[bombcar]

It has always annoyed me that "region settings" don't just take into account the realities of the situation; they're OBVIOUSLY designed to prevent people in "rich" countries from buying media designated for "poor" countries in a form of market segmentation; but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices.

Of course now things like the players are so cheap you can just buy multiple if you want to bypass region encoding on DVDs, for example.

I wonder if off-brand ink would have just completely ignored the region thingy.

[oefrha]

Tangential: after moving to a “cheaper” region I can no longer gift American friends Steam titles. I’d pay the full American price but there’s simply no such option. Sad. (Of course I can send cash instead, but cash gifts IMO are kinda gross.)

[jbm]

On a side note, I've come around on cash gifts. I used to think they were gross, as they seemed to put a number on a relationship.

However, life is short and I would much rather give my kids 20-40 bucks to gift to a friend than go shopping for a toy. Moreover, I'd rather get something I wanted instead of 10 things I didn't really want; cash presents make that possible.

[account42]

As a kid I preferred cash gifts because it meant I could buy the things I actually want. As an adult I have enough disposable income that 20-40 bucks does not make a meaningful difference to what I can buy - I much prefer getting an item that I didn't think about buying, something that the giver has invested time into creating/slecting or that has some other personal meaning.

Of course that doesn't work out for situations where people just buy a random item as a token gift because they (feel they) are expected to provide one. In that situation the best solution is to remove that expectation - if nothing else works by forbidding gifts.

Or to sum it up: I think cash gifts only make sense if the amount is menaingful for the receiver and they are not expected to just gift the same amount back (i.e. the relationship is asymmetric in terms of gift transfer).

[makeitdouble]

> but that should mean the "rich media" should just work in all devices.

There's no simple business reason to do that. The most basic approach is to have the customer pay multiple times: they can afford to move regions or have the goods imported, blocking that route and have them pay for a whole new set is a simple strategy.

Arguing against that simpleness requires fuzzy touchy/feely brand image, consumer satisfaction, lifetime customer value calculations that most printer brands probably care very little about outside of the enterprise market.

[jen20]

No-one in their right mind would pay a scumbag company with that strategy having moved, so they in fact lose revenue as the ongoing media cost goes to their competitor.

[makeitdouble]

This is an issue only if your direct competitors have different strategies. And in my experience, they don't.

I think the general wisdom for anyone caring enough, is to go for a Brother laser printer (I personally went for Xerox but it's the same deal), and I'd posit they're not in direct competition with HP or EPSON:

- it requires ample prior research. You don't stumble upon a laser printer when going to a shopping mall and ask the staff for a printer for your kids homework.

- it requires having given up on many dreams in general and recognizing the bullshit of the whole industry. They are big and bulky, expensive, under marketed, your friends won't have them (or you're lucky), they're never on discount, and you're not a lawyer so you shouldn't be buying something named "WorkCenter 6515" instead of "ENVY Inspire all-in-one" to print school assignments. When I bought mine online I was asked my VAT number for the corporate tax paperwork and had to explain we're just some random family needing a reliable printer.

It's only after having seen the other side for so many years that you give up and buy a professional grade color laser printer if you expect to have to print more than 3 times a year at home.

[Jolter]

I’m pretty sure off-brand ink would not have worked at all. That’s the whole purpose of the DRM — HP cannot tolerate that someone buys non-original cartridges, or refills them.

[nikanj]

You are giving advice on how to circumvent region coding technology, which is probably illegal due to DMCA or some other act

[bombcar]

If I've had to deal with that once, I've had to deal with it 13,256,278,887,989,457,­651,­018,­865,­901,­401,­704,­640 times.

[Toutouxc]

TIL: this comment is about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...

[2Gkashmiri]

You think non Americans give a flying fuck about a DMCA claim?

I would love to be tried, remotely by an american court for breaking DMCA by bypassing DRM for american made software.

[realusername]

Depends of your country, there's a lot of countries with interoperability exceptions to copyright, a lot of EU countries will fall in this category and it's totally legal in those countries to publish DRM hacks and publish software which circumvent such protections automatically.

[akira2501]

The DMCA specifically acknowledges that it cannot limit free speech, and it specifically defines what is prohibited:

"No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part"

Mere advise is almost certainly safe.

[jeron]

I can’t see how suggesting to buy off brand ink is illegal