Someone Has Finally Sued Canon Over A Ridiculous Disabling Policy

Anyone who's ever purchased a printer knows how it goes. You buy the printer for couple hundred dollars, get it home, and eventually, you run out of the ink that comes with it, and a replacement ink cartridge is nearly the cost of the printer. Many have used a laser printer where the manufacturer disables it as soon as the toner cartridge reaches some arbitrary level even though pages are still coming out of the printer without problems.

Someone has filed a lawsuit against printer manufacturer Canon for its underhanded policy attempting to force people to buy more ink. Canon is being sued for disabling the scanning and faxing functions of its multifunction printers when the printers run out of ink. The lawsuit was filed by David Leacraft and is a class action that alleges deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment by Canon.

The product that led the man to file a class-action lawsuit was a Pixma MG6320 (not pictured). According to Leacraft, he discovered that when his printer was out of ink, he could not scan or fax documents from the device. The lawsuit argues that ink isn't necessary for scanning and faxing, and those functions should continue to work if there is no ink in the device.

Leacraft isn't the only person who has run into this issue with the same printer. Another user went to Canon customer service and was told the printer must have all the tanks installed, and they must contain ink to use the printer's functions. The customer service representative said there is no workaround and the only fix was to replace the empty cartridge with a new one.

The lawsuit also claims there was no warning on the packaging, stating that functions of the printer would be disabled when one of its ink cartridges was empty. The class-action lawsuit alleges that customers were deceived, and the product was designed unethically to induce bottlenecks to entice users to purchase ink.