HP avoids monetary damages over printers in class-action settlement

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/hp-avoids-monetary-damages-over-bricked-printers-in-class-action-settlement/

by JSR_FDED • 1 year ago

111 89 1 year ago

arstechnica.com

jqpabc1232• 1 year ago

The obvious solution for consumers --- don't buy HP printers.

api• 1 year ago

Been true for a long time.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

Why anyone bought HP printers in the last decade is beyond me. They aren't even good printers.

bognition• 1 year ago

Most people are not technically informed.

Most people are the parents of students going to school, teachers, trades people opening a store… they walk into BestBuy and they recognize the brand HP.

HP has massive marketing budgets and gets to package and discount their printers.

Most people think they’re getting an amazing printer at a great deal.

Nextgrid• 1 year ago

Because the average consumer has zero way to judge the quality of a printer or the likelihood of them doing something like this, either now or in the future (considering how well this turned out for HP, there's no reason why their competitors wouldn't try doing the same thing).

loloquwowndueo3• 1 year ago

My printer has worked really well and for whichever reason I haven’t been hit by any of those HP shenanigans. Maybe it’s because I haven't installed any HP drivers or software? Not needed on Linux or ios which is what I have. Works great, network-enabled and supports AirPrint so we can print from our phones (95% of our printing needs). Toner is expensive and I’ve only ever used HP toner; third-party toner requires cannibalizing the chip from original cartridges which I’m too lazy to do. Color Laserjet pro m255dw. I still probably wouldn’t buy another HP given all the user hostility :)

RockRobotRock• 1 year ago

Are their laserjet MFPs bad?

op00to7• 1 year ago

My Color Laserjet M478f-9f purchased two years ago is amazing. It required no configuration for phones or computers, scans and faxes prints, and is generally a high quality piece of kit. It is the best printer I’ve owned, and I have owned a few Brother laser printers and old school Laserjets. Hell, I owned one of the first NEC postscript laser printers back in the 90s.

It’s not cheap, but it just works.

I can’t defend the bullshit business practices, but the “medium” business class Laserjets are high quality. I wouldn’t touch anything SMB or residential with a 50 foot pole.

josefx• 1 year ago

Cheap up front cost and an unwillingness to estimate long term costs.

unyttigfjelltol3• 1 year ago

The problem is when competitors follow HP in this product-enshittification.

bayindirh• 1 year ago

I don't understand this broad take. HP makes two classes of printers for home and SOHO market. Low end and High End. There's no middle (aka the Sony model).

Lower end printers are really low quality. They have low monthly output thresholds, have lower quality ink, and have low end hardware which needs firmware on every boot, etc. They wear out and die. I worn one down, I know.

Their higher end printers are good. They use better inks. They cartridges are more reasonable (Ink Advantage Series), they work really well with anything from mac OS to Linux to your kitchen sink, because they talk PDF over well defined protocols, and they're reliable. They last more than a decade, and they don't wear down. My 4510 still goes strong, for example, and it works like the way I bought it the first day.

If you go even higher end, these models use full pigment ink sets for even more durable and color correct prints. Higher end home printers use pigment black and dye color sets.

Aren't there other good brands? Oh yes. Lexmark's lasers are good. Samsung used to make terrific laser printers with Xerox. People say Brother is also good. I didn't use them, I can't comment.

Lastly, I always say and will always say so. Not all ink is created equal, ink is not simple science. There's a specific reason why HP and Xerox have their own labs and patents on ink/toner formulation and delivery.

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

I expanded that to other products they have.

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

HP has proven it's a viable business and there's effective shields against lawsuits and consumer rage.

Will you build your own printer when the other brands all go the HP way ?

Brother's as a company had slim profits and it went down 10% in their last call. Their shareholders sure would want some more juice to the stock...

jqpabc1232• 1 year ago

Will you build your own printer when the other brands all go the HP way ?

I will avoid printing as much as possible --- which is about what I do now.

I have a Canon color laser for business use which accepts 3rd party toner. For photos and the occasional large print job, I outsource to Walmart or Office Depot.

Ink jet is totally out; essentially worthless for my needs and nothing but an exercise in frustration.

autoexec• 1 year ago

So it sounds like HP pays nothing to the people they hurt, they don't have to admit to doing anything wrong, and they get to continue to kill printers using forced updates as long as they aren't one of 21 specific models, and even for those 21 models they can still kill them using updates as long as they don't call the update a "Dynamic Security feature"?

This is exactly the kind of bullshit "win" that makes class-action lawsuits a total joke for anyone looking for justice, and why corporations continue to engage in user-hostile behavior. They stand to make a lot more money screwing over consumers than they have to fear from lawsuits.

ryao3• 1 year ago

I suspect that lawyers that fish for clients to represent in class action lawsuits intend to settle for a quick payout (to themselves) rather than actually represent the interests of those they represent.

If that is not the case, HP’s lawyers are fantastic.

brookst• 1 year ago

Yep. There are three parties here: HP, the people they hurt, and the class action lawyers.

It’s better for both HP and the class action lawyers to get a resolution that doesn’t cost HP too much, doesn’t bind HP’s future actions, and pays out nicely to the class action lawyers.

short_sells_poo• 1 year ago

I wonder if, after becoming successful, every company ends up turning into a law firm - ie dominated by lawyers and accountants. Instead of innovating, the only thing they know how to do is extract money from their product line in increasingly user hostile means.

navigate8310• 1 year ago

I was not aware of this fact before I watched Better Call Saul. Really opened my eyes how the complete system is optimized to screw anyone who seeks justice.

rs186• 1 year ago

Somewhat related:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/gloria-allred-sex-abuse-cele...

I just started to realize that law firms are businesses, and what they care about the most, above everything else, is making a profit. Are these lawyers warriors for women's rights? Maybe. But what I know for sure is that they want to make money more than they want to be warriors. Which explains why they can directly talk to the other party's lawyers and get you a decent settlement, instead of actually going through litigation, at all.

swat535• 1 year ago

Yes, actually, this monetization strategy is quite common, especially among smaller firms.

I know of a few here in Montreal, Canada, that will go after any big company (Mastercard, Facebook, Google, you name it) with random class action lawsuits. Then they settle as quickly as possible and cash out, usually with a payout in the $500K to $5M range.

To keep costs low, these firms often rely on interns, who are either unpaid or minimally paid and may only retain one or two actual lawyers.

It's become a whole cottage industry, kind of like patent trolling.

nmridul• 1 year ago

Could the future users (or the users who were not part of current suite) start another class action ?

edoceo2• 1 year ago

Sure. And they'd get what? Based on this outcome - nothing.

cratermoon• 1 year ago

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA need to go.

carra• 1 year ago

Impressive that they can get away with calling results like this "justice"...

ohgr3• 1 year ago

Assholes. Banning HP products from my org entirely now.

op00to7• 1 year ago

What a strange move. By all means you should be banning residential and small business equipment because that’s best practice for a number of reasons. But to ban their larger units is nonsensical. They are entirely different business models, run with different profit motives. Pick the best tool for your business, don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions.

edoceo2• 1 year ago

Unpredictable behavior of a device is a risk to the business.

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

There is a gigantic market of vendors choose from, and sometimes it’s easiest to just say “We’re going to avoid vendor X because they create risk for us.”

The above poster didn’t say he’s banning HPE, either. Just HP. I doubt anyone will really suffer from banning HP products.

We have a policy of only buying Brother, Epson, and Canon desktop/office printers with an exception for Lexmarks that are laser printers and have specific built in features. It means a lot less drama supporting them and getting supplies (even though we only use OEM supplies, or else get service and supplies through a click charge maintenance contract).

There’s still a fleet of ancient HP printers, including a workhorse 20-year-old LaserJet still printing 11x17 sheets.

doctaj• 1 year ago

Whether you like it or not, brand perception goes across business units, lol.

pbasista2• 1 year ago

They are entirely different business models, run with different profit motives.

Why should that be taken into account?

don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions

Why not?

If you only consider one aspect of a complex issue and make your decisions around that one aspect only, you might be missing out on the bigger picture.

Take Trump's "Dumbest Trade War in History" as the WSJ calls it. Why are e.g. Canadians not buying US goods and why are they cancelling vacations in the US?

Is it because they have better vacation options in Canada? I do not think so.

They are doing it because they take the bigger picture into account. They do not care about temporary discomfort it might bring them. They know that they need to send a strong message to Trump. And they are doing it with their own wallets.

chgs• 1 year ago

I’m surprised this was the straw

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

I'm disappointed there's no legislation yet that bans these practices wholesale (vendor lock-in, wasteful and overpriced ink cartridges, etc). There's a range of consumer products with scummy practices like this, like razors, printers, vapes/e-cigarrettes, etc. They generate huge amounts of e-waste.

cmiller12• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how legislating the razor and blade business model would help with the bit about e-waste. The basic idea is simply that the product is sold at a loss but the consumables (ink, blades, vape cartridges) are sold with high markup. My gut reaction is that making the consumables cheaper would increase the waste because people would be buying more of those consumables.

Aerroon• 1 year ago

How does this not fall under anti-competitive practices?

mg794613• 1 year ago

Translation from corpo-legalese: Big Corp avoids any responsibility, normal citizen the big loser.

FpUser• 1 year ago

I remember there was once great company that had supplied first rate scientific equipment, great printers and other things. Now we have a healthy racket business.

apricot• 1 year ago

Don't forget the best pocket calculators ever made.

ourmandave• 1 year ago

On the upside you can now decline firmware upgrades that try to prevent you from using 3rd party ink, aka: Dynamic Security.

But only on certain models.

Yeah, they totally got away with it.

… HP has agreed to continue making certain disclosures to users of Class Printers about Dynamic Security and data collection, and to continue to allow users of Class Printers to either agree to install or decline to install firmware updates that include Dynamic Security features. The disclosures that HP has agreed to continue making include the disclosure that HP collects printer cartridge data from Class Printers through the HP Smart App, and that HP’s Dynamic Security measures are designed to block cartridges using a non-HP chip, and may be delivered to printers through periodic firmware updates.

nerdponx• 1 year ago

This is a great example of how you can ignore politics all you want, but politics will not ignore you.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Has anyone read the decision? I'm curious what the actual legal justification was for not refunding customers for removing functionality. It seems so baffling I'm wondering if there was some technicality.

Also, why is the article misusing the term "bricked"? Bricked means a device doesn't work at all, and that it can't be fixed with a reset or further update -- not that it loses part of its functionality. These printers work as soon as you put HP ink in them, right? Their functionality has been limited, not bricked. (I'm not defending HP at all, just saying let's use the right words for the right things?)

IshKebab• 1 year ago

It was a settlement agreement, so there doesn't need to be any legal justification.

fn-mote• 1 year ago

The most interesting part of the short agreement is that there was exactly _one_ objection to the settlement. I guess most people don't care or there wasn't enough of an argument for them being compensated in this particular case.

Also, the complaints about lawyers enriching themselves seem exaggerated since their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.

johnnyanmac4• 1 year ago

Class actions aren't really known for their activism per se. A lot of setting it up is just calling or emailing people and getting their signature. I'm not too surprised the engagement is on the level of a Change.org petition.

their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.

paying themselves high 6 figures to just shake hands with oligarchs is way too much, imo. There was no justice here, they just wanted a cut of the heist.

buccal• 1 year ago

Speaking of HP firmware updates: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Video-Display-and-Tou...

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

This reminds me of a Dell laptop with a great touchpad, if you were able to install the Synaptics drivers from ... Lenovo!

The touchpad had support for edge-drag, but the Dell ones didn't expose it. And it's not that the Lenovo driver did something special. In fact, they did less work. Instead of creating a custom UI, they just exposed the Synaptics UI.

talkingtab• 1 year ago

This illustrates what is very, very wrong and a huge source of discontent in our corpocracy. Corporations are able to enact any law they want (DRM for example) because of United vs FEC. Then they can get away with anything in court because they can afford to pay millions in lawyer fees after extorting customers by bricking printers. If I did this, I would go to jail. Not to mention Purdue Pharma.

gruez4• 1 year ago

Then they can get away with anything in court because they can afford to pay millions in lawyer fees after extorting customers by bricking printers. If I did this, I would go to jail.

HP didn't even "brick" the printers. They only prevented them from using third party cartridges. That's not "brick" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's also unclear how that's something obviously illegal if it's done by an individual.

aziaziazi• 1 year ago

Alphabet pushes a "dynamic security update” to your phone tomorrow, blocking the third party apps. They didn’t brick your phone, you still can continue to download and use their apps!

unyttigfjelltol3• 1 year ago

Everywhere I look I see examples of the US justice system falling down on the job. It does reasonably well managing value-based conflict at the SCOTUS level, but God help you if you find yourself in need of civil justice at any lower level. Criminal justice isn't a lot better.

I feel like the root cause is a system built for the 1700s that actively rejects the principles of efficiency, effectiveness, right and wrong in favor of an it's-too-much-make-it-go-away bureacratic moral equivalency.

In no universe should HP be allowed to continue this practice. And yet, I also identify with class action plaintiffs stuck in a system that does not care one whit about providing even them reasonable access to justice after years of litigation.

dartos3• 1 year ago

I feel like the root cause system built for the 1700s

The root cause is that lawyers are expensive a corporations have more money than just about anyone else.

Couple that with a legislature which pretty much only passes laws in a reactionary manner and the fact that corporate lobbying has been a mainstay in US politics for the majority of the lifetime of the US and you get what we have now.

unyttigfjelltol3• 1 year ago

The problem is not that skill is expensive, it is that methods are inapt and archaic.

If I told you coding was unsatisfactory in a scenario where a human compiler was required to process each instruction, the correct response is not "developers" and "corporations". There is a right and wrong and our judges and lawyers demonstrate over and over they have not constructed a modern system for doing or finding it.

johnnyanmac4• 1 year ago

Rhetorical, but why do lawyers have to be expensive when they can be your only recluse against being abused by companies? That's part of the problem right there. I understand that law needs to be meticulous, but we're clearly doing something wrong if the system is disproportionately hitting wallets wrong.

The legislative stuff is unfortunate, but partially brought upon by the people. That one more falls to lack of understanding from the voterbase that put those people in. Someone like Nancy Pelosi or Matt Gaetz should not have been so easy to keep winning more terms if you spent 2 minutes researching them. But alas.

guelo• 1 year ago

It does reasonably well managing value-based conflict at the SCOTUS level

I could not disagree more, but anti-government extremists are happy that they have captured the supreme court for the rest of our lives.

HP avoids monetary damages over printers in class-action settlement

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