From PC World: Printers are one of the banes of modern computing, expensive and frustrating relics that are nonetheless occasionally necessary. Over the last few years, HP seems to be doing its best to make them even more expensive and frustrating by milking the infamously exploitative ink market until both the literal and metaphorical cartridge runs dry. After enraging customers by blocking third-party ink and bricking printers with dodgy firmware, HP’s CEO recently said the quiet part out loud.
A bit of context: In an interview with CNBC last week during the World Economic Forum in Davos, HP CEO Enrique Lores gave a few choice quotes. In response to a recent lawsuit over HP’s software updates that block ink cartridges from non-HP sources, he started by saying, “I think for us it’s important to protect our IP [intellectual property]. There is a lot of IP that we built in the inks of the printheads, in the printheads itself in the printers, and what we’re doing is when we identify cartridges that are violating our IP, we stop the printer from work[ing].”
“So they’re rip-offs, they’re counterfeit, and you’re going to break the printer as a result?” replied CNBC Squawk Box host Rebecca Quick.
“In many cases it could be,” said Lores. “It can create all sorts of issues, from the printer stop working [sic], because the inks have not been designed to work in our printers, to even creat[ing] security issues. We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges, through the cartridge…to the printer, from the printer…to the network, so it can create many more problems.”
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