2d ago

Brother Says It Was Falsely Accused Of Bricking Printers That Use Cheaper Third-Party Ink Cartridges

www.techdirt.com Brother Says It Was Falsely Accused Of Bricking Printers That Use Cheaper Third-Party Ink Cartridges

For years, more ham-fisted printer manufacturers have waged a not-so-subtle war on consumers by blocking the ability to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. HP and Canon have both been part…

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That's a very charitable way of looking at DRM.
- In this case, I kind of don't blame them in terms of warranty work. Like yeah, if the machine faults out within the warranty period, they should replace it. But if the machine breaks because someone uses $3 ink from a bodega that's made from busted open bic pens, then no manufacturer should be on the hook for replacement when caused by user negligence, and I don't blame a company for using some measure to determine that.
  
  $3 ink from a bodega
  That's actually a fair price for 3rd party replacement.
  I used to work at a computer shop, and people only ever bought the cheapest available cartridges.
  We also used to do printer repair, do you know how many printers had to come in because of shitty ink?
  The answer is zero.
  And anyway, in your example the printer manufacturer has no business tracking your ink usage, whether it's by spying on you and phoning home, or recording this info in the printer's memory.
  
  My main concern here is that they (allegedly, I haven't confirmed) remove old firmware. If customers want to try out older firmware to see if that fixes their problem, they should be able to. It doesn't cost much, so why not?
  Yeah, voiding a warranty because the customer used something that could cause irreversible damage makes sense. Removing access to older firmware does not.
  
  Ah, that's fair on the old firmware bit, I hadn't heard about that. I have a Brother laser printer, but it's locked down on my network for phoning home.
  
  What's the domain you blocked?
  
  I didn't block a domain, I restricted the printer's MAC from WAN access in my router's firewall. I can still access it from any device on my network, but it just can't phone home or search for firmware updates.

51 comments