Lexmark and analog DRM

The Free Culture blog has an eminently readable rant about Lexmark winning

their recent case.

The case was about whether Lexmark could offer a “prebate” on some of its ink cartridges with the stipulation that ink cartridges bought under this prebate (that is, a discounted price) would carry a contractual obligation on the part of the customer to mail back the empty cartridges to Lexmark — and not reuse them by using an ink-syringe kit to refill them or sending them to a company that refills cartridges for you (such companies being the ones represented by ACRA, a trade association for such things).

There’s no actual contract, of course. The reason companies don’t make you do this random crap most of the time is because, before, it would require railroading you into signing something, which most customers won’t do.

But now apparently by generalizing from the way shrinkwrap licenses or “Click to Accept” EULAs on software work, hardware is falling under similar rules. The Court has ruled that if a box reads “Single Use Only”, then buying the product and opening the box constitutes a contract of sale that says you will only use the product once and not find some third-party way to reuse it...

I mean, come on — we’re not talking about electronically stored data here anymore, not about information, not about complex technology. We’re talking about your right to buy a container filled with fluid, use up the fluid and fill it up again with fluid. What’s next, Evian refusing to allow you to fill their containers with non-Evian water? When you can’t own something as mundane as an ink cartridge — when a simple physical object that fulfills a simple physical function is licensed rather than being sold the old-fashioned way, when companies absolutely refuse to allow us to have the right of resale and reuse and creative retooling that we’re used to with actual physical objects that we actually physically buy and take home to our houses to use –

Well, damn. This fight’s just gotten a lot bigger than cyberspace. This is now a meatspace fight. This fight is now about the right to own anything.