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HP Launches Ink Patent Violation Manhunt
BlueCup writes to tell us that Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers looking for possible ink patent infringement. With more than 4,000 patents on their ink formulations and cartridge design and a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers ... [HP have] a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Two days ago I was attempting to print a B&W document on my HP inkjet printer and it paused .. printed a line and paused .. then stuck. I form-fed the sheet it had stalled on and found
a large amount (at HP rates, about $4 worth) of ink pooled on the paper, as if it had taken a widdle and forgot where it was before this well-timed potty break. After cancelling the print job and powering down and up again the printer, I tried again. Same results. Perhaps they could explain why this is happening.
It's simple, sir, HP depend upon your regular purchase of ink and you haven't bought enough recently to ensure sustained profits. It's another of our patented business processes. Get out and buy some more, there's a good chap.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So, now HP needs to chase down violators to protect itself. If only HP had continued to pay attention to quality, maybe HP would not need to worry about this kind of activity.
Fifteen years ago, the only brand of printer I would buy was HP. Partly because HP was on point, but also because I'd always associated HP with quality as job one (actually, I guess that was supposed to be Ford). HP calculators, printers, electrical instruments, all quality products for years I'd faithfully used with trust.
Then came the second HP printer I'd ever bought, a deskjet, and I don't remember its model number. I do remember it suddenly either would pick up no sheets of paper for printing, or pick up 2 or 3 at a time. The fix?
I give HP credit, they did offer a fix. But it involved a scary piece of software and an even scarier piece of hardware with steel wool pads (I'm not kidding) you had to insert into the feed rollers -- and when all was done, you had a better performing (not perfect) printer and a heck of a mess to clean up. (Though I did get a free dental appointment once by bringing in my contraption and applying the HP "fix" to their HP printer!)
An anomaly?, a tiny blip on the radar? Nope. The next printer I bought, also HP Deskjet, fell apart so many times because of cheap plastic assembly I became an expert in the insides of the machine.
Still, I faithfully recommended HP printers to friends and family, but there were a disturbingly large and consistent number of "incidents" with these new printers. They were either balky in their performance, had ink problems, were virtually impossible to install, or keep installed. I gave up on HP about three or four years ago. Sadly, it's tinged my opinion of HP in general, from HP-UX, to HP-41X RPN calculators, probably unfairly since I think they still make some of the best electronics.
HP decided to go the route of making money on their printer ink, and sell their printers sometimes below cost -- that's kind of the disposable razor idea -- not necessarily a bad idea, but if it comes at the sacrifice of making reliable printers, I'm out.
HP's obsession with cost cutting, chasing down patent cheaters, etc., these are not the signatures of a class technology company.
So it was HP ink? Have you always used HP ink? I really don't think that's on purpose.
This just goes to show that software should not be paten... oh. Nevermind.
This is just lame. Desperation, not innovation. Why can't they just charge more for the printer? I'd pay more for a printer with better ink capacity and lower ink costs. The disposable razor IS a bad idea. It will only lead to crap like this.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them?
Blerg.
I wish their market share would either reach monopoly status or dwindle into distant hopeful, but not niche status. If they were a monopoly, we could all band together and sue them into licensing 3rd party cartridges. If their market share dropped significantly, they would need a competetive edge, and probably at least reduce the price of their own cartridges. If they were a niche market they could keep prices artificially high due to lack of competition.
A friend of mine recently discovered that it was cheaper to buy her same model printer on sale than to buy a replacement cartridge for her existing printer. She couldn't bring herself to toss a perfectly good printer just to get the cartridge cheaper, but the temptation was there. I'll bet many other people don't have the same compunctions about this sort of waste.
...you prove you are more interested in litigation than innovation.
Really, could HP have more prominently declared that their traditional business model was failing miserably? After all, why try and provide a good or a service unsuccessfully, when you can just throw some patents around and generate instant income? The quality of HP products is no longer in question, because they've dealt their own credibility a far worse blow than any other competitor (or exploding battery) could ever do: they have consciously decided to invest in patent trolling, instead of spending that money on providing better products/service. Way to go, HP. Been taking business lessons from Sony?
So you want all patents gone?
;)
What I really want is a pony. But failing that, I'll settle for people laughing at my jokes.
I met a traveller from a silicon land
Who said: Two life-sized cutouts of cardboard
Stand near Palo Alto. Near it, at 367 Addison Avenue,
Half sunk, a shatter'd garage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on a pedestal in Cupertino these words appear:
"My name is Carly Fiorina, queen of queens:
Look on my works, Bill and David, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, outsourced and bare,
The stock options stretch far out of the money.
What is interesting is that the replacement ink cartridge for Canon costs 67% less than the replacement ink cartridge for HP. The sales critter explained that the HP cartridge is actually integrated into a new printer head: the net is that you must buy both the replacement ink and a new printer head, resulting in the higher cost.
However, printer heads generally last a long time. In the long run, you will save substantial money if you buy the Canon printer.
The Canon printers must be hurting HP in less-affluent countries: Thailand, Eastern Europe, etc.
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for HP.
Just to screw HP, we bought replacement inkjets as they came on sale (which placed them cheaper than the replacement ink).
Then we started needing to do high quality work and switched to a Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450. The consummables are cheaper per page, and it even runs in Linux. Ever seen a printer with its own hard drive? It's just wicked cool.
We haven't looked back at HP since.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
secondly... I was under the distinct impression that formulations were not patentable, only methods of manufacture...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Which printer maker is not a patent-enforcing-drm-encoding bastard, so that I can toss out my current printers and buy theirs instead?
Bic.
Here's their latest non DRM-ed model: Printer with sample printout
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Canon. I've been very satisfied with the quality of their printers. Their ink cartridges are clear, so you can see right inside them. Absolutely nothing in there but ink and a sponge. No chips or circuits or anything of the type. Their name brand ink is a pretty good value compared to the other brands, and you can buy much cheaper replacement inks without any worried of it being considered unauthorized.
The printers have ink level sensors that tell you when the ink gets low and then prompts you to replace the cartridge. However, when that happens, you can clearly see there is no ink inside the cartridge. However, there is sometimes ink still in the sponge. If you don't want to waste that, the printer lets you override it and continue printing. I regularly do this. After the cartridge is reported as empty, I'll print a few 8x10 photos, pull out the cartridge and see if the sponge is saturated or starting to dry. If it still has considerable ink absorbed in the sponge, I'll put in back in and print a few more. However, be careful not to overdo it. I've heard that it's very bad for the print head if it actually runs dry.
And to top it all off, when a cartridge actually runs out and needs to be replaced, most of the canons I've seen use individual cartridges for each color, so you don't throw out a half full magenta cart when the cyan runs out.
My money goes to Canon. I had an Epson printer for a while, and it sucked ass with a huge sucking noise.
My Canon i960, on the other hand, rocks my world...
- quiet
- fast
- never, ever clogs
- individual ink tanks
- no chip in the tanks
- uses a clever optical scheme with a prism in the tank to read the ink level.
- replaceable print head (not that I've needed to)
And Canon has not engaged in any absurd DMCA or patent barratry against anyone yet (that I know of.) They've just done a fantastic job of not pissing me off, unlike HP and Lexmark.
Ok, their ink cartridges still cost a bundle. And their newer cartridges designs have chips... but they're still the best of a bad lot as far as I'm concerned.
Because Lexmark lost?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
I used to recommend HP to all my customers and even family and friends, but that changed about a years ago, when my expensive HP 2000c colour printer, refuse to print.
After investigating I found out that the HP cartridges have a chip that records the installation date and regardless of the ink levels will stop printing after x months.
This really anyone me, I felt that HP were stealing my hard earned cash, by stopping me using the full level of ink in my (property) cartridges. Being in the UK I resorted to throwing the printer in the rubbish rather that pay £100+ for 4 colour cartridges.
Later on I found out that in the USA there was a class action law suit against HP by consumers that felt the same way I did.
I didn't manage to follow this up but only hope that the consumer wins. As far as I am concern, this was my last deal with HP stuff, since the HP must have lost hundreds of thousand of pounds as i have stop purchasing HP kit for my employer and any private business that I do.
My Dell 3100cn works great and was on sale for $300 shipped. Did well on reviews and cost per page is 1.5/4.5 cents (BW/Color). Networked and handles PCL 6 - didn't advertise PS but it actually seems to work for me (unless CUPS is translating). In any case, got it working with linux which is no small feat in general (foomatic is about as easy to set up as it sounds like it should be)... :)
Really designed to be a workgroup printer and it is a bit large, but the footprint isn't really all that much larger than my old inkjet (slightly narrower, barely deeper when you consider the paper output path on an inkjet that must remain clear, and WAY taller).
I heard once Ink was priced more than its weight in gold, however gold has been steadily moving up...and I am lazy to do the math.
/ 03/2037207
It does seem to be more than a good champagne: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07
Considering ink was one of mankinds first inventions, somewhere after the spear, fire and the wheel, basing/monopolizing a business on that is either pure genious or complete insanity.
HP Ink for a DeskJet model - $20 / 11 milliliters = $1.82 per milliliter
Dom Perignon - $145 / 750 milliliters = $0.19 per milliliter
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I don't use HP Inkjet printers any more. I used to have a HP 712C, every time I would print something the CPU resources would stay at 100% till the print job was done. Also I always seemed to run out of ink half way through the print job. Now I use an old HP Laserjet 4+, a good old reliable work horse. Plus a new toner cartridge is about the same price as HP's over priced ink and prints about 20 times more pages between toner cartridge changes.
If I need something printed in color I just print it out at work on a color laser printer or take it to Office Depot.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I'm a chemist for a company that makes formulations for the papermaking, mining, and oilfield industries, and I do a lot of work analyzing chemical patents. After reading this article, I see two cases: one full of BS and one that msy sctually be legit.
a tic_Control_Components), but Lexmark sued on the basis of copyright and DMCA violation, not patent violation. You mechanical, electrical and computer engineers in the audience can talk about this one better than I can.
Case 1. HP suing people for violating their "cartridge design" patents. Without hearing anything else, this sounds like HP's suing people who make replacement cartridges that fit their systems (including any chipping), which sounds pretty low. We've seen this once with Lexmark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int'l_v._St
Cases 2. HP suing people for violating their ink formulations. (All that stuff about using GC, the "egg yolk" test, etc.) Here HP may not be full of BS. Inks aren't as simple as you might think -- they are highly engineered formulations that must disperse into tiny droplets for spraying by the ink jet, they must not bleed, they must not fade in light, etc. This is on my turf, so I'll lecture for a bit.
The inks are made from specific combinations of pigments and dyes, which could have been used for centuries or been made in a lab last week. The dyes and pigments are then mixed with other chemicals that will disperse them in a solution and keep them from settling over time. The pigment, dye, or dispersant can be a new chemical substance and granted a material patent. The specific combination of ingredients, including how they are mixed together, can be granted a process patent.
Unlike software patents, the patents in the paragraph above cover tangible things (pigments, dispersants, dyes, and formulations). They can be circumvented and you can prove if you are infringing or not with some straightforward lab tests. Some simplistic examples: If HP has a patent on an ink that is 25% A, 50% B, and 25% C, I can sell an ink that is 50% A, 30% B, and 20% C and not infringe. If the dye molecule in HP's material patent absorbs at 590-610 nm and the dye molecule I sell absorbs at 550-585 nm, I am not infringing. Smart companies change the competitor's formula just enough to avoid violating patents, while being able to have approximately the same performance.
HP may find people copying their patented chemicals or formulations and prosecute them to he fullest extent of the law. They may find instead competing companies coming out with similar but noninfringing products at a low price that the consumer actually likes. In that case, hopefully the market will clear things up instead of a bunch of suits.
(Of course the cynic in me thinks they'll still sue the people who are not infringing their material or process patents in the hope of intimidating them.)
I purchased an Okidata microline 590 way way back in the early 90's. I still use it for all my black and white printing. This Printer has worked flawlessly for years and has followed me from computer to computer just like a faithful dog. Not only is the paper cheap but at 4 million characters per tape refill which costs a whopping 8 bucks. There is just no way you can beat it for efficiency.
IF you can't be famous be infamous. But for GODS sake be something
If you were using something like indigo, you would be using a perfectly legal, public domain ink - one of the ones in the "5,000 years old" category. However nowadays much research and development goes into creating new inks. I worked at one such company's research centre, let's call it Company X, for one of my co-ops. Creating a new ink was serious business. So hopefully this can be an overview of what I learned.
In order to create a "clone" ink, you have to match the colours, as most printers are designed to use a certain colour space, which must be matched by the inks used - a mismatch of colours means that your photos won't look quite right. Certain chemical structures absorb light at different wavelengths, and have different absorption patterns. You need to match it very closely, otherwise a Brand Name print and a Knock-Off will look different depending on the light that it is viewed under (Fluorescent vs Sunlight & Incandescent lights). The easiest way to do this is to match the structure of the dye very closely, or at least by finding a related dye that has the same absorption spectrum. Furthermore, the ink has to stick to the surface well enough, be fade-resistant (i.e. not break down with exposure to sunlight), and ideally easy to make. The chemist's job is to design and make said new dyes so that the new dye molecule - and just as importantly the process used to make it - can be patented.
Formulations are another part of the patent. I don't know if you've ever smelled the difference between a Canon brand ink cartridge and a clone (I get mine from piloshop.ca), but they smell very different. Piloshop's ink reeks of what I am fairly sure is ethylene glycol (the price of cheapness). Not only does one have to match the colour with the right chemical dye (or combination of them), one must also make sure that they are properly dissolved, dispersed, have the right consistency, and so forth. Bad formulations lead to ink that chips off, or steaking on the page. This is much like the pharmaceutical industry where it is not just the drug that you use, but what other things you throw in to make it work and be absorbed by the body. (E.g. a certain widely-used drug is sold as the citrate salt to make it work better.)
As for violating the DCMA, you've forgotten what the D stands for: digital. This is chemical. And every company out there is testing their competitor's chemical products. Whether it's a battery company, a drug company, or a plastics company. Every product needs a benchmark, and chances are it was made by the other guys. It can actually be quite simple to find out what some of the chemical components are, however the beauty of what HP's chemists have done is that they've managed to create a simple fingerprint-type comparisson test that uses a relatively small amount of dye. And at a dozen dyes a week, it sounds like it works well.
In my experience, IT workers are much more likely to steal toner. Why? Because they have the access. At my company, we lock down the toner. EVERY empty cartridge, box, etc must be accounted for. Usage is tracked -- when I turn in an empty to get a full one, it gets noted in the usage file... any anomalies are investigated. Sucks to be me if someone decides to steal my toner, or swap out their used home cartridge with my new one after-hours.
I tried pointing out that the tracking was more expensive than the occasional lost cartridge... for my troubles I got to compare the cost savings on toner post-tracking system.
Turns out, a company of 90 full-time employees was losing over $3000 per year on 'missing' toner. Who knew?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai