Technology

This is the best summary I could come up with:

HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant.

Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding [PDF] in an Illinois court to an earlier HP Inc motion to dismiss a January lawsuit.

Among other things, the plaintiffs' filing stated that the printer buyers "never entered into any contractual agreement to buy only HP-branded ink prior to receiving the firmware updates."

In the case, which began in January, the plaintiffs are arguing that HP issued a firmware update between late 2022 and early 2023 that they allege disabled their printers if they installed a replacement cartridge that was not HP-branded.

It added that the printer owners can't claim damages for being overcharged under federal antitrust laws because consumers who buy products from an intermediary can sue the manufacturer for injunctive relief under those laws, but they can't sue the manufacturer to recover damages resulting from an alleged overcharge.

HP CEO Enrique Lores has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to pull customers into a print subscription business model.

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