Judge denies HP’s plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit - AiO devices won’t scan or fax without ink, and plaintiffs say IT giant illegally withheld that info from buyers::AiO devices won’t scan or fax without ink, and plaintiffs say IT giant illegally withheld that info from buyers
Am I the only one who thinks it’s crazy that the only grounds they have are that HP didn’t disclose that their All-In-Ones won’t let you scan or fax without ink and not, you know, the fact that they do that in the first place? It should be illegal to disable critical functions of a device simply because an unrelated function is temporarily unavailable. There’s no technical reason HP is doing this other than, “fuck you, buy more ink.”
Unfortunately this is the difference between illegal and unethical, and I don’t gather that HP cares much about ethics. Hopefully right-to-repair laws will cover these cases in the future too.
Well, no.
The argument of this case is exactly that what they did is not legal because they didn’t inform people upfront before the sale
It seemingly (IANAL, but that’s my understanding from what I’ve read so far) is absolutelly legal to sell a device which can be disabled by the manufacturer under certain conditions if the prospective buyer is informed upfront of that “feature” (and depending on the Legal jurisdiction “informed upfront” might mean large bold lettering in all promotional material).
It’s also legal if something stops working because it requires some kind of input it doesn’t have power (i.e. it’s legal if the ICE car you bought won’t work if you don’t put the right kind of fuel in it).
However selling something as having certain characteristics and then it turns out it hasn’t can be considered a Bait & Switch, which is illegal (a form of Fraud) in most places. (Note that this is the direction the plaintiff is comming from: not that it’s illegal for the AiO to work like that but that it’s illegal for it to be sold without notifying potential buyers upfront of that restriction).
With the legal complexity that comes from the devices working as a one and that scanner not being disabled, just not working when other parts of the device are missing a required input, you need that a judge actually looks into into (rather than issuing a summary judgment) to determine if it falls within the boundaries of legality or not.
The last and only printer that I bought from HP worked well and didn’t pull any shenanigans, it was a Laserjet 5L.
Since then, feedback from colleagues and what I’ve seen from reviews and tech communities put me off buying HP again. Between their cloud printing, their inkjet cartridge verification and the USB ports covered in stickers and now this…
I still have a LaserJet 4000N in service (circa 1997 - same era as the 5L) and it’s a workhorse that never dies. Once upon a time, HP did take pride in their products. Even then, though, their toner cartridges were abusively overpriced - they just hadn’t yet figured out how to prevent 3rd party competition.
I recently had a printer to configure (IT) that was HP, and it needed an internet connection and registration to print over USB (well, at all); guess what? Dead ethernet port. Now (even with a working USB) the printer is just landfill food waiting to reach our bloodstream in a few years time. I fucking hate love HP!
