HP and 'Printing as a Service': Cartridges Blocked Remotely

Printers are undoubtedly the worst peripheral you can connect to a computer, regardless of its resources or the operating system in use. While other accessories keep improving their specs, printers continue to sow pain and desperation among their supposed owners. I say "supposed" because a Twitter user discovered the "virtues" of printing as a service: official HP cartridges full of ink, blocked remotely by the company.

A quick trip to YouTube finds tutorials for refilling toner and ink cartridges in hundreds of different printers. There are also instructions for using small devices that reset the embedded chips—true masters of deception if ever there were. The point is that printers are not allies of the user. Their only goal is to make you spend money constantly on new cartridges because the companies' main profit comes from them. If that requires a scam, well... it doesn't matter.

Now, these companies aren't idle either, and from time to time they come up with something different to optimize their income. In HP's specific case, it's called Instant Ink. What exactly does it offer? For a fixed payment of $5 per month, the owner of an HP printer gets the privilege of printing up to 100 pages, and if you're about to run out of ink, the company will send you new cartridges at no charge. Although it sounds good on the surface, this printing as a service depends on the user's pace. If printing volume is relatively low, Instant Ink could become a much more expensive option than a couple of alternative cartridges.

And so we come to Twitter. A user named Ryan Sullivan shared that he had decided to cancel a strange monthly charge from HP called "Instant Ink" that was taking five dollars per month. Sullivan admits he had it "for more than a year" but didn't know what it was. When he went to print... he found out:

HP remotely blocked a set of original, ready-to-use cartridges because the user quit the subscription. Naturally, the rest of Twitter responded as expected (recommending EcoTank or switching to laser), but there's a small detail: HP warned this would happen.

Where? In the Instant Ink Terms of Use, Article 5, Paragraph "D", Section V: "If the Service is canceled for any reason, HP will remotely disable the Instant Ink Program Cartridges and you will no longer be able to use them to print." At the same time, paragraph "E" warns that the user must return the cartridges to HP, regardless of the state of the ink.

In short: Sullivan's great mistake was not studying more closely the terms he accepted when installing that HP printer, but given the company's previous behavior, their examples of transparency aren't brilliant. Ladies and gentlemen, let this serve as a warning: you must read all the terms. Companies don't want us to own what we pay for.

Source: Vice