Canon ink DRM

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Digital rights management (DRM) is a practice used by many major printer manufacturers, including [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. The DRM chip also prevents the OEM ink cartridges from being refilled, it communicates to the printer that the specific cartridge has already been used.

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".

Consumer Response

Summary and key issues of prevailing sentiment from the consumers and commentators that can be documented via articles, emails to support, reviews and forum posts.

---

Add your text below this box. Once this section is complete, delete this box by clicking on it and pressing backspace.

Company Response

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".