products that people are willing to pay a little extra for. That is a free market.
"Apple must leave the choice of OS to customers - right now you still have to pay for OSX when you are buying Mac even if you plan to use Mac with Linux or BeOS or BSD."
Apple doesn't prevent you from using a different OS, though. That's like saying Lexmark shouldn't include an ink cartridge with the printer when you buy it -- if nothing prevents you from changing it, I don't see why it would be a problem.
The market is deciding! It decided that it wants Lexmarks at an unbelievably cheap price and it wants others to supply the ink at a fair rate. Lexmark is USING legislation (dmca) to make generic refills die a quick death.
--Joey
The whole idea in the current market is to sell cheap printers that become mechanisms to sell expensive ink jet cartridges. The goal is to sell as many expensive cartridges as possible; so you find marketers playing stupid games like not filling the cartridges to capacity, etc..
The result of this is simply a great deal of garbage that consumers have to pay to haul away.
I doubt that toner and ink cartridges are really the most environmentally friendly things in the landfills. I suspect the fewer we toss out the better.
My brain fart du jour is that it would be great if industries had to pick up the tab for the garbage they create. Lenmark and other competitors in the industry would have to pay a disposal fee that could be distributed to landfills to cover costs.
If industry had to pay for the waste up front, there would be a hope that they would design products that create less waste product.
As you point out, the industry is really about putting ink (which is relatively inexpensive) on paper. All the extra packaging, cartridge parts, etc., that get produced and sold in this game are waste.
This whole industry is based upon one thing. Everyone knows that these companys literally give you the printer only to make the money back on the refill cartridges. If they were to market the printers differntly, go back to making quality machines rather than things that print for a few years then die, and aren't fixing cause it's cheaper to replace we and the enviornment would win. We would get cheaper ink cartridges, and higher quality ink jet printers, thus lasting us a lot longer and saving our landfills and being green in the same process. If the companys were even smarter, they would have a exchange policy for old cartridges, or offer refill kits themselves.
Or you could just not buy a lexmark printer. Let the market descide, don't legislate to death.
I would agree with you except for one thing. Lexmark is using the DMCA to stop people from refilling ink cartridges. There's a crypto widget in cartridge that contains copyrighted info. Can't duplicate it. Can't reset it. Do so and it's "legislated to death time". The best outcome would be taking the DMCA behind the barn and having either the Supreme Court or Congress shoot it through the head. Since the media conglomerates and electronics monopolists won't permit the death of their dream come true, I'll take what North Carolina is doing as a consolation prize.
If the capitalists believed in laissez-faire, they would not have gone shopping in Washington for the DMCA.
As long as corporations are given preferential tax and liability treatment, they should be subject to oversight and scrutiny. This is just and right.
I just wish it happened sometimes.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!