HP printers have anti-piracy measures built in?

After the disclosure that Adobe"s latest and greatest has measures built in to prevent currency copying, it would appear that other companies also have this. With a bit of prodding, M Smith found that HP drivers also have copy protection of this type built into them. Here is his email from the "Full Disclosure Mailing List".

"Hi,

Last week, the Associated Press reported that Adobe has incorporated anti-copying technology in their Photoshop CS software which prevents users from opening image files of U.S. and European currency. Here"s the article: Adobe admits to currency blocker

I did some investigating on my own computer and discovered that HP has also been shipping currency anti-copying software in their printer drives since at least the summer of 2002. I have an HP 130 photo printer and found the string "https://www.rulesforuse.org"(ed. a website setup by state banks regarding currency issues). embedded in the driver.

According to a few newsgroup messages posted in 2002 and 2003, folks are seeing this URL printed out when they attempt to print images of certain types of bills. An HP printer with this anti-copying technology only prints out an inch of a currency image before aborting the print job.

Here is a list of HP printers which appear to have this anti-copy technology embedded in their Windows printer drivers:

HP 130

HP 230

HP 7150

HP 7345

HP 7350

HP 7550

I suspect the list of affected HP printers is much longer. I located these printer drivers simply by searching all files in my Windows and Program Files directories for the string "rulesforuse". If other folks run this same experiment, please let me know of other programs which appear to contain currency anti-copy technology."

News source: Full Disclosure

View: HP.com

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