News Brother denies firmware blocks third-party toner and ink use

[Admin]

Brother denies leveraging firmware updates to prevent printers from using third-party toner or ink supplies.

Brother denies firmware blocks third-party toner and ink use : Read more

 

[helper800]

I have been working as an IT in education and I have a lot of experience with Brother printers. About half of our old inventory of color printer are Brother printers. Brother's prompts about using Genuine Brother Ink Cartridges are real and what likely caused such confusion. At most school sites in my district, the teachers each have a printer in the room for color printing exclusively. The teachers are responsible for using their yearly stipend for supplies on ink or their own personal money. Color printing is a privilege because of its cost. Most of the teachers choose to purchase 3rd party ink cartridges for their brother printers because they are about half the cost. The main issues I have seen with these 3rd party cartridges is that they are not recognized by the printer when slotted in, they are rather leaky, or that the ink itself does not play nice with the printer itself. I cannot say this is anything more than the pin to pad chip at the top of the cartridge not working properly. I actually rather like the brother printers that we have even though most of them are around 10 years old at this point. We started replacing the ones that stopped working consistently with the HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e/8015e printers and they seem okay, but there are very few options for ink other than HP themselves by design. We shall see if they last like most of the brother printers have.

 

[Giroro]

Brother's new medium-term business strategy (from their new CEO) states pretty clearly they intend to exploit their home printer users for more profit.

PDF here

Page 5, next to Printers & Solutions: "maximize businesses with continuous ties to customers to enhance customer LTV"

That's business speak for making their locked in customers pay the company more money for consumables. Forcing customers to buy their consumables seems like the only way they could even try to meet that goal.

Otherwise, Brother's statements are using some extremely specific lawyer-written language that should not be trusted. Their statement may be written with the intention to lead people to infer they are denying the claims, but they're not actually denying the claims. I don't think anybody said Brother is literally bricking their entire printer - the concerning claim is that the firmware update(s) deliberately degrade print quality over time on 3rd party cartridges, which were known working and printed perfectly before the update. Brother never actually denied that they've started doing that. They just said they're not directly bricking printers and locking out features. So if Brother wanted to make a strong denial, they should have denied the actual claims against them. But they didn't.

But on the other hand, Rossman is a professional troll, the title of his video was childishly written to take advantage of a professional wrestling marketing stunt, and these claims would have been extremely easy for a man of his wealth and influence to test. But then he would have had to get out of his chair and actually do something, as opposed to just complaining and exploiting outrage, for profit.
Were the people complaining just experiencing coincidental hardware failures? There's no clickbait money in proving that everything is fine, so we'll never find out.

 

[helper800]

Brother's new medium-term business strategy (from their new CEO) states pretty clearly they intend to exploit their home printer users for more profit.

PDF here

Page 5, next to Printers & Solutions: "maximize businesses with continuous ties to customers to enhance customer LTV"

That's business speak for making their locked in customers pay the company more money for consumables. Forcing customers to buy their consumables seems like the only way they could even try to meet that goal.

Otherwise, Brother's statements are using some extremely specific lawyer-written language that should not be trusted. Their statement may be written with the intention to lead people to infer they are denying the claims, but they're not actually denying the claims. I don't think anybody said Brother is literally bricking their entire printer - the concerning claim is that the firmware update(s) deliberately degrade print quality over time on 3rd party cartridges, which were known working and printed perfectly before the update. Brother never actually denied that they've started doing that. They just said they're not directly bricking printers and locking out features. So if Brother wanted to make a strong denial, they should have denied the actual claims against them. But they didn't.

But on the other hand, Rossman is a professional troll, the title of his video was childishly written to take advantage of a professional wrestling marketing stunt, and these claims would have been extremely easy for a man of his wealth and influence to test. But then he would have had to get out of his chair and actually do something, as opposed to just complaining and exploiting outrage, for profit.
Were the people complaining just experiencing coincidental hardware failures? There's no clickbait money in proving that everything is fine, so we'll never find out.

While my experience is anecdotal so take what I say with a fat grain of salt, but we have over a hundred Brother printers of all sorts of models ranging from 4-10 years old. I have not had any complaints recently out of the norm about print quality, or 3rd party carts not working en mass.

 

[King_V]

Nitpick: Yesterday. Ars posted the article March 5th.

 

[mrdoc22]

They are just doing the same that HP did with laserprinteres:
new printeres from today date, who receives firmwareupdate (which is set to default on), can only use original toner

(Glad I have a old Brother laserprinter which don't revice firmwareupdates anymore)

 

[tamalero]

While my experience is anecdotal so take what I say with a fat grain of salt, but we have over a hundred Brother printers of all sorts of models ranging from 4-10 years old. I have not had any complaints recently out of the norm about print quality, or 3rd party carts not working en mass.

isnt the point relatd to NEW FIRMWARES and updates?
If you have an older printer with no updates of course I do not think you will ever have problems.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's completely reasonable for troubleshooting to point out non genuine supplies, since I've had third part ink cartridges in my circa 2014 Brother printer just not work at all because the chip was faulty (one out of 5 in one pack didn't work), it wouldn't detect it, and it's easy to.see where someone with a novice level of knowledge may assume it's the printer being bad when something brand new doesn't work.

 

[helper800]

isnt the point relatd to NEW FIRMWARES and updates?
If you have an older printer with no updates of course I do not think you will ever have problems.

The newer ones do get such updates...

 

[hotaru251]

Rossman is a professional troll

idk about that but past yr or so he has been parroting whats gotten talked about w/o digging up or looking into it deeply like he use to do over issues.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

EPSON also microchips ink cartridges. They are all egregious scumbags, and the practice should just be outright illegal.

 

[TheOtherOne]

For some reason, I remembered this catchphrase after reading the title...

 

[Dr3ams]

January 2024 (Reuters)

HP has been sued in federal court in Chicago by consumers who claim the company's printers would not accept replacement ink cartridges made by other manufacturers, forcing them to pay artificially high prices for HP-branded cartridges.

In a proposed federal class action filed on Friday, 11 consumers from Illinois, New York, Missouri and other states accused HP, opens new tab of violating U.S. and state antitrust laws in a bid to monopolize the market for replacement ink.

The plaintiffs said they were not told automatic software updates from HP would disable some printers unless HP-branded ink was used.

“Faced with non-functional printers, the plaintiffs were forced to purchase HP-branded ink that they would not otherwise have purchased,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit builds on prior or pending cases accusing HP of deceptive practices involving its ink cartridges.

HP in 2019 agreed to resolve related consumer claims in a California case, settling for a payment of $1.5 million. HP did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

Last August, a U.S. judge in California said HP must face claims that it designed some all-in-one printers to stop scanning and faxing when the machine was low on ink, compelling consumers to buy cartridges.

A different California federal judge in December in another lawsuit said the plaintiffs could sue HP in a class-action over allegedly failing to warn them about its “Dynamic Security” policy of updates that bar consumers from using some third-party cartridges.

The court in that case narrowed, opens new tab the scope of proposed classes, and said they could only sue for an injunction against HP’s practices and not monetary damages. The lawsuit is over disclosure practices, and not the policy itself.

In the Chicago case, the plaintiffs said they are seeking an injunction barring HP from disabling printers unless they use HP-branded ink, and monetary damages of greater than $5 million.