Static controls: copyrights and printer cartridges.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Citings

THE DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was intended to thwart music and software piracy. But the printer manufacturer Lexmark has found a novel use for the law: They've sued to prevent a competitor from making cartridges that work in Lexmark printers.

Lexmark offers two kinds of cartridges for its printers: a more expensive one that anyone can refill and a cheaper version that must be sent back to Lexmark once it's exhausted. The second model is protected not only by a licensing agreement but by a technological barrier: The company's machines contain a chip that prevent them from printing from an unauthorized cartridge.

But when Mark Perkel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) bought one of their printers, no one mentioned the licensing agreement until the product arrived. The document declared that merely by using the already-purchased product, Perkel had agreed to the license, and it provided a phone number to call he didn't want to accept the terms.

Four times he dialed that number, and four times he reached a message saying that the extension did not exist. Perkel ended up culling the sales department instead, where a representative informed him that the license was not, in fact, a binding agreement.

Enter Static Control Components, a North Carolina company that put one of those Lexmark printers to a rather different use: It took out the chip, figured out how it worked, and started offering "Smartek" chips of its own. Armed...