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US Supreme Court Protects Consumers' Right To Refill Ink Cartridges In Precedent-Setting Lexmark vs Impression Case (hothardware.com)
The U.S. Supreme Court said on Tuesday companies give up their patent rights when they sell an item, in a ruling that puts new limits on businesses' ability to prevent their products from being resold at a discount. The ruling is a defeat for Lexmark International, which was trying to stop refurbished versions of its printer cartridges from undercutting its U.S. sales. It's also a blow to companies like HP and Canon that sell their printers for a relatively low cost with the idea that they will recoup money on sales of replacement cartridges. From a report: Lexmark originally set its sights on Impression Products, a small company that specializes in remanufacturing print cartridges for resale at prices much lower than what a customer would pay for a "genuine" Lexmark product. These cartridges often have no noticeable difference in performance compared to genuine ink or toner cartridges -- the only real difference is that customers can save a lot of money by going the remanufactured route. This secondary market for cartridges not only has implications for regular Joes looking to save a buck, but also businesses that are always looking to cut costs.
good
If you buy a movie on a disk can you make an mp4 and put it on your phone?
I'm glad that the gouging of printer manufacturers' has been recognized and cheaper replacement ink options are being mandated.
The ink jet printer market has always followed the razor blade model - sell the handle at a loss and get 'em with the blades.
Which leads me to the question, has Gillette or any of the other shaving blade manufacturers been investigated by the DOJ or is it just that the gouging was so extreme in the printer market that people stood up and took notice?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Now, what will the SCOTUS say about the right to repair for farming machinery from John Deere (if I remember correctly)?
You would think HP would have gotten slapped down by the Supreme Court for the all tricks they pulled over the years.
This is great. Even better is that it was 8-0 (or 7-1 on some parts, as mentioned in the article). It's wonderful to see something as basic to our society as the idea that "sold products are not owned by the seller after the sale" be confirmed unanimously by the supreme court. This will send a very real message to other industries as well, and likely result in even peripherally associated industries looking for other ways to mitigate their perceived losses other than expensive legislation and punishing their customers.
Truly excellent, and will have invisible benefits for years.
Good call. Now let's get to work on John Deere while you're in a giving mood.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't think anyone has come up with a way to economically remanufacture their blade cartridges. Assuming someone did, and they tried to act against that person, then we might see something happen. Not before, though. As long as their patents are in effect, it'll be nigh-impossible to make a compatible cartridge.
"... when they sell an item..."
This may be a precedent-setter in the cases of the farmers who save seed and are then sued for by "patent infringement" by Monsanto.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
If you want to learn about a really interesting aspect of the "first sale doctrine" and how it applies to software, you should have a look at "Vernor vs Autodesk" in the USA and compare it to "Oracle vs UsedSoft" in the EU. Basically, in the USA the courts determined that if a company sells you software, but in their terms & conditions claim that they are merely granting you a license, then you can't resell the software b/c you aren't considered to own it. In the EU however, if a company sells you a permanent life-time license in exchange for a one-time fee, the courts determined that you aren't merely licensing that software, you own it and you are allowed to resell it.
I think these different rulings haven't been fully appreciated yet. For example, if you buy Apple's Final Cut X for $299, you should be allowed to resell that software if you live in the EU, but there is currently no way to transfer licenses between users, preventing users from reselling it. It seems to me that by preventing users from reselling their software, Apple (and the Google Play Store) are probably violating sharia law on this matter.
Glad to see that consumers rights trump corporations' rights in the eyes of the SCOTUS. My apologies to anyone that may have thought I might be going in a different direction there.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
some manufacturers force distributors not to sell under MSRP and you can't can't buy from the manufacturers on your own.
Wow, I didn't know that was still a Thing, I thought laserprinters were cheap enough that anyone could buy one. I haven't owned one in years because they were such a ripoff.
what about thinks apples tricks to lock out 3rd party repair shops from getting parts / tools to fix stuff?
I like the ruling, but I think the day of the inkjet cartridge may finally be coming to an end regardless. For the past few decades the "paperless office" has been the Holy Grail of IT, but we were never quite able to reach it. I can remember seeing a statistic about 15 years ago stating that paper usage actually increased because of the ease of printing....If you needed to take something away from your desk, you just printed it and carried it with you. Now that mobile devices are pretty much ubiquitous, you can just carry it on your phone/tablet instead of having to print it.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I'm not paying for it, I'm merely letting you hold my money. You do not own it.
Remember, you said it wasn't a sale. Please sign this agreement to my cash allowing me a surprise audit of all your expenses at any time to check you're not abusing this cash and trying to launder money for terrorists.
...in the discussion. I used to repair printers. To say that there is no difference between remanufactured cartridges overall and OEM cartridges is a joke. Yes. there are some excellent remanufactures out there that produce outstanding products. There are also plenty of shoddy ones that sell leaky ones that crap up your printer and / or use substandard ink / toner that produce lesser (or awful) pages. In most cases, the consumer has no idea and buys on price. From a patent standpoint, Lexmark's case was stupid, petulant, and ridiculous. However, if they wanted to make an argument about voiding your warranty for using remanufactured cartridges then they would probably have a valid point. Really, the whole printer industry is in a prisoners' dilemma where they have to keep the printer prices down in order to sell printers and then they make it up on consumables. This eases up a bit in the enterprise space where you occasionally have more sophisticated buyers that have enough experience to understand that efficient purchasing covers the entire lifecycle of the device. Hopefully somebody will be able to break this cycle, but it will probably take some very good marketing to convince consumers to be less price-sensitive with the initial purchase.
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Not a loss for them per se, just expect DRM on your printer cartridges soon. If you break it, expect to get slapped with a DMCA suit
HP LaserJet 4000 series are good
For the price that you pay for Gillette blades, you can buy dozens of cheap complete razors. All the magic is in the blade. The handle is just a hunk of plastic.
I have tried many other razors, I have tried non-Gillette blades on my Gillette razor handle. They all suck.
I really do not like Gillette or how much I pay for Gillette blades, but I buy them anyway because they are the best.
I don't understand why people put up with it. A decent laser printer is similarly priced to a garbage printer, and toner is a cheaper and MUCH more seldom purchase. Home color prints are terrible quality, expensive, and generally annoying.
If I need to print something in color, I step out into meatspace and do it at a place that sells that service.
exploiting the Gillette business model, in the past I have bought an ink printer on clearance, printed color on it until it ran out, then thrown it in electronic recycling, which was significantly cheaper than buying ink for whatever printer I already had.
but yeah, ink refills are garbage, replacement ink cartridges are a racket, but it all boils down to the fact that a color ink printer is simply a device that sits in your house reminding you that you need to pay the manufacturer more money as often as possible.
One might even feel like the court, with it's unanimity is trying to tell the Federal Circuit that it really wants to stop having to hear all these patent cases. The opinion was delivered by the Chief Justice who spared no words in telling the Federal Circuit that it needs to do a much better job.
This venerable principle is not, as the Federal Circuit dismissively viewed it, merely "one common-law jurisdiction's general judicial policy at one time toward antialienation restrictions."
And
The Federal Circuit reached a different result largely because it got off on the wrong foot.
Refurb ink and electronics repair aren't exactly the same, but an argument could be made for repairing an iphone with 3rd party parts is comparable to refilling an ink cartridge with 3rd party ink. At the least, I hope it indicates the court would lean towards consumer rights in a future right to repair ruling.
This makes sense. Used car dealers often refurbish and resale cars made by other manufacturers.
The business plan for liquid-ink printers was starting to get bizarre. I mean, if you were patient enough to wait for a sale at one of the geek warehouses, it was cost-effective to just throw out the printer and buy a new one, rather than mess around with replacement cartridges. A big advantage is that you'd get a new print head each time, which cured a lot of printer-related problems.
I've been recommending to customer to only use laser printers with dry toner (color or B/W as necessary) for internal use, (they've gotten very affordable) and outsource high resolution color printing. Dry toner cartridges last a very long time, and there's no print head clogging or cleaning cycles to worry about. ("Outsourcing" in this case means to a local print shop, not overseas.)
Outsourcing your "wet" print jobs, besides having the advantage of not having to fool around with gummed up print heads or cartridge replacement, also has the advantage of using such printers the way they "want" to be used -- shorter downtimes between jobs, and less chance for the ink to dry up.
At home, even though I make part of my living as a photographer, I have an inexpensive laser printer I use for most stuff. (Mostly flyers and misc printing.) The toner cartridge is something like $100 but in 7 years of use I have yet to buy one. For my photography, I have coveted one of those large carriage continuous feed 8 cartridge printers, but realistically, I don't need one, when the photo store a mile and a half away has the same model and will print photos up to poster size for much less than the per-print cost of owning one of the damned things. Even if someone gave me one for free, I probably couldn't afford to keep it going.
So although I really appreciate the decision, and have a private fantasy that it'll perhaps mean higher cost but higher quality printer hardware, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter, because liquid ink printers are a bad choice for most consumers in the first place.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you want to learn about a really interesting aspect of the "first sale doctrine" and how it applies to software, you should have a look at "Vernor vs Autodesk" in the USA and compare it to "Oracle vs UsedSoft" in the EU. Basically, in the USA the courts determined that if a company sells you software, but in their terms & conditions claim that they are merely granting you a license, then you can't resell the software b/c you aren't considered to own it.
This varies by federal district. The Central District of California ruled in SoftMan Products Co. v. Adobe Systems Inc that (among other flaws in Adobe's argument, but this is the important one) a one time fee for indefinite use constitute a sale of goods, not a license, regardless of what the printed license says.
So far as I know, this is the first time this issue as gotten to SCOTUS. It's limited in scope, but combined with long established case law surrounding the first sale doctrine, it's promising.
Gillette or any of the other shaving blade manufacturers been investigated by the DOJ or is it just that the gouging was so extreme in the printer market that people stood up and took notice?
No, But they also haven't tried to crowd out Harry's or Dollar Shave Club, either.
Yes they have. Gillette sued Dollar Shave Club in December 2015.
If I need to print something in color, I step out into meatspace and do it at a place that sells that service.
Then you had better hope that your city's public transit isn't in the midst of a 60-hour scheduled downtime, as Fort Wayne Citilink was from about 6 PM Saturday to 6 AM this (Tuesday) morning.
Oooo, burn!
When I was a younger man, I held job as a "tech" at an inkjet refill place. Some carts needed extra steps to keep the pressure equal (lexmark I think) Some needed to be shorted against a little piece of tech that somehow reset the little DRM chip, and some just bled ink all over the costumers desk and ruined their day. I was shocked by how easy and cheap it was to refill the carts. I was convinced that this was going to be a giant market as soon as the everyman noticed. I bought a refill kit from myself that consisted of about 20 fl oz. of ink for each color+black, and some syringes. I ran my shitty little inkjet like crazy, Full color everything for every occasion. It was great. At one point I printed the entire D&D 3.0 DMs guide front and back (for personal use doncha-know). Eventually my little inkjet stopped working, so I picked up another, Same formula, same ink, different printer. I was back in business. When that one went tits-up I tried to do it again but completely destroyed the third printer on the first refill. Ink everywhere, unicorn farts all over the desk. The ink lasted the life-time of two inkjet printers, and caused the early death of another. There was still ink left when I finally junked the whole operation.
Years later I picked up a cheapo color inkjet, printed my holiday photos cards for family and tore the thing down for rods and steppers. It was not even economical to refill the carts myself anymore. The printers are so cheap now its almost more cost effective to buy cheap printers for electronics components than it is to buy the components themselves.
I'm honestly shocked anybody even bothers buying inkjet carts now-days. refurb or OEM. One round of ink costs more than a brand new printers that comes with ink... even from the local refill joint.
But this is still good news. First sale keeps capitalism honest. (sorta)
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
The Central District of California is part of the 9th circuit. The Vernor decision was made by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, so Vernor effectively (and, IMO, incorrectly) overrode the precedent in Softman.
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Why are you asking him to sign such an agreement? He never asked you to sign anything; he claims you agreed by magic, in secret without you ever being a party to the agreement, and despite you never doing anything that could be construed to having agreed to whatever his terms are.
If you claim that the other party agreed to something, then they agreed to it, period. That's how magic contracts work. We don't need no stinking signatures!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They tried the copyright route with SCC and got shot down. They tried the patent route with Impression Products and got shot down. What other options will their lawyers try to dig out before they realize that their cartridges WILL legally be resold and refilled?
Link to a website with your TOS. Then add that by redeeming this check you agree to the TOS.
Oh, jiggity - aside from any targeted corporate welfare statutes, this looks like "Canadian drugs" are no longer grey-market items under the patent regime.
I wonder if the EpiPen boondoggle was on the Justices' minds.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Link to a website with your TOS. Then add that by redeeming this check you agree to the TOS.
I did something similar to Chase bank a while ago.
Sent a check with the memo line referencing an attached letter that verbosely said:
Cash the check and you agree for me to repay my debt at 0.000% interest and over 54 months.
Sent it to their home office Attn Account Manager. They cashed the check and when they continued to bill me at the old rates I called them on it.
They threatened to sue me over it, and I replied that I'm in California, and I dared them to find a jury that would take their side. (there's a loooong story behind this where they jacked up min payments on lots of their accounts to force them in to overdue status to allow jacking up the interest rates).
Ultimately I actually prevailed. Not sure if their legal team got involved or if they decided one account wasn't worth the trouble, but I was able to repay my principal debt with zero interest. :)
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Printers, photocopiers, wide format, ink jets, pretty much if it feeds paper, I've serviced them. Personally, at home, I prefer OEM to refills, because when I print photographs, I'M PICKY! I go to the trouble of using a photospectrometer before printing (since I have one for work, it's not a big deal to use it at home). All of my customers, will use OEM, because we write into the service contracts they are required to use OEM supplies, which is also part of the maintenance agreement that supplies them with the toner/ink. MOST home users, can get by with non OEM inks and toners. What ticks me off about this crap is that you know the only difference between black ink/toner/carrier and color toner/ink/carrier? The pigment. When I'm doing training, I'll switch out some of the process units, and flip around say magenta/cyan and then default the machine to printing only b&w prints. And the minute one of the trainees prints color, it's a hoot to see the look on their face. It's the same stuff, just different pigments, but consumers get RIPPED by a higher price on color supplies, versus black supplies.
Are there any printer manufacturers that don't fucking suck?
The point being, there are conflicting rulings in different districts that can only be resolved by the Supreme Court. Which suggested, pretty strongly, today how it will be inclined to rule.
So sit down, take a deep breath, have some ice cream and put the outrage on hold. The good guys are winning.
Meh. Companies aren't stupid. If they can't recoup costs from selling ink they will just drive up the cost of the printer. Similar to raising taxes on corps - they just pass the cost on.
Playing devils advocate here...
They should create a new printer cartridge type that has a uniquely shaped locking tab made of about a half mm thick plastic, to secure the cartridge in place. Patent the shit out of the tab. To remove the cartridge from the printer after it has been locked in, you must break the tab off and dispose of it, much like you would dispose of a soda bottle cap. The printer should refuse to print if a cartridge is not recognized as locked in place.
If anyone tries to make compatible cartridges with a similar shaped tab (ie, the only shape that will fit their printers), they can be sued for patent infringement. Refilling an official cartridge that has already been used would also be futile because you cannot lock the cartridge back in place, and the printer will not print with an unsecured cartridge.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My first job when I was 15 was working in an electronics store where I sold ink refills and third party cartridges. My second job was working for a company that repaired printers and computers. I think people should be able to refill their cartridges but understand the risks and it should void their warranty. On opening a printer I could immediately tell if they had used third party ink in them. Among other things was the big build up of sediment they didn't get with genuine inks. So go ahead and use third party inks, I do today, but don't cry when your printer breaks.
Maybe, maybe not. They hinted at it, but at the same time, they also suggested that licensing terms could override that right. So the question is whether the whole "software is licensed, not sold" thing passes the courts' duck test.
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A license is distinctly different from a sale of goods. And there's plenty of case law defining that difference. Specifically, if you pay once for indefinite use, it's a sale of goods (and the first sale doctrine applies). Even if the "license" say otherwise. The case law on this goes back a century, to when book publishers tried to "license" their books to prevent libraries from loaning out books. There really aren't any new issues there.
Justice Roberts was feeling pretty feisty about Lexmark, too. The wording he chose to use in writing the opinion of the court is entertaining. He wrote, "Lexmark, however, was not so ready to concede that its plan had been foiled." Word for word, page three of the opinion (not the syllabus preceding the opinion in the PDF). Gotta love a judge who uses phrasing to describe the petitioner against whom he is ruling as if they were a super-villain.
And yet various shrink-wrap licenses have been upheld repeatedly by the courts. AutoDesk should have been an open-and-shut case of the first-sale doctrine, yet it wasn't, and SCOTUS refused certiorari—a reasonably strong indication that they believe the decision was correct. And the comments in this decision alluding to licensing being okay support my belief that AutoDesk would be upheld by the SCOTUS if granted certiorari today.
IMO, the decision in AutoDesk is prima facie ludicrous, as it draws an entirely arbitrary line between two classes of copyrighted material solely because one exists "on a computer". And yet six years later, it is still binding precedent. I'm not holding my breath on this getting fixed any time soon.
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I switched to Lexmark after I got mad at a HP all in one. Turned out the Lexmark was even worse. I went back to a different model HP all in one and it's still running today, years later.
During the time I had the Lexmark, I experienced bad support as well. My in-laws had a Lexmark printer. It wasn't long before I had to replace it, with an HP. HP has a little gold mine there as long as they can keep the accountants away from that part of the business.