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Bizarro IP Protection policies

ziggy on 2003-04-23T00:18:55

Robert Kaye blogged about part of the Laws and Emerging Technology Tutorial at O'Reilly's ETech Today. Part of the discussion included the recent Lexmark vs. DCC case. DCC remanufactured Lexmark printer cartridges (the high margin part of the printer), opening themselves up to a copyright infringement lawsuit. I never paid attention to the absurdity of this notion, but it was designed into the whole printer/cartridge system:

Apparently Lexmark embedds a depleted flag into each printer cartridge, and when the printer cartridge runs low on ink, the depleted flag in the cartridge gets set. If the user has a depleted cartridge refilled and reinserted into the printer, the printer will refuse to print since the cartridge is marked as depleted.

To get around this, DCC started replacing the chips with fresh new chips that didn't have their depleted flag set. And by doing this they committed a copyright violation. Huh? Copyright violation? It turns out that the Lexmark folks had the lawyers involved from day one and they in turn got the engineers to design the print heads so that the print head would actually download required firmware in order to start printing. By inserting a DCC cartridge, proprietary code from the printer was copied onto a non-Lexmark component, thus creating a copyright violation. Lexmark was granted an injunction against DCC creating printer cartridges for Lexmark printers.

Whacky, but true.

Um. Wow.

Bye bye Lexmark

bart on 2003-04-23T13:51:01

I have a Lexmark printer. I've recently run out of ink... but I'm not planning on buying a new cartridge. Instead, I'll be buying a new printer, not a Lexmark, but an HP, for roughly 3 to 4 times the price of a cartridge. Yes, Lexmark, you've helped the competion sell one more printer, because of this lawsuit.

Re:Bye bye Lexmark

ziggy on 2003-04-23T14:26:04

Unfortunately, that reduces the market to the least-of-all-evils. And all of the printer manufacturers either produce crap products or engage in questionable business practices like this.

I'm not thrilled with Lexmark's tactics, but I won't buy an other HP printer. I specifically purchased a color duplex inkjet a couple of years ago, and the duplex unit is broken as designed. I think I spent three hours on the phone to get a replacement duplex unit before received a fix. That duplex unit worked for about a day before it started to exhibit the same misbehavior. Oh, and they couldn't figure out why the duplex unit(s) they sent to me never arrived, so they kept re-sending them. Eventually I got three replacements over two months.

As soon as the ink cartridges for this printer dry out, I'm looking for a non-Lexmark, non-HP printer that really can print duplex.

inaccuracies, but also worse than you think!

brev on 2003-04-25T10:27:26

I just read some the documents from the EFF site on the case. The story that Robert Kaye relates is third-hand, so it's a bit inaccurate. The case is a bit more complex than that:
  • It's Static Control Components -- SCC, not DCC.
  • SCC supplies the cartridge recycler industry. They don't seem to actually make them.
  • In October 2002, SCC announced their new work-alike chips.
  • SCC claims that only then did Lexmark register copyrights on the "programs" in question. This seems to contradict Kaye when he says the lawyers were "involved from day one". It looks more like a desperation move.
  • It's hard to understand what actually during the hardware handshake, since the documents are redacted to remove most details. It seems that as the final part of the handshake, the cartridge transmits 55 bytes back to the printer, the initial 7 of which are some sort of SHA-1 hashed response to a challenge, and the remaining are just settings that describe the printer. This 55 byte sequence is the alleged copyrighted program.
  • So the violation appears to happen not when the printer downloads software to the printer, but it is alleged that SCC stole a 55-byte binary and transmits it on demand.
  • SCC disputes that any "program" is being exchanged over the wire, since the printer firmware doesn't even execute whatever it received. Lexmark responds with some extremely loose definitions of what a program is.
  • Interestingly there seem to be provisions or precedents that simple "lock-out codes" cannot be copyrighted. SCC claims strenuously that this magic 55 bytes is a lock-out code, since they tried varying every bit in the sequence (I assume in isolation, since there would probably be more permutations than elementary particles in the universe.) and every variation would cause the printer to error out "cartridge not recognized". Lexmark counters that part of the returned string contains data that is not used in authentication -- the SHA-1 hash is only 7 bytes -- therefore it is NOT a lock-out code. Bizarre, huh?

There seems to be a sort of ratchet effect here, biased in favor of industry. When it's to Lexmark's advantage to claim that all streams of data are really programs, they can claim anything under the DMCA.

However, anti-DMCA forces aren't allowed to claim that a program is merely a stream of ones and zeroes and is thus data and subject to the First Amendment and fair use and so on.