You may know that DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) prohibits your downloading and sharing any copyrighted material – pirated movies, music, book, TV shows, etc. If your computer IP is detected to take part in such activity, your ISP will receive a DMCA takedown notice – a formal message to report infringing content. The ISP will, in turn, warn your or whoever is know to be associated with detected IP to stop illegal activities. Briefly, this is how copyrights holders protect their intellectual property.

What does it have to do with printers, you may ask?

I’ll tell you what. Some guys (two teacher and a student namely) from University of Washington examined BitTorrent file-sharing networks using specially designed BitTorrent clients to monitor the traffic on these networks. They didn’t actually upload or download any files, but somehow the researchers received over 400 takedown requests. Each of those notices was a false positive accusing them of copyright infringement. The results of the study show that virtually any Internet user has a risk of receiving the DMCA takedown notice.

It still has nothing to do with printers, you may remark.

Yes, but we are almost there. The researchers say in the study that of all the numerous takedown notices they received, 13 were issued for 3 laser printers and a wireless access point. Interesting, right?

The results of the study make it clear that being an advanced user you can make your printer download movies for you and come out clean. On the other hand, the study shows how inconclusive is the method used to identify infringing BitTorrent users.

So if your ISP forwards you a takedown notice, cast the blame on your printer.

Nowadays, large offset presses, costing several million dollars apiece, dominate printing business that is estimated for $418 billion a year. Most of the offset presses sold in the world are produced by Xerox.

This state of affairs is likely to change with the introduction of the new inkjet technologies. And the success of new technologies means troubles for Xerox and more business for major makers of inkjet printers like Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Kodak and others.

The introduced inkjet presses, priced as much as $2.5 million per unit, are more expensive than the half a million dollar Xerox machines, but cost less per page. For instance, inkjet machines produce a page for 1 cent, versus about 4 cents for the Xerox’s laser technology. Just like with desktop printers, the digital printer makers expect to make their profits by selling ink.

So far offset printers produces 95% of all printed pages worldwide. Digital presses account for only 2% of offset pages, or $US8 billion annually. However, inkjet makers expect that share to triple in the next 3-4 years as quality and speed of digital printing improve. But even today inkjet makers are sure with their technology digital printing is competitive in price and quality with offset printing.

At the Drupa trade show world’s printer makers are showing new inkjet presses predicted to be the future of commercial printing.

Kodak will demonstrate its Stream inkjet technology that can print at a speed of 150 meters a minute, about half the speed of traditional offset. The technology will be available in 2010, Kodak says.

HP will show its Inkjet Color Web Press, which prints at 120 meters a minute and will be available for sale next year.

Industry specialists are cautious in theirs predictions and say digital printing won’t push out offset as fast as digital photography replaced film. But the shift to digital printing provides an important growth opportunity for printer makers.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc., launches CLX-6240FX, a multifunction printer to expand the company’s lineup of mid range color MFP for office workgroup. The CLX- 6240FX is 4-in-1 MFP with built-in print, copy, scan and fax capabilities, and a maximum monthly duty cycle of 80,000 pages per month and standard paper capacity of 850 sheets.

With quality Samsung toners the CLX- 6240FX delivers color documents at the speed of up to 25 PPM. The standard features include a legal size platen, auto duplex printing and copy and an 80GB hard drive.

Samsung CLX- 6240FX’s color CCD scanner has a high resolution up to 4800×4800 dpi. Among scanning features of this MFP you will find scan-to-network and scan-to-anywhere support for PDF, TIFF and JPEG files. The FRP also supports a Direct USB Interface for scanning to or printing from any standard USB drive. Scanning management tools include full Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support for effective networking and secure document management tools.

The CLX-6240FX MFP base unit is priced at $2,399 and can be purchased through Samsung’s authorized channel partners.