"Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink"

The question as always is: Do you own what you buy or don't you?

From The Register:
World crosses fingers

One man’s effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.
Florida man John Parziale was furious when he discovered in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party vendors – cartridges he had already bought and installed.

That month, HP emitted a remote firmware update, without alerting users, that changed the communication protocol between a printer’s chipset and the electronics in its inkjet cartridges so that only HP-branded kit was accepted. The result was that Parziale's printer would no longer work with his third-party ink. He saw a series of error messages that said he needed to replace empty cartridges and that there was a “cartridge problem.”

Parziale sued the IT titan in its home state of California, arguing he would never have bought the HP printers if he knew they would only work with HP-branded ink cartridges. At the time, the cartridges he bought to go with the machine did in fact work and were printing merrily right up to the point the DRM-style update was sent.

HP asks customers to “please use genuine HP ink cartridges for best results,” though Parziale decided he would forego the “best results” to save money. He bought nine cartridges, none of which work any longer.

It’s a situation that millions of people worldwide can sympathize with: a full set of inkjet cartridges often cost over $100, making the ink more expensive per drop than vintage champagne, whereas refilled or third-party cartridges often cost a third of that – and that's a significant saving.

But feeling ripped off and beating a tech giant in court are two different things, as Parziale found out this month [PDF] when federal district judge Edward Davila threw out most of his claims against HP. Four of five allegations he had made were under America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), accusing HP of abusing its “authorized access” to his devices. These were rejected because, the judge noted, he had granted HP remote access to his printer....MUCH MORE

 For some reason bringing to mind the Bill Gates' coronavirus vaccine joke making the rounds earlier in the month:
"Sure, they say it will be a one-shot deal but then come the updates".