Issue #0520/3 - Out of court victory for Epson in battle to protect intellectual property.
Epson ink cartridges are probably the most widely copied in the market because the print head is integral to the printer, rather than to the cartridge, and Epson is one of the market leading suppliers of ink jet printers, meaning that demand for aftermarket cartridges is high.
Unlike cartridges from manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark, because the ink cartridges are merely ink ‘tanks’ and do not perform the function of the print head, the cost of manufacturing a replica that fits into the printer is much lower than the cost of collecting, cleaning, refilling and selling previously used tanks. For this reason there is (has been!) little demand for empty Epson tanks.
However, that does not mean that the cartridges are simple to copy or even that it can be achieved without encountering technical difficulties.
One UK importer and distributor of Epson compatible cartridges fell foul of Epson’s patent protection activities recently and has announced that it has reached an out-of-court settlement with Epson following High Court action on the basis that the products infringed a number of patents and registered designs owned by Epson.
In a very significant statement that could have wide-reaching implications across the third-party supplies industry, the Managing Director of Environmental Business Products Limited said, “We have ceased importing and supplying Epson compatible cartridges because we are not confident of finding Epson compatibles that do not infringe one or more of Seiko Epson’s patents or registered designs”.
In other words, this action is the result of trading in Epson compatibles rather than manufacturing them. The company has clearly researched the compatibles available and concluded that the patents and registered designs owned by Epson are widely infringed by compatibles manufacturers.
If Epson could find a way of making litigation stick against the manufacturers rather than importers and distributors, we could see the face of the third party industry change drastically. One effect of such a change would be a huge increase in demand for empty Epson cartridges.
~End~
