This is true all over, but there’s an especial deliciousness to see it applied to printers and printer ink, always a trailblazer in extractive, deceptive and monopolistic practices of breathtaking, shameless sleaze.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Pierre Beyssac, a director of Internet Europe, recounts his campaigns in the Printer Wars, which start when he ordered a non-wifi-enabled Lexmark printer but got shipped the wifi version.
https://twitter.com/pbeyssac/status/1386988213923983362
He didn’t mind…except that the two models use different models of ink-cartridge, and he’d preordered €450 worth of cartridges, which were nonreturnable by the time he discovered the error.
But there’s an answer - a Chinese vendor sells a €15 conversion kit that bypasses the DRM (this is probably illegal in the EU under Article 6 of 2001’s EUCD). Beyssac was able to salvage his €450 ink investment.
But the adventure prompted him to investigate further. He discovered that Lexmark uses DRM to “regionalize” cartridges (similar to DVD regions): a cart bought in region 1 won’t work in a printer bought in region 2.
Hilariously, Lexmark claims that this is because each cartridge is specially tuned for each region’s “humidity.” By way of rebuttal, Beyssac points out that all of Russia shares a region with all of Africa (!).
Now all of this would be idiotic enough if it were any old printer monopolist, but because this is Lexmark, it is especially delicious,.
Lexmark, after all, fought one of the most important battles of the Printer Wars - and lost. Lexmark vs Static Controls was brought by Lexmark when it was a division of the early tech monopolist IBM.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy
Lexmark sold toner cartridges filled with the cheap and abundant element carbon, and it wanted to charge vintage Champagne prices for it. To that end, Lexmark ran a 55-byte program in a “security chip” that flipped an “I am full” bit to “I am empty” when the toner ran out.
Lexmark’s competitor Static Controls reverse-engineered this trivial program so you could refill a cartridge and flip it back to “I am full” so the printer would recognize it. In 2002 Lexmark sued, under Sec 1201 of the recently passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
DMCA 1201 made it a felony to traffick in a device that “bypassed an access control for a copyrighted work.” The judge asked Lexmark which copyrighted work was in its printer cartridges (it wasn’t the carbon powder!). Lexmark said it was the 55-bytle program.
The judge handed Lexmark its own ass, ruling that while software could be copyrighted, a 55-byte I-am-full/empty program didn’t rise to the level of copyrightability - it wasn’t even a haiku.
Lexmark lost, and today, Lexmark is…*a division of Static Controls.*
That’s right, the company that’s using all this bullshit DRM to prevent people from using their printers the way they want to is the company that did the exact same thing to IBM, won its court case, and then merged with the company whose racket it had destroyed.
Every pirate *seriously* wants to be an admiral.
But here’s the thing. Lexmark/Static turned on the fact that 55-byte programs (all that fit affordably in a primitive 2002 chip) wasn’t a copyrighted work. The cartridges Lexmark sells now have thousands of lines of code.
There’s whole OSes in there. These *are* copyrightable. As is the OS in every embedded system we buy, from car engine parts to smart speakers to pacemakers. That means that companies can use DMCA 1201 to prevent rivals from unlocking lawful features in their products.
They can use it to block independent repair and independent security audits. They can make it illegal to use any product you own in ways that disadvantages their shareholders, even if that’s what’s good for you.
Despite the “C” in DMCA standing for “copyright,” this isn’t copyright protection, it’s felony contempt of business model - a legally enforceable obligation to arrange your life to benefit multinational corporations’ shareholders.
And worse, this law has been spread around the world thanks to the US Trade Rep: it’s in 2001’s EUCD and Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act. Last summer, Mexico passed an even more extreme version as part of the USMCA.
If you think this shit is odious when it’s in your printer, you’re going to hate it when it’s in your toothbrush, wristwatch, car engine and toaster.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/
In 2016, EFF brought a lawsuit to overturn DMCA 1201 on behalf of Bunnie Huang and Matt Green. It has been working its way through the courts ever since.
https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice
by Cory Doctorow, Read more:
Image: uncredited
