Canon Ink DRM

Overview

Digital-rights management (DRM) is a practice used by many major printer manufacturers, including HP, Dymo, Lexmark and Canon. The manufacturers include silicon chips as part of the ink cartridges that can identify a cartridge as coming directly from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) as opposed to an aftermarket alternative, which is often cheaper. When aftermarket cartridges are inserted, some printers will display a message suggesting the supposed dangers of using non-genuine ink and have in the past, disabled device functionality when aftermarket ink is installed.

Incident

During the global chip shortage from 2020–2023, Canon had difficulty obtaining chips used in their printer ink cartridges. This resulted in genuine Canon ink cartridges behaving as if they were aftermarket cartridges when inserted into some Canon printers. A support page on the Canon website was created that instructed customers to ignore the warning or error messages that appeared as a result, stating this would cause "no negative effects on print quality."

Aftermath

Canon's instructions to customers in its support page to ignore these printer warning messages drew attention on social media from tech news outlets that considered the practice anti-competitive, with Vice stating: "as consumers and digital rights activists have been pointing out for ages, Canon essentially admits that its own DRM is absolutely not necessary.”