Slashdot Mirror
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
Now, what will the SCOTUS say about the right to repair for farming machinery from John Deere (if I remember correctly)?
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.
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?
When Gillette starts using DRM to prevent you from changing out razor refills with a third party's, then you can complain to the DOJ.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Good call. Now let's get to work on John Deere while you're in a giving mood.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"... 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. --
Both format shifting (ripping) and making backup copies have long been considered legal under fair use in the US. You just have to make sure to delete any copies if you resell the original. You also cannot share the copies you made with anyone else.
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...
Patents and copyrights are completely different things, with a UID as low as yours I'd expect you to know that.
Practically speaking the answer to your question is mostly yes, legally speaking I don't care, seriously, who gives a 4star.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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.
IANAL, but I believe the answer to that has already been established: "Yes." You're allowed to do whatever you'd like to do with the data on that disk--for your own personal use. I can buy a book, take a picture of each page, run it through an OCR reader and make my own version of the book which I could then put on whatever device I'd like.
The issue comes up when you then distribute that data to other people. You've now stepped outside the bounds of "your own personal use."
That's not to say that the people who own the copyright particularly like that you can do this. They'd much rather you buy the hardcover, the paperback, and two or three different encodings of the e-book. They'll go out of their way to make it more difficult for you to do this.
They do, by patenting the connector on the end of the handle.
...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.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Sorry but a 6 digit UID is not "low"... with a UID as high as yours I'd expect you to know that :-)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Sorry but a 6 digit UID is not "low"... with a UID as high as yours I'd expect you to know that :-)"
Also, based on my recollection of the level of discourse in Slashdot's early days, I wouldn't assume a low UID is a sign of wisdom...
Incoming? Soon? This has been a thing for nearly a decade. HP cartridges have DRM chips. No chip, no printing. 3rd parties started salvaging the chips from genuine cartridges (and they farmed them from their customers via the "send your old one to us" recycling programs). Then HP started doing expiration dates. I'm not sure what the current situation is. I haven't owned a printer in many years.
+1
Wishing I didn't use ISPs given email back in the nineties.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
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.
So what does count as a "low" UID these days? Is anyone even still signing up? This place is a shell of it's former self.
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.
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.
That depends on which part of Title 17 you read. One section says you can't break the encryption. Another says you can, for purposes of cross-compatibility. This conflict has never been resolved.
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.
So what does count as a "low" UID these days? Is anyone even still signing up? This place is a shell of it's former self.
+5 Funny. Should be +5 SadButTrue
Actually, this started when Lexmark put DRM on their cartridges, and somebody reverse engineered it. This isn't the first ridiculous lawsuit Lexmark as lost.
Lexmark tried that and lost. Lexmark Int'l v. Static Control Components, 387 F.3d 522.
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.
Sorry to bother you elders. But is it necessary now?
Yes, if you don't want to post from "Anonymous Coward" with starting score of zero.
For the first few years, Slashdot didn't have logins. You just entered whatever you wanted on the From: line.
Then logins were available but not required. You could still enter whatever you wanted on the From: line.
Finally, posts from non-logged in users became "Anonymous Coward" with zero starting score.
I moved pretty quickly to create a login after the Anonymous Coward change but I still ended up a five digit UID.
I had been posting for some time when logins were first implemented so I probably could have snagged a two digit UID. (The one digit UID's probably all went to staff) I just didn't want another login if I could avoid it.