Chip Shortage Forces Canon To Issue Workarounds For Its Own Obnoxious DRM

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the something-akin-to-justice dept

For decades now, consumers have been lured into a sour deal: pay for a relatively inexpensive printer, then spend a lifetime paying an arm and a leg for viciously overpriced printer cartridges. As most have learned first-hand, any attempt to disrupt this obnoxious paradigm via third-party printer cartridges has been met with a swift DRM roundhouse kick to the solar plexus. In fact if there’s an area where the printer industry actually innovates, it’s most frequently in finding new, creative and obnoxious methods of preventing cartridge competition.

Unfortunately for Canon, the global chip shortage has temporarily put a kink in the company’s plan to annoy regular customers. The shortage means the company hasn’t been able to buy enough chips used to determine whether a printer cartridge is “genuine” or “authorized,” and therefore has had to start selling cartridges without DRM, and issue guidance helping users do an end around for the company’s own obnoxious DRM warnings:

The company’s various international websites warn users that even “official” Canon ink cartridges could be seen as “counterfeit” across a range of printer products lines (19 devices in total) because they can no longer embed the chips needed for DRM:

“The role the chip plays in the toner cartridges is to communicate information, this includes toner level and to confirm that the toner is a genuine Canon product.”

Whoops.

Canon was just sued last October for disabling all the functions in their multifunction printers if the device’s cartridges ran out of ink (and failing to adequately disclose that to consumers). Basically, Canon did the math and realized that they’d boost their profit margins if they forced millions of customers to buy new printer cartridges — even if they were only using the device to scan. That this might annoy, inconvenience, or drive up costs for its customers, or sour the public on the brand apparently never entered into the company’s thinking.

Of course, none of this would be a problem if the company hadn’t embraced annoying, artificial limitations in a bid to hamper competition and drive up costs in the first place, but it’s obviously unlikely Canon will learn much of anything from the experience.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, chip shortage, copyright, dmca 1201, drm, printers
Companies: canon