Tyler v. Hewlett-Packard Company
I’ve been asked by a few readers to keep up with the the inkjet cartridge lawsuit against the Hewlett-Packard Company. When I last checked just a few days after the case was filed it had not made it into the Santa Clara Superior Court’s website.
Well, it is there now. You can find docket info here: Tyler v. Hewlett-Packard Company
How current that information is, of course, depends upon a large number of factors, not the least of which is how overworked the clerk’s office may be.
It is interesting to me that Hewlett-Packard has not yet filed an answer, although California allows for 30 days to answer (Cal. Code Civ. Proc., Sec. 412.20(a)(3).), along with one 15 day extension by agreement of the parties (Rule 201.7(d), Cal. Rules of Court). Since HP appears to have been served around the 28th of February, they are still well within that window.
I should also note that HP appears to have released a statement on the case, although it is not to be found in their “news room”. You can read that statement here. In this statement HP appears to say:
Smart technology used in our cartridges enhances the customer printing experience and protects the system from damage. On a small number of cartridges, this includes the use of an “expiration date”. These are used with HP’s business inkjet systems that have separate printheads and ink supplies.
The expiration date prevents the degradation of printer components and print quality due to changes over time in ink properties, cartridge properties and interactions between ink and the cartridge.
For some printing systems with ink expiration dates, the maximum cartridge lifetime is more than 4 years (54 months), and the maximum in-printer life is 2.5 years. In other systems with ink expiration dates, the maximum lifetime is 3 years and in-printer life is 18 months. The time allowed exceeds the normal usage period for the vast majority of our customers.
This seems to admit the matter at the crux of the lawsuit: HP does have some of its inkjet smart chips expire the cartridge even though the ink has not yet exhausted. Their defense seems to be that you shouldn’t be holding onto an ink cartridge that long anyway.
MickC @ March 23, 2005