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Copyright Office Rules Against Lexmark
SparkyTWP writes "'The United States Copyright Office has ruled in favour of Static Control Components, of Sanford, N.C., saying that its microchips do not contravene the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' This was in regard to SCC making microchips that imitated Lexmark's in remanufactured printer cartridges. It appears Lexmark won't be able to do anything about third-party cartridges."
I guess HP won't be raping me for cartridges anymore. But I think this will raise the price of printers.
"Lexmark filed its suit against SCC in December, 2002, saying the DMCA shields itself from competition from the remanufacturing industry."
Could there be a more appropriate quote that shows how the DMCA is ultimately an anti-competition and anti-capitalist tool?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
and I just needed a new cartridge (black). This was my first replacement, and what I discovered was that in ordinary retail channels, you can't buy third party. You have to go to the web for that (which means you have to plan ahead). I hope this ruling makes third party cartidges more available, but I suspect that Lexmark has leverage over typical places like Office Max (Don't sell third party ink, or you can't sell our printers).
I just love it when the government actually does what it's supposed to, namely, protect free markets instead of encroach on them!
Nice. It's been said before here - the courts usually do the right thing, you just need the staying power (read: money) to get there.
I liked the quote at the end:
I read that as "My turn now..."
I
Actually HP put the inkjet mechanism in their cartridges, and that is protected by patents. They've fairly effectively stopped the knockoff cartridge industry. Although this may have changed in the EU.
bp
Canon doesn't support free software very well, but if you're running Windows, Canon is still in the old school for ink; their ink carts are translucent plastic boxes with ink in them. Trivial to refill. I just last week bought an i960, and I love it. The ink boxes hold 15ml of ink per color, which lasts forever it seems, and it looks like refilling is as simple as "pop a hole in the top, squirt in ink, reseal." Each color has its own ink box so you only replace what's empty. They have an optical low ink sensor so it tells you when the ink is REALLY LOW, not "the counter says you should be out of ink, so I'm not printing anymore."
The i960 prints photos very fast, as well, and the 4x6 drop-down tray is very cool if you're using the printer to print photos and regular stuff every day. The photo quality is excellent.
They do charge $200 for the printer; if it was from Lexmark I think it would be $100, but they'd be selling you locked-in ink carts for $30 each.
I had an Epson before, and between bottom fill refilling leaking ink onto my hands, sponges that got air-saturated so you couldn't get them full anymore after a few fills, chips that you had to buy reprogrammers for to reset them, etc, etc, I was fed up.
Not necessarily. The ruling does not find Lexmark guilt of attempting to stop the third party cartridge manufacturers, nor does the finding state that printer companies have to fashion their printers to facilitate circumvention.
The ruling is that Lexmark can't hide behind the DMCA by using "encryption" to prevent otherwise legal reverse engineering.
Essentially nothing has changed in the printer market except Lexmarks lost their latest defense against third party printer cartridges (which have been available for years).
The facts sound roughly similar to Sega v. Accolade, a 1992 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case in which Sega (whom you all know) sued Accolade, who made Sega Genesis-compatible games without obtaining a license to do from from Sega.
Sega sued the crap out of them, alleging among other things trademark infringement. Basically, the Genesis console has a bit of code in the bootloader that checks that the game cartridge has the word "SEGA" in a particular location. That triggers a display that says "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" for a few seconds on the screen.
Sega was trying to be clever. If you manufactured a game cartridge without the "SEGA" code, it wouldn't run. And if you manufactured one with it, then you caused the display to appear. And if that statement was false (because you hadn't actually obtained a license), Sega could sue you for trademark infringement! Hehehehe.
The court told Sega to get a life. Trademarks are a limited monopoly allowing the holder exclusive use of certain aspects of words, pictures, or phrases. They certainly can't be used to tie monopoly purchases to nonprotected things, thereby extending the limited monopoly to them. If you could, then every manufacturer would have monopolies on everything they manufactured, as well as every replacement part, or compatible product, etc. etc. etc. They'd simply manufacture a patented, copyrighted, or trademarked doodad and then make sure that their entire product depended on that item to operate.
This sounds like what Lexmark was trying to do -- they had some sort of computer chip that verified that things were legit, and then they sued anyone who needed to copy that chip in order to make replacement parts. The lesson from Sega v. Accolade is: don't do this.
You can buy a LaserJet 4 on e-bay for about $50, with $40 in shipping.
They're rated for approximately 500,000 sheets, and most that you buy used have about 100,000.
Cartridges are about $80, and are rated to print about 35,000 sheets each. That comes out to about $.03 per sheet, compared to about $.20 a sheet for normal inkjets.
Obviously, you don't have to change such printers as often. I print about 20 pages per week. By my estimate, I'll have to change the cartridge in a decade or so.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
How many companies other than Lexmark had tried such a tactic to protect their refill market? How long has the DMCA been a spector, seriously
.8-1.0 years. To crack all the keys, (assuming 256-bit encryption) they could make it very difficult to produce a reliable replacement. At the very least it would create a great deal of FUD around using 3rd party cartridges for years after a new printer came out. Now compare that with the useful life of a printer.
preventing 3rd party cartridge competition? The lexmark case -- isn't it less than a year old? Refill gouging has been going on alot longer than that.
Printer companies can still use technological means to ensure cartridge loyalty, and only for the oldest printers are you likely to reap the benefit of reliable reverse engineering. Suppose your printer company has rotating encryption keys for the protocol that rotate twice a year for 10 years but only after 365 days of being 'on' with '5' days assumed usage out of '7'. Now you use your printer 3 days a week -- That would mean you rotate in
HP places expiration dates in each printer cartridge -- which means if you buy a 3rd party cartdridge and if such encryption were employed, users could find their 3rd party cartridges quickly "expired".
This legal decision does nothing more than release low-quality cartridge verification algorithms -- the easy one's to reverse engineer; it does nothing to prevent printer manufacturers from using ever more complex methods to protect their lucrative cartridge income.
Only if state laws (some state out east was doing this?) pass "open replacement" requirements on printer manufacturers will this situation seriously change.
There is also nothing to prevent printer manufacturers from secretly detecting foreign cartridges and setting a flag in the printer NVRAM to mark it as "tainted" and no longer available for support/warrantee. Makes perfect sense -- "we" (a printer manufacturer) "won't warantee our printers when used with 3rd party cartridges due to the lack of quality assurance in such cartridges. We can't be held responsible if a 3rd party cartridge damages or otherwise causes problems in your printer and won't be held responsible if 3rd party cartridges are used."....etc.etc.etc...blah blah blah. The DMCA is a tool of companies to protect against easily circumventable access controls.
-lpq
Dealers make very little profit (though they do make profit) on the vehicles they sell. The money is made on the extras, on the service departments, that kind of thing. A dealership generally cannot survive on vehicle sales. It is not true that most cars are sold at a loss for the dealership: that's an exaggeration. (I would quote figures but unfortunately they're confidential: however, I will say that my job entails managing financial data for around ten thousand US, Canadian, and Mexican car dealerships spread amongst six unrelated manufacturers representing every sector from the "Big 3" to luxury imports. I work with consultants whose job is to make dealerships profitable. Trust me on this!)
Manufacturers, on the other hand, make money hand over fist on vehicle sales. Additionally, many operate credit banks that are available to dealers, so the manufacturers also make money from financing, warranties, and such. The dealers do too however.
Note this is very different to the situation being described here. For the ink-jet printer industry, we're looking at a situation where:
- Printer manufacturers produce units that they sell wholesale at a loss. Retailers sell these at a profit (to the retailers.) This is opposite to that of the car industry.
- Printer manufacturers have a lock (albiet not a tight one) on the production of a key printer supply which they can make profits on to offset the losses from printer sales. The car industry has no such lock, and dealers who drastically overprice services in an attempt to subsidize vehicle sales would quickly go out of business.
It's very different, and really the two can't be compared.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.