New Chips Can Keep a Tight Rein on Consumers

[Peter Gutmann]

Pete Chown <Pete.Chown at skygate.co.uk> writes:
>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.

If the vendor required it, how long do you think it would take their lawyers to
figure out a way in which some sort of copyright was involved somewhere, and it
could therefore be hit with the DMCA hammer?  Thus the "universal hammer"
comment, you can define almost anything you want to be a copyright violation if
it suits your purposes.  My guess on this one (and IANAL) is that reading the
instruction codes sent from the host would be the user-definable copyright
violation for third-party Smartchips.

Peter.

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