Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well, this is going to do some serious damage to the business models of virtually every printer company out there.
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?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I was starting to worry that everyone else was crazy and the whole country, the legal system especialy was just out of touch with reality.
Small victiories...make everything work.
It must be owned by Halliburton to get such preferential treament from the Bush administration!
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!
Does anyone know if Lexmark has any legal recourse beyond this ruling? Can they appeal somewhere? Or is this the done deal?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I'll say this is good because NO company should ever try to lock people into propietary accessories by selling the initial main product at, close to or below cost, hoping to make up their profits by selling the locked-in accessories for a larger portion of the profits.
Look at the Playstation 2. It's locked-in (you must have Sony approve of and produce your game in _most_ instances), yet they make their profits on the game system whether or not you buy any games.
Let's see how long before other companies discover ways to break the models of these lock-ins and force the main company to rethink their strategy of selling short and hoping for bigger profits as time goes on because no one else can sell the accessories at reasonable prices.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
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
Ha-Ha!
Linuxprinting.org has a vendor score card to show you which vendors deserve yor support.
Their recommendation (and HP's work writing opensource drivers that support all the features of their printers) was the reason that I purchased a PhotoSmart 7260 from HP and I haven't regretted it - even the integrated card reader works.
Not surprisingly they rate Lexmark inkjet printers as useless.
Beep beep.
No they can't. With the DMCA out of the way for now, and disregarding patents, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Improvement Act prohibits a manufacturer from conditioning a product's warranty on use of other products identified by trademark unless the manufacturer can prove that the off-brand product damaged the product under warranty.
Will I retire or break 10K?
That the retail chains had leverage over Lexmark, not the other way around!!
"Oh, we can't sell third party ink for your printers? Well then I guess we'll have to remove all your products and tell customers they should return the ones they bought recently which we'll ship back to you at your expense, as per our contract..."
But even though it seems like that's how things should be, I have to agree with your view being how things really are. I just can't understand where the leverage is coming from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They can try that scheme. However automobile manufactures tried that stunt years ago, and it has been countered. When denying warentee covereage because of something the customer did they need to prove the modification caused the problem. Thus a non-OEM radio is not reason to refuse coverage for a blown engine, but would be reason to refuse coverage on a blown speaker.
Wouldn't surprize me to see them try to pull that stunt, and it would cause problems for a few years. Expect that it will eventially be knocked down in law/courts.
This issue had no business involving copyright law. This should have been settled with patents (i.e. If Lexmark doesn't have any covering it's cartridge design, it's SOL). This was a perfect example of the concept of "Intellectual Property" clouding the distinction between copyrights, patents and trademarks. The fact of the matter is that Lexmark's business model is perfectly valid, and well documented, but they didn't want the time limitations imposed by patent law and they thought they could get around it. They should fire the legal team that gave them the advice that led them down this path, and wise investors should have left long ago after seeing all this money wasted on developing "protection" technology that depended on an untested legal concept to work.
Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em with a stick. Fuck 'em 'till they turn purple. I've been refilling cartridges since I found a text on a BBS oh-so-many years ago (anybody remember 2400 baud external modems you could fry an egg on?). So now (well, for awhile now... I've got an epson currently) they've decided to toss "quality control" chips in/on their jewel-encrusted cartridges. That court ruling serves them right for the bait-and-switch practices they've been doing for years. Maybe someone will second this memory: in years past, wasn't there a pretty solid ratio between the cost of the printer and the cost of the cartridges (inverse ratio actually). Last time I looked it seems they're just screwing everyone on the cartriges, period. And how about this one for christ's sake: Epson cartridges supposedly can NOT be removed (for any reason) and replaced or else the nozzles will go tits-up (this is according to their web page). Happened to me; no matter what I do cleaning-wise, the blues and reds are mis-aligned. Anyone know of a fix (short of ditching the printer and buying a new one)?
What the inclusion of third party cartridge resellers into the market place does is cause competition in the sale of a specific consumable (toner), and nothing more. Sure, it is going to cut into profits, but printer manufacturers have a very easy way of fighting back: if you use third party consumables, you void your warranty. And this is a perfectly reasonable tactic, because you can't expect a printer manufacturer to insure a product that is using components who's quality they have no way of controlling. And trust me, when it costs $450 dollars just to have a printer tech take a look at your machine, no one is going to willingly void their warranty.
Here's SCC's webpage on the case. They have a Press Release (pdf) and a link to the official ruling site (but I don't see the ruling there yet).
I've been watching this case closely, and I'm glad it's been thrown out like the Garage door opener case!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Relevant text of the statute from an off-brand inkjet ink manufacturer, quoting 15 USC 2302:
Where again is it limited to motor vehicles?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This can only be a good thing. Not only does it put Lexmark in their place, but it also tells other companies that they can't cloak their anticompetitive practices behind the DMCA.
There was a similar case where the Chamberlain Group, a garage door opener manufacturer, sued Skylink Technologies over a universal garage door opener using the DMCA by saying that the program that interpreted the signals from the garage door remote was being exploited by Skylink, and thus fell under the circumvention article in the DMCA. Skylink has won this case. The judgement is here.
-R
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.
It's not just lawyer bills... The injunction has halted the sale of SCC's smartek chips since feb 8... Nine months of lost sales for SCC and the cartridge remanufacturers who buy SCC's chips.
What kills me is that, in granting the preliminary injunction the judge had to consider the potential for damages (page 48)... he found that Lexmark would suffer "irreparable harm" in terms of lost sales and money. Excuse me, but I think those can be repaired with money. On the other hand, if SCC had been put out of business under a load of bogus legal bills it couldn't survive, I think it would have suffered irreparable harm.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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
> What fraction of that $740 profit do you think is generated by printer
> cartridges versus printers?
I'd have to say the order from most to least profitable is as such:
1) laser printers
2) ink jet ink
3) toner ink
4) ink jet printers
Oh yea, the gap between #1 and all the others is about tripple as well.
I'm sure they will feel it, but it wont be the worst thing to happen to HP.
When you need a color laser that can photocopy and print from the network, a $10k HP wont compare to the inkjet market/problems at all.
It didn't make a judicial decision. It actual is an administrative decision. I'm not completely up on how the DMCA works, but I believe the Copyright office has the responsibility to give its interpretation of new ways the law is being used. This could be taken up with a federal court and the judge could decide differently and either side could appeal, as in a normal law case.
It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire
One might argue that the 8 1/2 x 11 printers are simply "ink holders" at this point. The Canon printer I have has ink reservoirs, with a permanent head set, and I refill with the slightly messy ink refill kits at Price Club/Costco for $15 for an ink set on the order of 8 oz. per color. Don't get much cheaper than that!
Those HP printer cartridges can push a liter of ink through the heads before the heads need servicing. Not 21 ml!!!!!
Since we are talking inks, some handy tips:
- We cleaned the HP cartridge heads all the time with just wet paper towels (not the super-soft ones that disintegrate), using purified water, like what you'd put in a steam iron.
- Those refill kits with the needles can damage the foil pouch inside, so insert slowly.
- There is a proprietary technique of refilling the HP cartridges without having a ball bearing rattling around inside; I don't know the trick personally, but it has to do with creating a vacuum somewhere.
- Printer ink comes off excellently with a mixture of water and bleach. Straight bleach and your hands corrode. There's also a paste you can buy, but it is far from easy to find, nor is it cheap.
- Most printers do a power-up "dance" as I like to call it, before they can print. This squirts ink out into a sponge, assumedly to keep the heads clean. If your ink heads cap nicely on a rubber boot, they don't dry out. I've noticed HP printers have a drain/breathe hole in their boots, which seems to circumvent this purpose somewhat.
The main difference between consumer inks (as in those intended for mostly sheets of paper, not odd materials like plastic of vinyl or cloth) comes from print compatibility, not chemistry. Your printer has an ink "profile" which basically says "lay down this much ink for this color, on this kind of paper." There's a lot of math and some scientific measurement to create these profiles, but that's why refill kits sometimes produce pages which puddle a bit, or the color is slightly off. Buy a printer that takes profiles from external files, such as my beloved Canon S820 does. Chances are, you will run with the same crowd that makes these printers, and has websites with profiles for download, etc.Ah, I've finally found it. The Copyright Office did not issue a new rule to cover the SCC case. Instead, it issued an opinion (in response to SCC's petition) that a new exemption rule was not necessary because section 1201(f) of the DMCA already allowed such an exemption. After having read it myself, I understand. The text of section 1201(f)(2) is: "Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. " So the Copyright Office didn't alter any rules for the SCC case; it just said that the requested rule already existed.
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.