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Lexmark's DMCA-Abuse Case Coming To An End
Adama writes "Lexmark is dead in the water with their hopes to use the DMCA to force their customers to buy their over-priced toner. Their request for another hearing has been denied. Ars has
an especially great write-up on this." (See this earlier story for more background on Lexmark's lock-in attempt.)
They'll be back next year, this time with a patented cartridge that plays (copyrighted) music (or sound) as part of its printing process, try duplicating that legally?
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Expect bad news for Lexmark on all fronts. You may recall that Dell has been using Lexmark printers for a few years. But now, even Dell is moving away from them in favor of other printer vendors.
Not sure if it relates back directly to their frivolous use of the DMCA, but it seems like they are being hit from all sides right now.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Gillette has been doing what the whole printer industry is doing with Razors for YEARS: Give the tool away cheap or for free and charge high for the blades. Some printers are actually sold cheaper than the ink cartages who come with the printer. So the ink cartridges who come with printers now only contain one third of the volume, just to make you go buy a new one a week after purchase. This is just not fair. Boycott the whole printer industry AND save the environment at the same time: Print less. Encourage your friends to do the same. Trees are today being cut down ten times the rate they are being reproduced! This is a fact. Yes, if we keep this up then the planet will be free of trees by the end of the century. So teach the evil printer industry a lesion, print less. And No, switching brand will not help, they are all running the ink scam.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
So does this mean that Nintendo can't claim copyright on the bitmap logo that is needed for the Gameboy to accept a cartridge? Does this open the door for third parties to manufacture their own GB cartridges?
Unfortunately it seems that this thinking is flawed. Customers these days are so used to having their rights, privacy, whatever abused that they expect to be ripped off by the Lexmarks, Microsofts etc of the world.
What happened to the old days when the customer was king and great customer service was the way to do business.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How can I be so sure?
Next time that you visit your local electronics store, walk on over to the section selling computer printers. Find the print cartridges. You will notice that print cartridges from Canon are now about 1/3 the cost of a print cartridge from either Lexmark or HP. No. I am not in error. The Canon cartridges are now super cheap and are as low as $8.
By the end of the year, you will notice a downward motion on HP stock.
Just void warranty on people/companies who use 3'rd party "ink" unless it's 'certified' to work with the printer.
And for some uses, I can see why a 3'rd party ink is worse in certain printers..
I still like the 5 cartridge cheap-o-ink Epson's. The reps actually encourage by saying "We dont do Lexmarks Scheme of lockins".
Does this mean that HP won't be able to region encode ink cartridges, or at least be a precedent when they are brought to court.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I have used Lexmark products on & off since they first came out (I worked for various dealers/VAR's/etc.) and their products were across-the-board awful. I am not surprised at their actions regarding their toner products. This is not a company interested in quality or customer loyalty. They do, however, have a talent for building junk that borders on admirable.
http://www.busyweather.com/
yep the trees used for paper production are farmed. So if you print less the land will be used for something else and there will be less trees.
The decision includes the phrase "If we were to adopt Lexmark's reading of the statute, manufacturers could potentially create monopolies for replacement parts simply by using similar, but more creative, lock-out codes.". This is interesting.
Just this past weekend, I had a check-engine light in my 2000 VW Golf diagnosed by a fellow VW club member via the use of a scanner made by ROSS-Tech Inc (which is also working on generic OBDII and BMW scanners) via the use of reverse engineering, similar to the way the BIOS of the original IBM PC was reverse-engineered.
As discussed in the article Wired News: Drivers Want Code to Their Cars, automakers don't release all of the diagnostic codes to vehicles, claiming that releasing the codes "would allow independent parts manufacturers to copy components that cost millions of dollars to develop".
However, the way I read the Lexmark article is that doing exactly that is legitimate -- by purchasing the car/printer, the consumer is granted access to the proprietary software inside the item that allows it to function, and can use third-party equipment to service it and keep it in a workable condition.
Perhaps a third-party manufacturer of automotive parts needs to sue an automaker to force release of the diagnostic codes. Or, maybe even the maker of the scanner that was used to reveal why my check-engine light triggered. But even if not, I don't think VW would, say, be able to bring a case against the scanner maker under the DMCA.
(The code was "fuel mixture too lean" and turned out to have been caused by a snapped vacuum hose; fixed in five minutes at no cost by pulling another hose off a soon-to-be-junked parts car.)
Oh... and the Ars Technica guy was right: the DMCA DOES need to go away.
i am a soviet space shuttle
One of the paradoxes of Intellectual Property is that the IP industry wants it to be treated like real property, exccept for the fact that you can't restrict how customers use real property once it's in their hands. At least not yet.
There is a small company that makes a template for routers -- the woodworking kind, not the networking kind -- for cutting dovetail joints. It's basically a piece of plastic that you clamp onto a piece of wood to guide the router. If you wanted to, you could use the template to make an identical template out of another piece of plastic. To guard against this possibility the manufacturer encloses a license agreement with the template, stating that the customer is specifically not allowed to do this. It further says you are authorized to use the template for personal woodworking projects only, not for business use.
This may be a silly example (although true), but I think there's a clear and present danger that the whacked logic of the IP world could spread like a fungus into the real world, and we could indeed wake up one day to find it illegal to use a Stanley hammer on non-Stanley nails. Frightening -- unless you are Mr. Stanley or his IP lawyer.
One more reason to find out who your representatives are and write them a short note periodically, once is good but once a month is better, urging them to consider the adverse impacts of IP issues on the public domain.
I always looked at the cost per page for Black and white and the cost per page for color.
I did own a HP until the price for the ink was was more than the printer.
I bought a Cannon S600. From the research I could find on the cost per page it was the the best. It also has good enough quality for things I do at home.
When I went to purchase a photo printer I looked first at Cannon. The simple fact is that I could reload all the color and black cartiages on the S600 for ~$35 impressed me so much that never even wanted to consider another product.
Now I have 9 cartiages to change but at I can get all the cartiages at once for about $75 if I catch the sale on the package set for the printer.
The point is why spend more on cartiages then you do the printer? It tells me the real value they put on the printers.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
'"[I]nteroperable devices" may use proprietary security systems to lock out unauthorized interoperability, but a technology developed solely for this functional purpose is not copyrightable.'
So does that mean that DRM schemes in general are not copyrightable? Doesn't that mean that all the standard Slashdot bugbears, like DVD/CSS, the stuff in iTunes/AAC, Macrovision, all of Microsoft and Adobe's stuff - and every closed eBook DRM, and every other copy protection that merely locks in a medium to a mandatory "interoperable" player, is not copyrightable? So they're fair game for reverse engineering and workarounds? I'm pretty happy about all that, but it seems too good to be true.
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make install -not war