HP Never Learns, Here Comes Yet Another Lawsuit About Proprietary Ink

HP Sauce Or Nothing

HP’s proprietary ink business makes them a lot of money, at least it better considering the number of times they’ve been sued over it.  They might not be quite as bad as Canon for disabling third party ink cartridges, but several times since at least 2016 HP released firmware which causes their printers to refuse to use anything other than their proprietary ink cartridges.  In this case, to make the update even more painful for their customers, HP also cranked up the price of their cartridges.

This class action suit has been triggered by a firmware update issued between late 2022 and early 2023, which reintroduced code similar to the Dynamic Security feature which previously disabled non-HP ink.  That move did not go well for them, especially as there was no notification sent to customers indicating that they would have to abandon their third party ink.  We can expect to see much the same outcome once this case is in front of a lawyer, unless something has changed to make the legal system far more HP friendly.  Since they probably also hate paying full price for HP cartridges, the chances are fairly low.

One might suggest to HP that lowering their prices, at least to the point where it is no longer cheaper to toss out a printer and replace it when it runs out of ink, would have a far more positive effect than trying to trap their customers.  It would also be good for the environment, we don’t need giant piles of printers barely a year old filling our landfills.  Seeing how many times printer companies try to lock customers in until legally required to stop, the chances of a price cut seem quite remote.