Cryptography To Frustrate Printer-Ink Piracy

Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."

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[Lonewolf666]

* AFAIK, making wasteful products is not illegal.

* The antitrust argument might have some merit, but I'm not sure if it is good enough to take to court.

* Finally, I've found a case about DMCA and printer cartridges that has already be decided in court:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Lexmark_v_Static_Co ntrol/20041026_Ruling.pdf
Here, Lexmark failed with a lawsuit against a company that reverse engineered its cartridges.

Cryptography Research Inc And Sony In Alliance

[im just cannonfodder]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070628-cryp tography-company-develops-chip-to-lock-out-third-p arty-ink-jet-cartridges.html
Cryptography Research Inc are also working on blu-ray BD+, the security on new blu-ray discs that will have features like:

1: expiring discs. so the media you own will need continued licence renewals to enable you to use it.
2: the ability for studios to remote disable drives permanently if yours or a line is found to be hacked/venerable.
3. usage reports to the studios of your hardware, including your location and serial number used in the fight against piracy.

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/m ay2006/tc20060526_680075.htm
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070620-blu- ray-content-protection-agency-certifies-bd.html