This is for color laser printers only, and is not a legal requirement as far as I can tell. Manufacturers were urged by the US government to add it, but it is not a written law.
Comment on Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable - The Oatmeal
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.
So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.
Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
This is not why printers are terrible. Printers are terrible because they don’t follow a standard protocol.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.
They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.
BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
This is for colour printers for sure, to prevent counterfitting. Many black and white only didn’t have fingerprinting, previously anyway. The printers serial number and manufacturer is coded. They don’t need to change anything, its done by the printer (serial, Mac, model)