Refilling Carts is a criminal patent infringement?

[fotofreek]

Also, at the exorbitant price charged for OEM ink it is a shame to throw away a few cc's of ink each time the single use OEM cart is discarded. When refilling the ink remaining in the sponge means that less ink does a full refill and less ink is wasted. It hardly matters at $5 or less for two ounces of ink as compared to $13 for 14 cc's of which a few cc's are thrown away when the cart reads empty. Now that I think about it, the OEM user throws away more dollars worth of ink per cart than we use to refill it!

 

[SilentRob]

Also keep in mind that it takes up less space in a shipping truck when you ship ink in big 100 mL bottles than in small <20 mL cartridges, which are packed in plastic, and then placed in individual boxes... more ink can be sent to your location on the same tank of gas when allowing self-refilling.

Just goes to show you how an illegal activity is not necessarily a crime. If anything, it would be a non-economical and fascist crime to force the refill companies to close their shops!

They say patent laws are necessary to encourage innovations that benefit consumers... this case along with hundreds of others show that excuse to be nonsense! Patent laws are almost exclusively used to make innovation a statutory offense... unless, in this case, refillers feel like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and development to reinvent the *entire printer* and neglect their competitive advantage in ink production. Thus, patents and intellectual property laws encourage people to settle for mediocre and/or overpriced goods.

Thanks to IBM not defeating MS in their battle over DOS, and Apple not defeating them in the battle over Graphical User Interfaces, the three companies have had to continually innovate and appeal to their advantageous market niches in order to stay in business. Unfortunately, like every other company that forgets who they are and where they came from, Microsoft turned to the dark side and sued Linus Torvalds for building a kernel that would support X-Windows and other Windows-like GUI's... shame shame shame!

You do not need to pass laws *against* the printer companies, either, as the evil vector is best when its magnitude is zero... it matters not in which direction it is pointed. I stand by the rights of printer companies to not be enslaved by Congress into the involuntary servitude of performing free repairs for people who have willfully ignored their conditions of sale... people who have a problem with that can buy a differently branded printer, and before you know it, those companies that void their warranties for aftermarket ink usage will have to reverse their policy out of necessity... they'd be hemmoraging too many customers to those brands that offer a more consumer-friendly policy!

Of course, Congress, the presidency and the courts probably will disregard any advice that sounds like this... they far too greatly relish their arbitrary control over people's lives to give it up without a fight.

Okay, I'll shut up now... if this keeps up, I'll have to think up a new net handle, as I'm not exactly being a very "Silent" Rob! I think, however, this provides a good enough introduction for my first post on the forum =].

 

[Nifty]

Rob, welcome to the forum! That is a great first post and is very appreciated. Personally, I respect anyone's opinion if it can be shared in a civil / non-confrontational manner. You've got some very valid points... keep the handle or change the handle, but keep coming back to post!

 

[BlasterQ]

if indeed they will insist that refilling an OEM cartridge is against the law, well, throw the OEM after you use up all the ink, get a 3rd party ink cartridge, and refill that as many times as you want. unfortunately for them, there's no patent infringement if you use a cartridge 'designed' for refilling, or a 3rd party cartridge that doesn't have those limitations.

 

[SilentRob]

You'd be surprised at what can pass for patent violation in our free-trade paradise. If people start doing what Blaster recommends, HP will insist that making aftermarket cartridges to fit their printers is a violation, and sue the competitor for that. Like I said before, the way patent laws are designed and used, an aspiring innovator has to reinvent the entire machine, buy or rent a factory for millions of dollars to manufacture the newly designed printers and cartridges, hire hundreds of employees (which aren't even that cheap in other countries seeing how much you have to pay local officials to even allow your factory to exist), set up a distribution network... all that good stuff.

My economics classes referred to this concept as "setting up barriers to entry"... its a shame hardly anyone bothers to apply that concept to patent and copyright law.

I talk to the big businessmen my parents do outsourced contract work for, and they all talk about how great American free trade is... funny thing is that most of them are engaged in some kind of scheme to abolish free trade, such as HP's anti-refill patent scam. I don't bother arguing with people who are so hypocritical... free trade is great for established mercantilists, as long as it's not actually free.

 

[BlasterQ]

"If people start doing what Blaster recommends, HP will insist that making aftermarket cartridges to fit their printers is a violation, and sue the competitor for that."

That issue has been resolved already. I think it was a discussion here a long time ago. The court has ruled that using 3rd party cartridges with 3rd party inks doesn't violate any infringement laws.

 

[SilentRob]

Okay, my bad... I get a little paranoid sometimes. My cat ran off with my tinfoil hat and shredded it... I just freak out when that happens =]. I've constructed an interim replacement out of aluminum foil until I find a place that actually sells tin foil. Hopefully it will do the trick.

 

[websnail]

Something I learned recently on the whole legal issue of refilling inkjet cartridges, that might be of interest is that Epson own a rather old patent that basically boils down to "sponge in a box" (or that's how it was put to me over the phone). In a nutshell it seems that the use of a sponge to damp flow and hold ink in a cartridge is the legal precedent and the reason manufacturers are hankering for the "spongeless" design.

I'd always assumed that the spongeless design was nirvana for refills and CISs's purely because it would mean less likelihood of clogging, air foaming and sponge life but it seems that for refill suppliers and the like, the legal temperature is lending a certain amount of urgency to the whole thing.

Obviously that doesn't reflect the test case about forcing people to use the originators own branded carts or not.. but it's interesting info' none the less.. .

 

[SilentRob]

Neat post websnail... I'll have to look into that =]