HP once updated millions of printers to reject ink they already owned, and it worked

Close

Close

By

Rob LeFebvre

Published Jul 29, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT

Rob LeFebvre is an editor and writer focusing on consumer and enterprise technologies for a broad range of outlets. He’s been writing online for more than 15 years; before that he was a special educator for kids with severe disabilities.

Rob has been an Editorial Director at Lifewire, a news writer at Engadget, and a senior contributor at Cult of Mac. He's written about PCs, Macs, mobile phones, and games, created newsrooms from the ground up, and has extensive experience reviewing hardware, software, and games across his career.

Sign in to your MakeUseOf account

Add Us

Like

Like

follow

Follow

followed

Followed

Thread

Log in

Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:

Try something different:

Show me the facts

Explain it like I’m 5

Give me a lighthearted recap

I've been reading a lot of my colleagues' printer coverage lately, from the letters buried on every ink box to Bambu Lab borrowing HP's old playbook for 3D printing. So I went back and read the actual court documents behind the story everyone references, but few people explain: HP's decade-long habit of pushing firmware updates that made printers refuse ink they'd already been happily printing with. The legal fees the company paid pale in comparison to the earnings it got from its shenanigans, making it work for the shareholders, at least.

Related

Bambu Lab just pulled the HP printer playbook on 3D printing — and the community fought back

HP called. It wants its business model back.

Posts

33

By

Yadullah Abidi

Dynamic Security turned a hardware update into a business strategy

A chip decides whether your ink counts, and HP can flip that switch after the sale

https://unsplash.com/photos/5AoOejjRUrA

HP calls it Dynamic Security. It's an authentication system, introduced in 2016, that checks whether an installed cartridge carries an HP-made security chip. When a firmware update lands and that chip is missing, whether the cartridge is a refill, a remanufactured unit, or a compatible third-party product, the printer stops treating it as ink. Instead, it throws an error like "Cartridge Problem" or "Non-HP Chip Detected" and refuses to print.<br>The issue that turned this into a decade of litigation is the timing. Dynamic Security doesn't just ship on new printers. HP has pushed it through firmware updates to machines people already owned, sometimes years after purchase, according to court filings in the consolidated federal case In re HP Printer Firmware Update Litigation. A cartridge that printed fine on one day can stop working after the next day's automatic update, with no warning that the update would change what ink the printer accepts.

Quiz

5 Questions

Inside the Printer Chip Wars

Your Top Score

Attempts

Start Quiz

Report Error

Found an error? Send it info@www.makeuseof.com so it can be corrected.

The lawsuits piled up, and HP kept the business model anyway

Every settlement cost less than a rounding error on the ink business

HP has been sued over this repeatedly, and it has settled or lost more than once. A 2018 US class action ended with a $1.5 million fund for affected customers. Consumer group Euroconsumers followed in 2022 with a settlement worth up to $1.35 million for buyers in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Italy's competition authority went further, fining HP €10 million, roughly $12 million, for not disclosing the cartridge restrictions clearly enough on its packaging.<br>None of that stopped the pattern. A November 2020 firmware push reactivated Dynamic Security on printers where it had gone dormant, triggering a fresh US class action. Plaintiffs, including a disaster-relief housing nonprofit that found its printer suddenly rejecting third-party toner, argued the update functioned as malware, altering code specifically to make competitors' cartridges incompatible. HP and the plaintiffs reached an agreement in August 2024, and a federal judge approved it in March 2025. The terms explain why HP had little reason to stop: three named plaintiffs received $5,000 each, HP covered roughly $725,000 in legal fees, and the rest of the affected class got nothing. HP admitted no wrongdoing.<br>So why does HP tolerate fines that sound so large? Its printing division brought in roughly $17.4 billion in net revenue for the full 2024 fiscal year, according to HP's own SEC filings. CEO Enrique Lores put the strategy plainly at Davos in 2024, saying, "We lose money on the hardware, we make money on the supplies." A few million dollars in settlements, spread across a decade, is a small cost of doing business when the ink itself can run $13 to $95 an ounce, according to Consumer Reports testing.

What the settlement actually changed for printer owners

A narrow opt-out, not a fix

NAR - Image from Unsplash

The one concrete win from the 2025 settlement is pretty...