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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 think if Ford Motor Company tried to completely control the aftermarket by trying to control the tire you put on your car by some device, I think this Legislature would act.
There are many areas of the market place that this should be applied.
The price of printers may go up, but we will still have Choice when it comes to ink. Ink is by far the higher cost in the long run.
Are you an employee of a company that manufacturers inkjet printers? Are you an inkjet owner? Have you been thinking of buying an inkjet printer? If so, listen up.
Now, don't get me wrong. Everyone owning their own printing press is an important leap for free speech, and thus democracy,
but there's one tidbit the printer manufacturers have neglected...
The loss leader model in the printing technology business is a failure.
Sure money is pouring in now, but sooner or later your customers will reel from the pain caused by you ramming their asses.
Let's face it-- previous inkjet owners would rather print at Kinkos than buy a new inkjet printer. If you put yourself in your customers' shoes, it's not hard to see why:
1. Ink cartridges are too expensive. Boy, are they too expensive!
2. The cartridges have a short shelf life before they dry up and jam the print heads.
3. Printing regularly (or otherwise wasting ink) is the only way to combat the ink drying problem.
4. Consumers are reluctant to print anything unless absolutely necessary thanks to the artificially high price of ink.
Thus, inkjet printers are rarely excercised enough to maintain them and rarely work right when they are needed.
Ink cartridges have a short shelf life and no printer manufacturer has been able to solve that problem. Because of that, Gillette's give-away-the-razor-sell-the-blades-at-a-primium model does not adapt well to the printing consumables industry. In
the meantime, raping consumers on ink is a business model that will soon die, because consumers will find that inkjet printers are just not worth it. Joe Sixpack will learn soon enough that the printer bundled "free" with his PC is nothing but a money pit.
Because printers are sold cheaply (presumably at a loss), it's not surprising that printer reliability has gone down the shitter. Manufacturers are cutting corners when producing printers. Inkjet printers today are made out of cheap plastic where metal should be used, resulting in a fragile product likely to jam paper.
Let's face it, until printer manufacturers change their business model, inkjet printers are just not worth the hassle.
Well consumers have that right already - they are perfectly free to refill their cartridges; of course, it doesn't do them any good, because the chip ignores the new ink. Is this a ban on putting the chips in?
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.
More on topic, if this bill get's signed it'll be interesting to see if similar legislation is passed in other states.
I always buy my printers based on how much it'll run me to replace the ink afterwards. Not necessarily comparing *just* that, granted, but it's a big factor. These days, my favored brand is generally Epson, and my still-relatively-new Stylus C62 has been good to me. And replacement ink doesn't break the bank.
If people would *think* before they purchase and realize that Lexmark may have decent printer prices but their ink is absolutely ridiculous, such legislation would be largley unnecessary.
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?
The big money is in toner not inkjet ink. Toner cartridges are the cartridges that Lexmark put anti-refill technology on. Things like counting the amount of times the drum roles restricting the cartridge to so many pages printed (even if there's still toner left in the cartridge!) there are companies out there that can circumvent this. check out Multilaser
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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 Lexmark (or HP or whoever) makes a product and they say that for warranty purposes you have to use their own crappy ink/toner -- all this upfront, I don't see a big deal why it is a consumer victory as touted. I surely agree that a refill helps in cost cutting, but I have also seen tons of printers (both inkjet and laser) with ink/toner spilt all over their innards just because ppl didn't want use a decent cartridge / toner. This is when they bring their product in for warranty "replacement" since their ink/toner is "smudging", "not printing right" , "sucks" or something of that nature.
.....
As long as they let the consumer know this in advance and you have a choice not to buy this product no one is in trouble are they?
Ofcourse you may not have much choice for buying from someone besides Lexmark & Canon & HP but then thats a DIFFERENT problem
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
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?
There is a lot of it. The states are sometimes called the "laboritories" for legislation. The U.S. was set up with way -- a relatively weak and powerless federal government that provides for the common defense, currency, bankruptcy, and a few other things in the "enumerated powers." The states were responsible for all other legislation, except in areas reserved exclusively to the people. Things like freedom of speech, religion and assembly, and the right to bear arms are in that category (see 9th and 10th amendments). These days, a lot of federal mandates are achieved through the federal government's power of taxation, rather than more direct (and unconstitutional) means.
I'm not sure if the U.S. federal government is all that constitutional these days. Before FDR, there was a "presumption of liberty" that favors individuals and the states. Post-FDR, there was a "presumption of constitutionality" which favors congress and the president, and disfavors states and individual citizens. This flies in the face of the 9th and 10th Amendments, which are supposed to be part of the "supreme law of the land" that places limitations on the power of the federal government.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The Lexmark inkjet cartridge problem is based on abusing copyright rather than trademark, but it seems quite possible that a court would find that because Lexmark has unnecessarily forced their competitors to use their copyright in order to make a compatible cartridge, they are to blame for the resulting copyright infringement.
Last time I checked Canon doesn't sue 3rd party competitors
& uses a seperate tank for each color (less waste)
& doesn't throw around the DMCA
& tells you to check your ink level by LOOKING AT THE CARTRIDGE (as it should be).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from my recent research I found Canon to be the most reasonable (yes, I hated them as much as everyone else 5 years ago).
"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 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.
Get one at Wal-Mart and when the ink runs out - return it and get a new one, complete with a new ink cartridge. Wal-mart employees could care less. Just give some lame-ass excuse.
If manufacturers want to play this game, let's play! HP & Lexmark will have a new definition for "loss leader."
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
This is where you are wrong. Apple is a hardware company that writes their own OS and software.
Apple makes their money on hardware sales. Period. Remeber the clone wars? Power Computing, Umax and the others qucikly developed better and more powerful machines than Apple. This almost killed them. They spent more time and money updating the OS (no profit here) while everyone purchased everyone elses hardware. if Steve Jobs had not come back in the fold and killed the clones Apple wouldn't be here today. Don't get me wrong, I was as pissed off as everyone else when the clones were killed but in the long run I now see it was the right thing to do. This same reasoning goes to why you will never see OSX on x86.
> Or you could just not buy a lexmark printer. Let the market descide, don't legislate to death.
A take a couple issues with your statement:
1. Most, if not all, inkjet vendors practice this. In fact an inkjet vendor that didn't practice this would be cut out of the market because he would have to charge the real cost of the printer. Thus, everyone is undercutting each other and passing the cost in another form. This is arguably anti-competitve behavior and undercutting to drive someone out of business in many situations has been ruled to be anti-competitive.
2. The consumer may or may not know what ink really costs. Its important to know the mark-up and using ignorance to overcharge on such a level is ethically dubious. Worse, there is nothing the consumer can do except move onto other technologies like laser printers. Now, imagine if the $20 laser printer came out except toner was $150 and it had some BS DRM attached to it. Now what do you do? Move to a copy machine?
This is simply bad business and even in the US this can be seen as illegal undercutting.
3. Legislation like the DMCA gives DRM protected ink a ridiculous amount of legislative protections. In other words the law is part of the problem and claiming "dont change the laws" is silly when a law like the DMCA exists.