New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers

[Pete Chown]

Peter Gutmann wrote:

> Actually I'm amazed no printer vendor has ever gone after companies who produce
> third-party Smartchips for remanufactured printer cartridges.  This sounds like
> the perfect thing to hit with the DMCA universal hammer.

There is no copyright issue, though.  The DMCA only bans circumvention
devices that relate to copyrighted content.

I don't know what would happen if you included copyright content in the
chip.  A printer could check that a particular short story is included
in the chip before it would work.  The courts may see this as too
contrived, however.

The other possibility would be to invent something trivial, patent it,
and design the chips around it.

-- 
Pete


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