Oh great, there’s DRM in printer PAPER now
Dymo was so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
The printer industry has always surfed the leading edge of dystopian business practices, pioneering the most disgusting, deceptive tactics for ripping off customers by locking them into buying half-full ink cartridges at $12,000/gallon.
Printer companies have used copyright law to attack refillers, pushed out fake “security updates” to trick you into installing code to block third-party ink, cheated and lied to block “security chips” from being harvested from e-waste and used in new cartridges and more.
There is no depth so low that printer companies will not stoop to it. Forcing you to waste ink by printing “calibration sheets”? Sure. Suckering buyers with “lifetime” ink deals and then suddenly ending them? Why not?
But there’s one depravity that no printer company has managed: putting DRM in paper. Oh, not for lack of will! But adding DRM to paper is hard, because paper is…well, it’s paper. Pressed sheets of vegetable pulp. It’s hard to put a cop-chip in a sheet of paper.
But what about a roll of paper?
See where this is going?
If you’re a well-organized person, you might have a Dymo label maker around the house. I grew up with Dymo’s original embossing tape label makers and gleefully labeled everything important to me.
In the years since the company was founded, it’s been agglomerated, snapped up by Newell Brands, owners of Rubbermaid, Mr Coffee, Yankee Candles, Elmer’s, Sharpie, X-Acto and many others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newell_Brands#Brands
Divisions a these corporate hydras are under relentless pressure to wring more profits out of their workhorse products. Which is how Dymo came to invent — wait for it — DRM for paper.
Dymo’s desktop label-makers enjoyed a boom during the lockdown, thanks to the shift to e-commerce and the demand for shipping labels. But those windfall profits weren’t enough for the company. They just released two new models, the 550 and the 5XL, whose DRM prevents you from using third-party labels:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/worst-timeline-printer-company-putting-drm-paper-now
Third-party labels for desktop label-makers are ubiquitous. Different manufacturers produce them, differentiating on materials, size, and adhesive. Oh, and price, naturally. Dymo’s own-brand labels are fine, but they cost more than comparable rival labels.
The new label rolls come with a booby-trap: a RFID-equipped microcontroller that authenticates with your label-maker to attest that you bought Dymo’s premium-priced labels and not a competitors. The chip counts down the labels as you print them (so you can’t transplant it to a generic label roll).
Dymo clearly understands that its customers don’t want this. Dymo owners who buy non-Dymo labels aren’t being tricked into it — they’re seeking out alternatives. No surprise that Dymo’s sales materials don’t mention this new, unprecedented restriction.
In forums and online reviews, Dymo owners are fuming, rightly accusing the company of ripping them off. Some are speculating about how to reprogram the cop-chip in their labels, but anyone who provides a tool to do so risks felony prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (penalty: 5 years and $500k for a first offense).
This is a good reason to reform or overturn the DMCA (as EFF is seeking to do with its lawsuit against the US government):
https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice
But in the meantime, this is a rare instance in which individuals can make a difference. Dymo has lots of competitors, whose comparable printers cost the same as the new DRM-burdened models. Even with the cost of throwing away your new Dymo and buying a Zebra or MFLabel replacement, you will still come out ahead once you factor in the savings from buying any labels you choose.
Dymo is floating a trial balloon here, checking to see whether printer owners will accept DRMed paper as well as ink (ironically, Dymo pitches the fact that its label printers are inkless as an advantage because you sidestep ink price-gouging!). We can pop that balloon before it attains altitude.
Tell your friends.
Image:
Hugh D’Andrade/EFF
https://www.eff.org/about/staff/hugh-dandrade
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. 1His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).
