I am relieved to finally stop using that Lexmark printer. Those crappy ink cartridges that cost $5 more than HP’s? The reason I harbor so much hatred for those little pieces of plastic, is that they not only stop working after they’ve dispensed a set amount of ink (even if there happens to be a gallon of ink left in them — sorry, you’ve already used your 2 ounces), but they actually have an end-user license agreement (the infamous EULA) on the packaging, which you agree to simply by purchasing the cartridge.
So basically, as I understand it, Lexmark is claiming that you are renting their shoddy piece of trash, and it’s illegal for you to use it in any other way than they see fit (aka – refilling the cartridge yourself). And when you’re done with it, they want you to return it to them, so they can refill it and sell it for another 60 trillion dollars. And, I think they might have actually won a DMCA lawsuit recently against someone that was either trying to hack their cartridges to be refilled or make non-Lexmark cartridges that would work in Lexmark printers.
Well, I need to go license (not buy) some Sunkist oranges soon — my Sunkist orange juicer won’t operate without the software chip they embed inside the orange peel. And if I hack some other brand of oranges to work with the juicer, I could get fined $100k per orange and up to 5 years in prison. My point, don’t buy from Lexmark until they stop this garbage.
UPDATE: Lexmark lost the DMCA suit, but won an almost identical suit under Patent law, based on the fact that the ink cartridge boxes are labeled with, “Single Use Only.”
No rights reserved.
…it’s only a matter of time until your Sunkist nightmares are true. (:
I’m really hoping that people are actually smarter than the frogs from the frog analogy:
If you place a frog in a pot of hot water, it will immediately hop out. But if you place a frog in a pot of comfortable water, then slowly increase the temperature, it will stay in the water until it’s dead.
That is, even though our consumer/end user rights are slowly being taken away, hopefully it doesn’t get bad enough before we still have the ability to take them back. I just hope that consumers eventually wise up and start using their dollars to support non-EULA alternatives when possible; or, at the very least, EULAs without unconscionable terms. I’ll post an entry on an idea I’ve got later.
I wonder if sunkist would want their oranges returned after your body has ‘processed’ them ;D
Bah, I just found out the frog analogy is useless: http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog. But it still doesn’t change how many IP advocates are trying to make it possible to own ideas forever. They’ve already convinced the general public that “if I made it, I own it, it’s mine!”