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HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#331

Post by hedora »

dack wrote: post #310
rafark wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)” Did I read this correct? Do consumer printers cost over $10k where you live?

i think you have the proportion backwards i think he is saying $1000 = 10 x (retail price of printer). which would mean the retail price of a printer is $100

Yes, and 10x is reasonable when computing punitive fines.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#332

Post by gameman144 »

FrontierPsych wrote: post #284
gameman144 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund. We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we j…

Workers, yes, but mainly consumers. A million dollar fine, if you sell 500,000,000 cartridges (just a guess, but in 2012 I searched and saw they sold 315 million worldwide) means they would have to charge .2 cents per cartridge to pay for the fine. '' I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for tha…

> Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.

Fines work great as long as they're sufficient enough to disincentivize the relevant behavior! If you made it so that any printer that you disabled cost more to you than one left enabled, then the business would absolutely change course, no huge single-time fine required.

> But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.

Agreed, but I think that effect would be extremely detrimental to society (capital punishment for misbehavior also has a big impact, and is pretty clearly not the kind of thing we'd want.)

If there is currently a criminal law that the CEO is breaking, then by all means they should be tried. If we're just trying to end business practices we don't like, though, regulation and monetary disincentives are the way to do that.

Making an example of someone should only be done insofar as they've broken the rules. If we don't like the way they're acting while following the rules, the rules are the things we should change.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#333

Post by ryao »

clipsy wrote: post #24
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prison time? For bricking an $80 printer unless you use specific parts? I don't think so. Let's try to stay on planet earth here..

You deliberately misrepresent this as one $80 printer; in reality it is the sum total of all printers bricked by this, plus price gouging the printer owners who don’t want their printer bricked. If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free?…

Did they misrepresent the printer? They advertise “dynamic security” in their marketing as if it were a good thing. If it was in the advertising and documentation, how is that misrepresentation?

That being said, HP seems to mostly rebadge Canon printers loaded with their firmware, so I am not sure why people are still buying them. HP is just a middle man these days.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#334

Post by ryao »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #31
clipsy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You deliberately misrepresent this as one $80 printer; in reality it is the sum total of all printers bricked by this, plus price gouging the printer owners who don’t want their printer bricked. If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free?…

I'm curious if this violates U.S. code 1030(a)(5) [0] "(5) (A)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; (B)intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or (C)intentionally accesses a protected…

I recall a court ruling that stated that a router is not a computer, so have fun trying to convince a court that a printer is a computer.

Also, what counts as protected?

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#335

Post by Zak »

jiggawatts wrote: post #314
RedNifre wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not work, they have insurance against this.

Wait... what!? How can that possibly be legal?

It's legal to buy insurance covering civil liability for almost anything other than criminal acts. The price and availability of such insurance tends to vary in proportion to the risk, and policies often have specific exclusions to discourage risky behaviors. Directors and officers insurance is very common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directors_and_officers_liabili...

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#336

Post by JKCalhoun »

oxfordmale wrote: post #91
mcny wrote: post #12

The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business. No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express wr…

Just stop buying HP printers. If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first. The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.

Knowing HP's shitty policies some years ago I bought an HP color laser printer off eBay that was already then several years old. It was a model I understood to be able to work with cheap 3rd party ink cartridges.

I feel like these older, pre-dynamic security printers are going to be gold. Hang on to your babies, keep them safe, keep them running.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#337

Post by CamperBob2 »

lostlogin wrote: post #46
millzlane wrote: post #23

I like brother printers.

Is it possible to like a printer? Frustration, irritation and anger would summarise my feelings about them.

I liked my 1993-model LaserJet 4 until I realized what it was doing to my electric bill. I'd probably still be using it otherwise. Built to survive nuclear Armageddon.

The only tougher printer was the LaserJet 3 it replaced, which was built to survive an asteroid strike.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#338

Post by influxmoment »

hypercube33 wrote: post #311
ranting-moth wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. They're disabling printers today that were functional yesterday. There's no HP cartridge to put back in, unless I go and buy one. The printer is disabled until I give HP money. I call that extortion.

in a free market shouldn't hp be forced to lower it's prices to compete with 3rd party to a little more than their price since it technically is OEM? I mean like car parts

Free markets don't work if fraud and bad actors are not prosecuted. Otherwise lies and fraud will win against honest actors

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#339

Post by screwturner68 »

gameman144 wrote: post #51
mcny wrote: post #12

The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business. No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express wr…

I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund. We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we j…

The issue is the fine is paid by the company and not the people who actually did the crime. As a result, the CEO, the board and the other players will all get big fat bonuses and the company will take a hit. When the company takes a hit one thing happens the people at the bottom of the chain get fired, not the decision makers, not the people who pushed this policy but some fucking engineer that just had his first kid and thought being and engineer at HP was a great job. The system is setup so that people who screw up never pay but the people who have nothing to do with the problem always pay the bill. If the idiots at the top actually had some accountability I think we'd see a lot different choices being made, but that is just a pipe dream in the world we live in.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#340

Post by jorvi »

WalterBright wrote: post #329
jorvi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply and demand presumes that I would have wanted something else than Fanta - since I (and presumably others) did not, Fanta had market power :). As an aside, the example would be even more dramatic with non-sugar, where the 0.5L bottle is €1.88, but the 1L bottle is €1.95, due to both the price premium of ‘convenient size’ and ‘healthy alternative’ being stacked.

> Supply and demand presumes that I would have wanted something else than Fanta That's not how S&D works. S&D is in-play even if Fanta had a monopoly. Even if the prices were set by the government. Governments have tried every scheme imaginable to repeal the law of S&D, but they never work. BTW, I gave up all soda about 15 years ago. It took about a year to finally stop craving it. I no longer have any desire for it.…

> A firm with market power chooses a point on the demand curve that it faces. It sets a price as a markup over marginal cost and then produces enough to meet demand at that price. A firm with market power does not take the price as given and then determine a quantity to supply. In fact—strictly speaking—there is no such thing as a supply curve when a firm has market power.

Soda for me is a guilty pleasure, like a good barbecue, or a bottle of red wine. But I appreciate the heads-up!

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