As I recall, part of the rules of the Death Note was that the user has to picture the face of the victim as they write the name, so they have to have a name and a face to kill. I assume a printer doesn't manage to do that, although I do suspect at times that some printers are fairly malevolent.
".. would accept POST requests of victims' names/pictures ... at that time pull up an image of them on X and print their name on one page of the death note ..." (emphasis added)
Like I said, this depends on a bit of a loose definition of "mind", so it might not have worked at all.
Here is the exact wording of the rule in question: "This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected."
It specifically appeals to the (somewhat hazy) concept of mind, which would imply the prerequisite of some sort of sentience. However, the rules are not absolute, but rather based on Ryuk's imperfect interpretation (Ryuk didn't know a priori how certain experiments would turn out, like writing causes of death before names with the FBI agents); thus, the use of "mind" itself isn't so important, as it merely implies that Ryuk's experience is limited to sentient beings, which should be obvious.
In other words, there isn't any way to know whether a death note could be used in this way without testing it on a "real" death note (or having the authors write canonical material on it).
I agree that there's not any way to know for sure. I guess I saw the "mind" thing a different way; that it has to be a sentient being thinking about it, but obviously we can't know without one to test on :)
