Brother Says It Was Falsely Accused Of Bricking Printers That Use Cheaper Third-Party Ink Cartridges
from the crying-wolf dept
For years, more ham-fisted printer manufacturers have waged a not-so-subtle war on consumers by blocking the ability to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. HP and Canon have both been particularly obnoxious on this front, and continue to engage in the practice despite a growing pile of assorted lawsuits.
Brother has historically been one of the last major printer manufacturers that doesn’t engage in this practice, something that should be applauded.
Yet the company found itself on the receiving end of recent accusations that it too had begun bricking the printers of users who try to install third-party cartridges. The rumblings began courtesy of a YouTube video and several lazy subsequent articles about it claiming the company had done an about face.
But the accusations were entirely based on a 2022 Reddit post from a user who had problems after a firmware update. The problem wasn’t new, and it wasn’t clear Brother actually did anything differently.
Ars Technica managed to do actual reporting and ask Brother about it. The company repeatedly insists that absolutely nothing has changed in regards to the company’s treatment of third-party ink and toner cartridges:
“We are aware of the recent false claims suggesting that a Brother firmware update may have restricted the use of third-party ink cartridges. Please be assured that Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines.”
There are various claims peppered around Reddit by users who claim a firmware update blocked their use of third-party cartridges. But Brother says that while its software and hardware do check to confirm whether official Brother cartridges are installed (which might cause inadvertent bugs for some users), they don’t block their use in any way (FWIW I have an MFC-L3770CDW LaserJet that has never struggled to use cheap third-party toner).
It’s unfortunate for Brother, given, again, it’s one of the few remaining manufacturers not being an asshole on this subject. So far.
A few years ago, printer manufacturers took this tactic one step further, and began preventing users from being able to use a multifunction printer’s scanner if they didn’t have company sanctioned ink installed. Canon was hit with a $5 million lawsuit in 2021 for the practice, but was able to quietly settle it privately without facing much accountability, or having to change much of its behavior.
In 2022 HP was also hit with a lawsuit (pdf) for preventing scanners from working without sanctioned ink cartridges installed, and not being transparent about this with customers. HP has spent a few years trying to wiggle out of the suit, but hasn’t had much luck.
Lawsuits don’t seem to be deterring the behavior by most major companies. And given Trump 2.0 is turning most consumer protection regulators into the legal equivalent of damp roadside cardboard, there are fewer disincentives than ever for companies that want to goose their quarterly earnings by nickel-and-diming their loyal customers.
Filed Under: bricked, cheap ink, firmware, printers, third party ink cartridges, third party toner cartridges
Companies: brother
Comments on “Brother Says It Was Falsely Accused Of Bricking Printers That Use Cheaper Third-Party Ink Cartridges”
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Brother is plainly lying...
My Brother printer was working perfectly UNTIL they sent out a software update which bricked the printer, including scanning, which uses no ink at all. Only fix was to install a Brother cartridge, which immediately resolved the problem.
Also noted, the obligatory Trump Derangement Statement in the last paragraph. Junkies can’t help themselves.
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“The company is definitely lying to paying customers, but mentioning the active presidential administration that openly and deliberately weakens the relevant consumer protection agency is derangement.”
Are you sure your name isn’t TheBootlickerObeys?
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Yeah, this is a gross injustice. The Dude wouldn’t defend Trump. The Dude is probably on a bowling team with a guy whose parents also named him Donald Trump who gets visits from Russian kompromat agents who piss on his rug in a case of mistaken identity. “Where is the Ukraine surrender deal, Trump?”
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Nah, it’s called “relevance”.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
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I hope trump departs your family into a ditch.
Go fucking die you nazi.
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Reminder: Refusing to criticize Trump or brushing off any criticism of Trump as “deranged”, as if he should be wholly insulated from even the most milquetoast criticism of himself and/or his administration, is actual derangement.
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As far as “plainly lying” goes, Trump is plainly lying… about everything all the time. Try complaining about that sometime, you know, when you learn to acknowledge reality.
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Nope. Lying means intentionally providing false information, which is to say that only a person with a grasp of reality can lie. Trump, by contrast, is a bullshitter; constantly making stuff up, without any apparent thought about whether it might or might not be true.
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It’s an objective statement of fact. Just because you get deranged when encountering Trump facts you don’t like doesn’t mean we need to hear about it.
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One data point does not make a valid conclusion- did put put the 3rd-party cartridge back in to see if the problem recurred? How about another 3rd-party cart.? Try rolling back the firmware? Without any of that, the assertion that the cartridge was the problem lacks merit.
And if the printer was truly “bricked”, nothing would resurrect it… that’s the point of calling it a brick.
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Part of the problem/complaint was specifically that Brother wasn’t keeping the older firmwares available from download section of their website
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Trump is fucking deranged, so they used this as an obvious naming for his condition. What about it?
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“ Junkies can’t help themselves.”
Here you are. Serving as a warning to others.
How dare someone criticize the government!
I think you also deserve to know that the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” comes from the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome”, ostensibly invented to make anyone who doesn’t think it’s okay to murder Iraqi children.
TDS
Trump Derangement Syndrome is more correctly the affliction that his supporters exhibit. They twist themselves into knots and layers of hypocrisy to excuse and defend their orange idiot king of every gross word and action, no matter what.
When was the update?
When did you install the update that required Brother ink?
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Good question, seeing as how the original complaint stems from 2022, not ‘recently’.
Unless one’s sense of time is subject to the newly-coined Republican definition of how long is a day.
We have a Brother printer. Some time a month ago, it just stopped printing. This happened around the same time we replaced the ink cartridges with non-official cartridges for 1/4 the price of official ones.
After a ton of troubleshooting, we eventually had to uninstall and reinstall the printer (network), and the ink replacement was just a coincidence. So it must have been a VERY broken driver or firmware update to detect the cartridge. And the only point to updating the printer to detect this was to nag at us for not over-paying for their liquid gold?
Re: One man's nagging is another man's fraud protection
One man’s nagging is another man’s fraud protection: Arguably, Brother could be responding to requests for better ways to detect counterfeit cartridges. Since the federal government, and the biggest retailers around seem reluctant* to actually police product fraud, perhaps people asked for a way to detect athentic Brother carts.
I know I’ve had trouble with 3rd-party inkjet carts either clogging almost instantly or somehow containing even less ink than 1st-party “starter” carts: Probably 1 for 3 on getting actual good 3rd-party carts for our old HP PhotoJet**. At that rate, if the 3rd-party carts aren’t at most 1/3 of the price, they’re kinda not worth it. Sometimes it actually pays to go 1st-party instead of rolling the dice on trying to find 3rd party products that are not garbage.
I have yet to try 3rd parter toner in our (more often used lately) Brother B&W laser, because I keep finding 1st party carts at decent enough prices to sway me against rolling the dice on potential 3rd party garbage.
*(see: de minimus bullshit and complete ignorance of the cloning industry across the Pacific, as long as the dollars keep flowing to already overflowing wallets. Though they’re still seemingly happy to excessively guard against even the _potential_ for IP fraud/theft via the grossly overpowered DMCA…)
**(purchased before HP went fully off the deep end. They seem to have completely dropped support for it, and maybe because of that it still takes any cartridge I throw at it. Old is good sometimes!)
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Yeah, that would make sense. People sometimes forget that printing is a legitimately difficult problem. For example, it’s why air conditioning was invented, and why it uses the odd term “conditioning” rather than the more obvious “cooling”. (It was invented to stop paper from warping in a printing plant, with humidity being a larger concern than temperature.) Ink makes things especially tricky; for one thing, its consistency changes over time, probably differently for each color. The manufacturers can’t rely on customers to use it quickly or to control temperature and humidity as strictly as a commercial plant would. The cartridges are definitely overpriced, but there’s some serious chemistry, physics, and engineering in them.
Some of the third-party providers do a good job, but there’s crap in every market. So it’s good for customers to know whether they have what’s actually been tested by the printer maker. The term “nagging”, though, implies persistence and annoyance, and there’s little excuse for that (and I don’t know whether what Brother is doing really counts). A pop-up message on each cartridge-change might be fine; showing it for every print job would suck.
I have a Brother inkjet
It’s a DCP-T420W Inktank, but
I think you meant to say “formerly loyal ex-customers.”
Brother’s statement, though, leaves out one word that should have been included: “intentionally” (as in, Brother doesn’t intentionally brick printers with 3rd party cartridges). Best intentions and all.
And yet both of mine (one very old, one from 2019) have survived all SW updates to date just fine, with third-party cartridges installed.
Either you’re unlucky or full of shit. Given your last little bout of cerebral diarrhea, I’m gonna go with the latter.
Brother HL-L3270CDW on our home network for years. Firmware kept up-to-date. Fully zero problems in all that time with using third-party compatibles.
We’ve gone from blaming mystical gremlins for tech problems, to it must be a corporate tactic so quickly.
Of course now all the evidence we need to make the leap, is one person making a claim & we don’t even ask any questions.
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That’s a direct and rational response to the actions of the corpos.
"We're not guilty -- of this one specific thing we weren't actually accused of!"🤔
Oddly enough, “bricking” was not what Brother was actually accused of.
(I only watch Rossman’s videos occasionally, when a sufficiently interesting one crops up in my YouTube feed, but I did see this one.)
The complaint was not that Brother’s updated firmware (for some particular printers) was bricking printers when presented 3rd-party supplies, but that the firmware update was making color registration not work properly anymore (ie. greying out/not letting color registration tools be available in the interface) when using 3rd party supplies, after the firmware for those particular printers were upgraded.
The complaint also (significantly) included that Brother was not keeping previous firmware versions available on the Brother download page, for those who might want to roll back to a previous version.
Maybe this was an experiment, that Brother is walking back from. Maybe it was a regional trial. Maybe something else. Possibly even just a dumb mistake slipping through the cracks. But whatever the actual intentions, I think the discrepancy between the specifics of the complaints, and the specifics in Brother’s denial, to be rather… interesting — and possibly revealing.
PS: I have a Brother printer, which is still working fine, and I’m still recommending Brother to friends and acquaintances, for now (especially if they are tempted by HP, or might any interest in leaving Windows for Linux). But I am also paying closer attention than I was.
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I think people lost track, years ago, of what “brick” means. It used to mean something had stopped working entirely, and was not fixable using “normal” processes (like, maybe you’d have to de-solder a chip and buy a programmer, or figure out how to use JTAG). Then people were saying it just when something wasn’t working normally, even if it could still boot into some kind of recovery mode. So I’m not surprised if someone things “some minor feature stopped working” falls under the term.
The “brother turned evil” were all posts by suspiciously new accounts etc.
Basically Epson, HP, Canon etc all tried to push the fake narrative that “brother is just as evil as us…so you might as well buy OUR printers!”
Desperate and a bit pathetic, as the three companies above are floundering. No-one wants/needs scanners anymore. Businesses have mostly done away with printers.
Even the UK government is allowing its HP contracts to just fade away and going down (literally) from 12000 printers to just 200. And those are just for legally-must-be-printed documents. (court cases etc)
Everything else is fully online now.
Can't use my ink list what was in printer already
Wasnt using brother ink getting much better hits and was working fine went to print something nope now printer asking for brother ink only replace ink ughhhhhhhh list half of my ink had to throw out almost hit hew printer oribly gi back to my HP printer I don’t have money to waste cheaper ink is made I should be able to use what I want have some choice words for this awful thing to do to people needed that article printed asap there was locked up I half to order ink don’t live close to stores to just run out and buy awful thing to do freedom of choice right
Bogus Ink warning
2 weeks after buying a Brother printer I get a warning for Black and yellow ink being low with the other 2 colours almost full. Since then I replaced it with 3rd party ink cartridges and just switched to black only.
Now having not even printed anything at all I get a firmware update which then tells me the cyan and magenta are empty? Total scam how can it have no ink has it just evaporated?