The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business.
No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.
I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund.
We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business.
Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines."
Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions.
Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.
> Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers
No they don't, they get passed on to shareholders. The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that.
If the company could get away with paying workers less or decreasing its workforce in order to boost profitability, it already would have. It's not waiting for a fine to justify doing so.
> No they don't, they get passed on to shareholders. The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that.
Ehh, if they have to, but execs are going to do their very best not to pass on costs to shareholders.
Even if shareholders foot the bill, why would that be a desirable outcome? Are you arguing that we have to fine corporations instead of holding the decision makers responsible? What do you have against people taking responsibility for their own actions?
> If the company could get away with paying workers less or decreasing its workforce in order to boost profitability, it already would have. It's not waiting for a fine to justify doing so.
But they couldn't pay workers less or decrease workforce, because they needed those workers to execute the unethical business plan. They weren't waiting for a fine to cut workers, they were waiting for the cash cow to stop producing milk to cut workers who were necessary to keep the cash cow going.
> but execs are going to do their very best not to pass on costs to shareholders.
But it's not up to execs, execs don't control the share price, no matter how much they wish they could. The market does. The market sees the fine, it adjusts the market cap, done.
> Even if shareholders foot the bill, why would that be a desirable outcome?
Because shareholders elected the board. That's the entire foundation of joint-stock corporations, that shareholders get the rewards but also suffer the losses.
Why would you assume the market efficiently adjusts for things like fines? Have you seen the stock market lately? There is at best a loose correlation between business reality and stock prices.
Why would there be a 1 to 1 relationship between the price of stocks and reality, when most investing is blind passive investing that ignores reality by design?
It doesn't really matter that much if he thinks or knows a stock is under or over valued if he also expects that bad valuation to be maintained for any significant length of time.
Stock prices are not rational and there is no consistent way to calculate the value of a company. An expensive media campaign that accomplishes nothing related to their business offerings and may even lose the company significant amounts of money can end up raising a stock price. And you also don't have unlimited time to try and wait out stocks which also have so many other random factors being thrown in over the years.
> But it's not up to execs, execs don't control the share price, no matter how much they wish they could. The market does. The market sees the fine, it adjusts the market cap, done.
Not directly, but surely I don't need to explain to you what effect cutting costs typically has on share price?
> Because shareholders elected the board. That's the entire foundation of joint-stock corporations, that shareholders get the rewards but also suffer the losses.
Sorry, I'm missing the part of this where you answered the question. Why is this a desirable outcome? What is the problem with holding human beings responsible for their own actions?
I don't give a fuck about the foundation of joint-stock corporations. If the foundations of joint-stock corporations result in sociopaths profiting off harming people with no consequences, the foundations of joint-stock corporations need to change or be discarded completely.
> surely I don't need to explain to you what effect laying off a bunch of workers might have on share price?
Surely you do, because sometimes the stock goes up if the workers weren't needed in the first place, sometimes it goes down because it shows the company is flailing, and sometimes it does nothing because it's business as usual.
You're operating under an illusion that execs have control over how the market will respond.
> Sorry, I'm missing the part of this where you answered the question.
And I'm missing the part where anything I wrote gave you the excuse to be rude. Please be civil, this is HN.
I had to double check and you were not responding to me, but yes, it was in fact you who was passive aggressive rude and underhanded with your snide “surely I don’t have to”, conceited, pretentious, snarky response. If you’re going to accuse others of being rude, you should start. This is not reddit. Are you lost? Pretentious pomp should best be left at the door anywhere outside of the reddit quarantine of awful humans.
What normal people are concerned about: "Corporations are destroying people's lives for the profit of a few."
What Hacker News is concerned about: "Someone was slightly snarky in an internet post."
I didn't accuse anyone of being rude. I don't care if you're rude to me. This whole "rudeness" thing is just a transparent way of distracting from the question:
Why can't we hold executives personally, financially or criminally responsible when they make decisions that harm other people?
Because "make decisions that harm people" is vague, and criminal codes should be explicit and clear? Who the fuck would want to do business if someone can arbitrarily claim they broke some vague law that most surely would not get applied fairly and equally? It's a terrible idea.
> Because "make decisions that harm people" is vague, and criminal codes should be explicit and clear?
Nobody was proposing that "make decisions that harm people" should be the wording of the criminal code. Obviously nobody's drafting legal language to be passed as law on Hacker News.
We're discussing, at a high level, the concept of holding people responsible for their actions. If a concrete example would help you, consider the Ford Pinto case, where people committed murder (a law that's already on the books, in clear language) and didn't go to jail for it because it was behind the veil of a corporation.
> Who the fuck would want to do business if someone can arbitrarily claim they broke some vague law that most surely would not get applied fairly and equally?
Oh no, what will we do without sociopaths in charge of the economy? Who will want money if they can't harm other people to get it?
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like if people decide not to go into business because their business doesn't work without harming people, that's a good thing?
If you're worried about people being treated unfairly, why are you completely ignoring everything that's being said about businesses harming workers and customers? Why are you only worried that the rich and powerful might be treated unfairly, despite a complete lack of historical precedent for that happening?
Sure, of a law is on the books, then hold people responsible. But we are talking about 3rd party printer ink here. Why is criminality and jail even being mentioned at all?
"Destruction of property" is a law on the books in some form in pretty much every jurisdiction[1].
When you sell a printer to someone, it's no longer your property, it's their property, and if you destroy it, that's destruction of property.
Arguably there's also some cyber crimes involved here as well.
If I hacked into your printer and bricked it, I'd go to jail, no question. Why is HP above the law in your mind, when they did it on a much larger scale?
that's simply how civile law, the most popular legal system in the World, works: the trial establishes if the company harmed people and decides if the decision makers are to be punished or not.
Nothing hard about it.
OTOH the way corporate law is applied today is neither fair or applied equally and it mostly harms people and benefit corporations, I don't see a problem if we reverse the outcome
less corporations that operate on higher ethical standards sounds like a win-win to me
The person answered your question implicitly, you just didn't understand it.
Not only that, you're completely wrong in the earlier exchange about laying off workers. I think you need to understand business better to see that it doesn't work out the way you think it does. Shouting "fuck" on HN with a wrong take doesn't make you right.
If you have any problems with my understanding of business, feel free to say what they are, but so far you've just claimed that I'm wrong without any reason, and objected to my choice of words.
Pretty much. Yesterday I wanted to grab some Fanta for in the park.
A 0.33L can would’ve been too little, but a 1L bottle too much, and a 1.5L bottle far too much. 0.50L was the perfect size.
The pricing?
0.33L - €0.66 (€2.00 per L)
0.50L - €1.48 (€2.96 per L)
1.00L - €1.93 (€1.93 per L)
1.50L - €2.09 (€1.39 per L)
Initially this made me angry, as it is very clear they figured out that the 0.5L bottle is the most convenient size, and put a huge premium on that, as people that need that size (for say, in a backpack) will pay it for lack of alternative. In other words, the price the market will bear.
But then I reminded myself, modern companies will always try to give you the least amount of value for the highest price the market will bear.
This is also why you should never feel bad if you can get one over on a company. Pricing error that gets you expensive shoes for €1? Screw ‘em. Contractual obligation that effectively gives you lifetime for €1? Screw ‘em. They’ll do the same to you whenever they can.
I wish businesses believed in being synergistic with their customers and nurturing loyalty, but alas. Not the times we live in.
Pretty much everyone: Businesses should operate in a free market. Let the market decide! Things shouldn't be regulated by the government if they don't absolutely need to be.
Also pretty much everyone: Wait, the decisions businesses make that affect me absolutely suck!
> This is also why you should never feel bad if you can get one over on a company. Pricing error that gets you expensive shoes for €1? Screw ‘em. Contractual obligation that effectively gives you lifetime for €1? Screw ‘em. They’ll do the same to you whenever they can
I recently saw a £700 bicycle carbon fork on sale for £70, new, the shop just forgot a zero. I didnt buy it out of feeling bad :(
I'm guessing a component like that was being sold by a local bike shop or a small chain, not an inhuman multinational corporation. I hope you told somebody about the error rather than just leaving it for the next person to buy.
If a company like Amazon mispriced something that way, I'd gladly buy it.
In the UK at least they can refuse to sell at that price if it is an error. A displayed price is not a contract but an invitation to tender. It only becomes different legally if the low price was a deliberate bait-and-switch thing or similar.
Supply and demand presumes that I would have wanted something else than Fanta - since I (and presumably others) did not, Fanta had market power :).
As an aside, the example would be even more dramatic with non-sugar, where the 0.5L bottle is €1.88, but the 1L bottle is €1.95, due to both the price premium of ‘convenient size’ and ‘healthy alternative’ being stacked.
> Supply and demand presumes that I would have wanted something else than Fanta
That's not how S&D works. S&D is in-play even if Fanta had a monopoly. Even if the prices were set by the government. Governments have tried every scheme imaginable to repeal the law of S&D, but they never work.
BTW, I gave up all soda about 15 years ago. It took about a year to finally stop craving it. I no longer have any desire for it.
Besides the health issues, it has saved me a ton of money in aggregate.
> A firm with market power chooses a point on the demand curve that it faces. It sets a price as a markup over marginal cost and then produces enough to meet demand at that price. A firm with market power does not take the price as given and then determine a quantity to supply. In fact—strictly speaking—there is no such thing as a supply curve when a firm has market power.
Soda for me is a guilty pleasure, like a good barbecue, or a bottle of red wine. But I appreciate the heads-up!
> The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that.
Purely in theory in a vacuum, yes. In practice, you'll have a very hard time finding examples where that actually happened. At best, the stock takes a momentary dip and next ~week it's back to where it was.
Well in reality it's a gradual decrease over time as the fine moves from hypothetical low-probability to actually happening. By the time the fine happens it's often already been "priced in".
But so what if the stock is back up the following week? More things happened over the following week. You're missing the fact that it would have been up even higher if it weren't for the fine. (Alternatively, the stock also might go down even further the following week. But similarly, it wouldn't have gone down as much if not for the fine.)
This is not theory, this is how stocks actually work in the aggregate. If they didn't, you'd be able to make a lot of easy money off the stock market otherwise.
In the parlance of an old internet meme, "why not both"?
Also, they _are_ cutting employees. There have been a lot of layoffs recently, and some of them have explicitly stated it'd not because they can't afford those employees.
Yes HP is laying off employees just like pretty much every other large tech company right now. Which shows you it has nothing to do with fines, and rather everything to do with industry-wide overexpansion during COVID and high interest rates now.
I don’t know how to deal with people who talk about the economy in terms of a perfect competition free market where all participants have full knowledge and are all equal in terms of power. If a physicist talked in terms of zero friction or spherical cows, we would laugh them off and never listen to them again. And yet people continue to talk about the economy with these assumptions that make zero friction and spherical cows look like practical applied physics.
I don't know where the requirement of full knowledge became part of the definition of a free market.
Because it isn't true.
Another word for lack of knowledge is "risk".
The amount of risk is factored into the price of everything you buy and sell. For example, a name brand item sells for a higher price than a generic item because the name brand carries with it less risk for the buyer.
They do not get "passed on to the workers." That's not how that works - not how any of that works.
A business needs a certain number of workers for a certain output. Those workers need to be paid a market amount for their skillset, for the amount of output. If the company does not have the funds to pay them - due to fines or competition or any other reason, the company lays off workers and reduces output and revenue - giving those sales to competitors, or goes out of business.
Yes, if the solution to "we broke printers" is to refund every single affected sale, the company will lay off workers, reduce output, and close down if that happens enough. Their competition will increase output to fill the unmet demand, and hire workers.
That literally is the point of the fine, and is a good thing, not a bad thing.
>Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines."
This is like "if you raise the minimum wage we'll only have to lay people off" which is equally self serving and utterly, completely wrong.
Employees dont pay. Shareholders pay. If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so.
> If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so.
But they couldn't pay workers less or decrease workforce, because they needed those workers to execute the unethical business plan. They weren't waiting for a fine to cut workers, they were waiting for the cash cow to stop producing milk to cut workers who were necessary to keep the cash cow going.
If you can run a successful business by selling $100 objects that cost $20 each to make and result in an average of $90 of fines per sale, and make it up by mistreating your workers, I applaud you.
But if they could mistreat their workers they would so anyway independent of the object in question. $100 sale - $20 costs - $90 fine = -$10 per unit. Nobody's going to do that unless having that in people's hands makes them money somehow. (We have seen that with game systems--sell at a loss and make it up on the games.)
The issue is the fine is paid by the company and not the people who actually did the crime. As a result, the CEO, the board and the other players will all get big fat bonuses and the company will take a hit. When the company takes a hit one thing happens the people at the bottom of the chain get fired, not the decision makers, not the people who pushed this policy but some fucking engineer that just had his first kid and thought being and engineer at HP was a great job. The system is setup so that people who screw up never pay but the people who have nothing to do with the problem always pay the bill. If the idiots at the top actually had some accountability I think we'd see a lot different choices being made, but that is just a pipe dream in the world we live in.
The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money.
A lot of corporate bad behavior would be fairly easy to stop by making it a cost rather than a benefit. Things like an improper denial, you owe 2x the amount. Late payment, you owe say +20% plus a high interest rate on the delay. Fairly routine things you have a clock that's tolled while the other party is actually responding to requests for information, not transit time. (From when they receive it to when they respond. Thus they'll do everything electronic unless original signatures are required.) Clock runs out, that's considered an approval.
The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money.
True, but only when the cost is greater than the profit from doing whatever it is you don't want the business to do. From example, if paying a bill late comes with a 20% premium, but not paying it increases profit by 21%, then it's better to pay late.
In the system of modern business it's really hard to see why things happen, so simple rules very rarely work. People are hugely creative when it comes to dreaming up ways around them.
I used to think this as well but then I learned of something called a principal-agent problem. I am talking in general, so while fines might work in this exact case, they won’t work in general. The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag.
I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority.
I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.
> The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag.
Did these people continue to maintain the processes and rules enacted by their predecessors? If so they aren't "left holding the bag", they are the remaining beneficiaries of the system. If you are one of the few who have the power to stop something but you don't because you benefit from the status quo, you aren't a victim. You are the perpetrator.
> If you are one of the few who have the power to stop something but you don't because you benefit from the status quo, you aren't a victim. You are the perpetrator.
I know you said few and I am moving goal posts here a little but it isn’t always the “big guys” who suffer either.
Will you volunteer to tell the retiring teacher or firefighter that they will have to starve because you’d rather punish the ultimate perpetrators rather than hold the actually guilty (the then CEO and the board) accountable to the law?
> Will you volunteer to tell the retiring teacher or firefighter that they will have to starve because you’d rather punish the ultimate perpetrators rather than hold the actually guilty (the then CEO and the board) accountable to the law?
I would. And firefighters and teachers are used to getting fucked by everybody anyway. (mom is a teacher, and have several friends who are firefighters).
But in reality, big union funds, invest only a little bit in any one company, so no, some big company loosing some of it market cap, would make little difference to each individual teacher and firefighter.
Maybe visible, but as someone who works in EU, behind the screen there is a lot more emphasis on either not collecting data, or being more strict with what you collect and how you collect it.
PII data identifying, documenting it, and periodic review's of that is becoming standard procedure.
I remember when GDPR was announced, where for most projects, there was not anyone who could tell you for any given project, what all data is being collected and stored where.
So GDPR did have positive* effect at least with the part of the market I am familiar with.
The fine would have to be akin to a corporate death penalty, so that the CEO would never work again. Ideally, it would also pierce the veil of limited liability, so they’d be stuck in court for the next few decades.
For this case, computing back:
94M printers are sold per year.
HP’s market cap is $29 billion.
So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)
Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant.
After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity.
As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)
Nah. I wouldn't fine them for the printers. I would fine them the retail cost of all ink sold while the block is in place, paid to the consumers who bought it. (Basically a 100% rebate, simply submit your receipt. Make that the standard penalty for DRM-locking supplies.)
“So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)”
Did I read this correct? Do consumer printers cost over $10k where you live?
That's pretty reasonable. I was thinking full refund for price paid, plus sending someone to dispose of it properly. It's less to me about punishing them, and more about being able to retroactively vote with my wallet.
Workers, yes, but mainly consumers. A million dollar fine, if you sell 500,000,000 cartridges (just a guess, but in 2012 I searched and saw they sold 315 million worldwide) means they would have to charge .2 cents per cartridge to pay for the fine. ''
I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments.
Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.
But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.
And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.
> Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.
Fines work great as long as they're sufficient enough to disincentivize the relevant behavior! If you made it so that any printer that you disabled cost more to you than one left enabled, then the business would absolutely change course, no huge single-time fine required.
> But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.
Agreed, but I think that effect would be extremely detrimental to society (capital punishment for misbehavior also has a big impact, and is pretty clearly not the kind of thing we'd want.)
If there is currently a criminal law that the CEO is breaking, then by all means they should be tried. If we're just trying to end business practices we don't like, though, regulation and monetary disincentives are the way to do that.
Making an example of someone should only be done insofar as they've broken the rules. If we don't like the way they're acting while following the rules, the rules are the things we should change.
I think you're fundamentally incorrect that a more consistent fine structure could fix the problems we have now.
The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).
What property was destroyed? The HP printer still works with genuine ink cartridges and the third party ink cartridge will work for printers that don't require genuine HP ink.
Kind of a weird world we live in where intellectual property gives someone else legal power over what we may do with our own devices, but conversely our ability to do things with our devices that is within our legal right is not considered our property.
That's not what's happening here. HP doesn't have power over what you can do to your printer. If you want to modify your printer so that it allows for ungenuine ink to be used you are free to do so.
HP modified other peoples' printers without genuine[0] consent to make the printers less valuable. It should probably be illegal for them to do that.
I imagine there isn't an existing criminal law covering that and I'm not in favor of interpreting criminal laws creatively to expand their scope, however I could be convinced to support making a new criminal law to cover this kind of behavior.
[0] No doubt, they have some fine print in a clickwrap agreement giving themselves permission.
I'm not sure that will work. The intention here is to move the needle on what's acceptable.
If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care.
A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.
Doesn't work in cases like this because most people aren't going to do a lot of research on a technical buy - they're intimidated by the task so they go with whatever the salesperson tells them. And the salespeople are paid to tell them whatever brings in the most money.
This is a surprisingly naive thing to say in the era of a CEO having a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder-value over the short-term / their tenure (whichever is shorter)
Can you give an example of a time when a CEO or board of directors lost a suit for taking the morally upright option instead of trying to maximize share value? I often hear people talking about this, but it's always generalities rather than specific occurrences.
This is a myth that refuses to go away. A business can go in whatever direction it chooses, even if it hurts shareholders, employees, or other stakeholders by doing so. Anything short of directly looting the company coffers by directors is fine in a legal sense. Shareholders can just sell if they lose faith in leadership, or put pressure on the board.
That's not right either, the board and officers have fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interest and to use reasonable business judgment. Less strict than maximizing profit, but more strict than anything-legal-goes.
How the heck would you create such a law with no unintended consequences? “If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.” So if a low-wage worker goes mad and kills his coworker the CEO should be charged with murder? What if his salary got cut and it was a customer? Where do you draw the line?
What’s needed is regulation and fines, so that it’s not the “cost of doing business” and they lose money (the one thing that dictates their decisions) from this stunt. If there was actually a decent competitor, they could simply be forced to fully refund impacted customers who decide to switch, but HP has basically a monopoly on printers. This is a sign they need to be broken up or put under strict regulation like utilities.
That would a) fully repay affected customers, b) stop the practice for future customers, and c) discourage other companies from this practice. IMO 3 goals, and the only 3 reasons, we have a justice system and punishments in the first place. This isn’t an action which caused permanent, life-altering harm. This is an action which can be 110% undone (via extra fines), so no further punishment is necessary.
And yes, I know petty thieves and druggies serve jail time for causing much lesser problems. That’s wrong too. “2 wrongs don’t make a right”
Step one would probably be making this practice illegal in the first place, which, as far as I can tell, it isn't. Putting the cart before the horse to worry about who's liable for doing something legal.
Not my practice area, and I don't know all the facts. But if they sold printers and later disable those printers, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to treat that as a fraud or swindle in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1341, or as an unfair or deceptive trade practice under 15 U.S.C. § 45.
If this were anything other than tech - if, say, IKEA sold you a bed frame that disintegrated the moment you used a non-IKEA mattress or comforter - I don't think the government would be so blasé about it.
(EDIT: Perhaps less of a case if the printer merely won't work with those cartridges rather than actually being disabled.)
At the end of the day I'm not sure that a lock that prevents you from using non-authorized equipment/refills/whatever is very different from established practice. If they bricked the printer altogether sure, that'd be a new frontier, and it seems like many commenters have erroneously understood that to be the story, but that's not what's going on.
Make them pay the fines personally. They take credit and make big money when employees do the right thing, so let's make it a two way street. Once their net worth gets wiped, maybe they will get the message.
It's legal to buy insurance covering civil liability for almost anything other than criminal acts. The price and availability of such insurance tends to vary in proportion to the risk, and policies often have specific exclusions to discourage risky behaviors. Directors and officers insurance is very common.
If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this
In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first.
The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.
Knowing HP's shitty policies some years ago I bought an HP color laser printer off eBay that was already then several years old. It was a model I understood to be able to work with cheap 3rd party ink cartridges.
I feel like these older, pre-dynamic security printers are going to be gold. Hang on to your babies, keep them safe, keep them running.
> The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour
please name a situation in the past 50 years where a conpany went under or lost at least 10% of their revenue from'peiple not accepting' this behaviour
> Before US Airways was purchased by America West in 2005, the airline slashed its customer service budget, and outsourced many of those functions. As a result, the company mishandled or failed to address numerous complaints, angering customers to the point that no amount of cost-cutting could make up for the fact that passengers didn't want to do business with with the airline, eventually forcing it to file bankruptcy.
While brick-and-mortar stores have faced a lot of headwinds, and mismanagement is not always at the expense of the consumer, various failures have ultimately been attributed to consumers just not accepting it anymore.
> A poor customer experience has its consequences. Across all industries, an average of 45% of consumers cut their spending with companies after having a bad experience. The Fast Food industry is more likely than average to either see consumers decrease spending (42%) or completely stop spending (25%).
> In pushing for a better return on investment that never materialized, Mr. Lampert lost sight of the most important player in retail: The customer.
> “When someone pulls up to a Kmart or Sears they don’t see ROI,” Mr. Cohen said. “They see light bulbs that are burnt out, potholes in the parking lot and a front door that looks like it was hit with a sledge hammer.”
Sure, any one thing rarely kills a company or even product line unless it's a true showstopper. But at least in part, this is because when customers let a company know that they aren't happy, the company listens.
While I generally agree, there's something more immediate. All of us having this view can refuse to ever buy or even use HP products, and explain to anyone and everyone at every opportunity exactly why this is.
Boycotts can be immensely powerful, and strike fear into the hearts of those who would exploit us.
Personally, I will never buy an HP product again. Absolute, permanent blacklist.
It's simply way too disgusting to me that they would even consider doing this, let alone actually carry it out.
What must they think of their customers? It's unforgivable.
How about switching to laser printers from brands that do not play these shenanigans? As far as I know, the only one that does not do it is Canon, which has the same security chips, but lets you opt into disabling third party cartridge support.
Also, of interest, is that HP and Canon printers can use the same toner cartridges:
For the most part, HP does not make its own printers anymore and just sells rebadged printers running their own firmware. It would not surprise me if the ink for HP Smart Tank printers is identical to the ink for Canon Mega Tank printers.
They reportedly are selling some models using technology that they obtained from Samsung, but aside from that, very little of what they sell they actually make. They are basically a middle man.
AFIAK Brother doesn't play that game. At this point the only printer I have that isn't Brother is an industrial label printer that I need for work--and it's supplies (labels and thermal ribbon) have no electrical contacts at all.
There've been some few recently in the public backlash to the "woke" movement. It's been so effective particularly regarding financials a rallying meme emerged:
"Go woke, go broke!"
Little of this reaches mainstream outlets, as embarrassing oneself's somewhat untenable for institutions in speedy declines, partly, from relatedly-shortsighted population-alienators.
Let's apply the same logic to people then. "John scammed his neighbour of his life savings, we don't need to lock him up because lots of people will refuse to associate with him or supply him with goods and services."
Making loss of business or minor fines the only mechanism for correcting behaviour, means that the leaders can view antisocial and unethical behaviour as a cost benefit tradeoff. And the lack of personal accountability means the company leadership has very limited downside, even if they completely screw up.
Crimes of moral turpitude (e.g. fraud), and even some lesser civil acts, are sometimes punished by denying the convicted person the right to have an executive job for a period of years.
This seems to be the top vote comment here, demanding jail time for CEOs for printers not working.
Meanwhile, the top comment on an article painstakingly detailing how a company is using every dirty trick in the book to get mentally incapable or distressed, etc people to sell homes to them at far below market value has a top comment basically saying “well, they signed a contract”.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this affects most HNers, so it’s the worst thing in the world, whereas that doesn’t, so people it does affect are just suckers.
The argument isn't. "This is illegal so the CEO should be jailed". Instead the argument is "This should be made illegal so the threat of jail ensures CEOs keep this from happening."
Worth noting that we make things illegal when we feel they should be illegal, and for no other reason. In a democracy the feeling turns to a vote which turns to legislation. In this case, we would pass a law making executives personally criminally liable for anti-competative, anti-consumer behavior like this. I do not think it would run afoul of the Constitution, either.
I think we should pass the law and try it out, see how it feels.
Maybe none. Everything was done above board, capitalism (growing capital as a core value) worked as intended.
It was immoral and unethical but those are lesser concerns than maximising return on capital invested. Possibly, no law was clearly broken.
We need to outsource some of our lawmaking to ethics boards/commissions if we want to keep capitalism. Otherwise, every other company is now looking to defraud its customers and that’s the only way an endless desire for capital growth (exponential growth expectations from investors) goes.
But how about some sort of environmental levy on any device prematurely 'bricked', or disposed of before reaching a certain lifespan.
Including those bricked by server shutdowns, or by the inevitable failure of non-replaceable batteries. Perhaps even those designed to be somewhat fragile but not economically repairable - thinking of all the phones and tablets discarded due to cracked screens.
Isn’t an environmental levy just a fine? Maybe prison is excessive but there needs to be a way to punish bad actors personally on an individual level. It’s clear that current corporate level fines aren’t effective.
I don’t follow the models closely as I don’t really care.
For HP, basically you look at $350-500 devices as the entry point. Some of the commercial inkjet and all of the midrange laser printers don’t have these problems.
Brother and Epson definitely offer devices with no ink controls. Canon used to, not sure about today. Epson sells a fixed print head printer with tanks of ink.
HPs strategy is a subscription model for casual users. It’s probably the best value for most people, who don’t really care about print and want minimal viable capabilities. If it’s not for you, it’s a declining, although still competitive market.
As someone here came up with, as punishment instead of fines the government should be granted X percentage non-dilutable ownership of the company. Mess up once, you now have to deal with the government owning 5% or more. This punishes the shareholders/owners in a real way that fines don't. If the business continues to mess up the government would acquires more ownership until it becomes majority owner and can completely clean house. The Government can sell their ownership after X years or if once in majority control replaces X people in management. Funds from sales could not be used for general budget purposes (to prevent the government from instituting taking as policy) but instead social goods projects (provide waterworks improvement grants, provide scholarships, etc).
The government takes money for public education from me and doesn't let me swap cartridges (i.e., spend that money on a less crappy school that it doesn't run). So not looking forward to your plan.
I like the sentiment a lot but curious what law this is against that has prison time as a consequence? I can’t think of any, but if there are none, we should pass laws that allow this to put these people on notice and then aggressively prosecute.
Difficulty: it’s a wobbler, and is only a misdemeanor unless it’s > $400 worth of damage. Good luck proving that in this situation.
Maybe if they wrote in an email their evil plan to set the printers on fire so their customers would buy new ones, and it caught some people’s houses on fire.
Civil claims or a class action are an entirely different matter of course.
It’s frustrating to see people argue this. Not because it’s wrong, but besides basically anything that makes it not worth doing will work. The debate to be had is over what is to be done to put policies that discourage this activity in place. Bikeshedding what to do basically just passifies the urge to debate the actually important thing.
It's at times like this that I'm reminded of what Howard Scott said: "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who hasn't sufficient capital to form a corporation."
Funny how access to enough money to form a corporation, does in certain circumstances tend to clothe your subsequent actions in virtue...
Punishment should fit the crime. We don't over-punish people to force them to think differently, that has always led to dark periods in history.
There are plenty of low-friction ways consumers could be reimbursed plus the cost of lost time or energy spent on a now 'broken' printer if we wanted to solve this in a fair way.
But in America people are overpunished. I often read titles like "he faces up to 100 years in a prison" when in reality it is just a poor Russian guy who didn't murder or hurt anyone, just collected credit card numbers and sold it to other guys. 100 years just for stealing a bit of money? That's draconian laws.
> when in reality it is just a poor Russian guy who didn't murder or hurt anyone, just collected credit card numbers and sold it to other guys. 100 years just for stealing a bit of money? That's draconian laws.
Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it? And regional managers as well? And the stores that sell the printers too?
No, prison makes zero sense. When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial. And punitive remedies exist precisely to make sure the "cost of doing business" makes it no longer profitable.
And if that's not happening, then that's the fault of the legislators and voters. This is why we need to vote people into office who ensure that consumer protection laws remain strong.
It's not as if corporate actors are passive non-participants in the political process, abstaining from lobbying or campaign financing. It's much more economical for corporation to influence legislation/regulation than for voters to build a coalition and then try to leverage it to significantly alter the status quo. Ignoring this reality makes idealistic arguments like yours seem naive at best.
No, there's nothing naive about it at all. I'm not making a specific political endorsement here, but if voters elect candidates like e.g. Elizabeth Warren to Congress then you get much stronger consumer protections, corporate lobbying be damned.
I'm not saying corporate lobbying has zero influence (that would be naive), but if the electorate chooses to care about something, it trumps corporations. This is actually a major finding of academic research on corporate influence and lobbying in politics -- it's mostly effective specifically in areas where voters aren't paying attention and don't care.
The idea that there’s cornucopias of choice in day to day life for 99% of Americans is absurd
You have to go to extraordinary and extreme measures to break out of the basic choices that you are offered for which the profits all go to the same group of people
There is basically Zero diversity in the corporate landscape for either consumers or workers.
Maybe even if that’s the trend, let’s choose not all live in a pvp hellscape owned by about 10,000 people that enjoy infinite luxury, another 8 million who insulate them by showing that “You too can be a class striver and abandon the working class” and the rest of the 8Billion people slowly killing each other for the scraps left behind as everyone tries to claw their way into the 1% and beyond.
> You have to go to extraordinary and extreme measures to break out of the basic choices that you are offered for which the profits all go to the same group of people
In this case we are talking about printers. There are literally dozens of printer makers.
And Berkshire Hathaway has an outsize position in the largest of them, HP.
What else does BRK own, and thus influence via board and activist shareholder position that is in your home.
This is the point. You can have a million “options” but if they all only benefit a handful of owners then no matter how you “vote” with your dollars it still makes the same people the same money.
Again, you have to go to extremes to find a printer that is manufactured by a union or employee owned cooperative if there even are any.
For what it is worth, HP barely still designs printers. Most of them are just rebadged Canons. They have a small number of models that are based on Samsung models that they got from their acquisition and an even smaller number of printers they actually made themselves. For the most part, when you buy a HP, you are buying a Canon printer with HP's label on it and HP firmware. HP is really just a middle man, and I am not sure why people keep buying their printers given that middlemen should be avoided.
Some of their software started to get pushy, and their toner cartridges started to ‘be empty’ too early - with some new printers also having ‘trial’ toners with almost no toner in them.
Canon does not do this. They also let you opt into the feature that blocks third party cartridges. You read that right. The feature is opt-in.
Coincidentally, many HP and Canon laser printers use slight variations of the same toner cartridges such that third parties can support both printers with the same cartridges:
I am curious if this is also true for the inkjet printers, but finding out would probably involve buying every cartridge and comparing. I cannot justify that expense to sate my curiosity.
At least with my HL-1112 (bottom-barrel model in 2015) and MFC-L2700DW (entry level all-in-one with decent, albeit aftermarket, multiplatform support) it's trivial to manually reset the levels once you know the button sequence - don't even need a retail cartridge with the mechanical "unused toner" spinner!
That said... yeah, who knows what they're up to, 5 years later?
I wonder if their lawyers will argue that putting that they do this in their documentation and advertising materials precludes any possibility of fraud. You cannot view HP’s printer descriptions without having this mentioned in them.
> Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it?
Or just curtail every holder's shares by a fixed percentage, if/when a publicly-owned company is found to have engaged in anti-competitive behavior. If the incentive of maximizing shareholder value is no longer aligned with the interests of society, maybe that's how to fix it.
> CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this
This is the sort of overreaction that kills reasonable responses, like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled, trebled, plus pay a big fine to a regulator and also enter into a consent decree. Hit them with a market cap decimating fine. Then let the Board eat its own.
> like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled
won't happen, because most of the customers live in different countries with different law systems
> hit them with a market cap decimating fine
won't happen, because most of the costs is beared by people in foreign countries who don't matter to US courts, and most of the profits are gathered by people in US (company, owners, shareholders, employees, budget)
It's not an accident that most of the time google and apple are fined by EU and VW is fined by USA.
While I support the notion of a lengthy spell of contemplation inside the walls of a prison for all CEOs of printer companies — even prior to this cartridge issue — I cannot help but feel that anything short of summary execution is excusable for the engineer or engineers who were responsible for the logic and error messages pertaining to “PC Load Letter”.
Say what you will about Carly fiorinas leadership strategy but she certainly set a record for how fast you can pedal an american institution into the ground.
If it weren't for government contracts and Gartner quadrant payola I don't think HP would even exist.
You deliberately misrepresent this as one $80 printer; in reality it is the sum total of all printers bricked by this, plus price gouging the printer owners who don’t want their printer bricked.
If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free? And don’t waste your breath on fines —- those will only be passed on to the captive consumers as the “cost of business.”
I'm curious if this violates U.S. code 1030(a)(5) [0]
"(5)
(A)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(B)intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or
(C)intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage and loss.[2]"
We should absolutely use every tool available to us. I anal and I don’t quite understand if this is CFAA but it is my personal conviction that that the CFAA is both overly broad and unnecessary and must be repealed.
Meanwhile, it is a miscarriage of justice that prosecutors don’t seem to use CFAA against large corporations.
Are we even sure that the customers legally own the printers? For instance, has anyone bothered to read the EULA that came with whatever bundled software someone installs now days to get the printer driver working?
Even if there isn't surreptitious transfer of the hardware, they could certainly have a clause in there that authorizes them to do such things.
That's not how sale of physical products work. If you go to a store and buy a box and take it home, without the people at the store making you read and sign a contract, you own it.
At some point in the recent past, people's ideas of what constitute a contract changed. Previously, it was a firm agreement between two parties, who had met and discussed it, and made a formal declaration that the agreement had been reached (not necessarily by signing papers, but at least some gesture/voiced assent). Now?
Now people seem to think that the other party doesn't even have to be present. It's one-sided. No discussion or agreement need take place. No evidence need to be preserved that there was a discussion or agreement. It only protects one side of the deal, not both, and can be amended by one side with no recourse to the other. If you listen carefully, you catch wind of this idea all the time in daily life. Talking about gym memberships, cell phone plans, cable tv, etc.
The people talking about it are on the losing side, too. They don't seem hurt or angry or confused, they accept it as if it's the way things should be or have to be.
It's not entirely clear to me why this switched. It's not clear to me how no one ever seemed to be outraged over it.
I don't think it could be fixed. Sure, I can imagine legislation that might cut out the worst aspects of it (no, gyms can't demand that people sign year long contracts unless they also prove that they're using the existence of the contracts to justify the purchase of new equipment or the like). But without people at least grumbling about these things, there'd never be pressure for any legislation anyway. Let alone the likelihood that this is more of a matter for the courts than legislatures.
Given all this, I don't think that people are buying physical products anymore. How many exercise bikes or treadmills out there are cloud-connected and will stop working if the company goes out of business? Or if your "subscription" ends and you don't let it auto-renew?
The ship has sailed, I think, on the concept of personal property.
Yes, non-proud HP InkJet owner. You own the printer. However, you MUST be subscribed to their HP Whatever Program and pre-pay them the amount of pages you’d like to print on a monthly basis. You cannot print unless you are on the program. I did read these terms because it was insane, and I’m paraphrasing.
It looks like they updated their program terms to force you to buy their ink. Honestly I thought that was already the case since I had tried using cheaper ink and the printer rejected it.
I have a HP PhotoSmart C3180 that predates that program. It did not work well with third party ink cartridges, but it could be that HP did something in the firmware to sabotage them. I have since stopped buying ink cartridges. I only print using laser printers now. The HP is nothing more than a high resolution scanner at this point.
I doubt you have have any problem convincing that printers are goods that you own and the EULA is meaningless. Eulas already are questionable from a legal standpoint as they don't really meet the standards of a contract.
If we ever want customers to have a fighting chance at protecting their rights against the interests of corporations, we must drastically narrow what rights can be 'waived' in an EULA. It's absurd that today you can buy a physical good and somehow some non-negotiated piece of legalese that you don't even get to read until you open the box can somehow 'authorize' them to choose what kind of ink you are allowed to put in it. This notion must die and any castles built upon it must fall.
Did they misrepresent the printer? They advertise “dynamic security” in their marketing as if it were a good thing. If it was in the advertising and documentation, how is that misrepresentation?
That being said, HP seems to mostly rebadge Canon printers loaded with their firmware, so I am not sure why people are still buying them. HP is just a middle man these days.
What would happen if you went around to every house in your neighborhood and smashed everyone's printers? Would you be fined 0.01% of the cost of damaged items, or would you go to jail?
I can't believe such a response. Is not the $80 dollar printer, is that HP is crossing a line, boarding the realm of illegality, misappropriating an electronic device that should be yours. And is also not money that you lose. Is frustration, time and feeling miserably deceit by a corporation that gives a shit about you. Also that you probably end up buying another printer and/or wasting time doing some research on printers online to not fall again into a dirty and dodgy maneuver like this.
The cynical answer might be that HP secretly updated their TOS so that the printer transaction is not a purchase but a long term rental on their terms. Not unlike “buying” a game on Steam or “buying” a Tesla. In both cases, you do something the vendor dislikes and your ownership is toast.
Poor people sometimes go to prison for far smaller crimes than this. The problem is that far too often, rich and powerful people are only held accountable if they hurt other rich and powerful people.
And if it's a million $80 printers affected by this, it's an $80 million crime.
It's not a 80$ printer but damage to society, or if you find that exaggerated hurting and lying to customers.
Prison is hard, on the other hand let the scale of damage and intention decide.. more human would be just stick to penalties. They just must be high enough to hurt really, not ridiculous amounts you can price in. Like do it once and maybe get away with it, but do it twice or thrice and you will quite certainly bankrupt the company.
No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.