Getting Back Into Gear

Canon continues to pursue what it believes to be its intellectual property rights over the sale and distribution of third party cartridges in many places including the United States and Europe.

Apparently, the reuse, dismantling and or reassembly of what has become known as the dongle gear inside the cartridge infringes Canon’s patents. These cartridges can be used in a range of commonly used HP and Canon laser printers.

While many remanufacturers and distributors caught up in the lawsuits settle with Canon, one has researched and developed a work around solution.

Print-Rite, one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of aftermarket print consumables, has invested heavily to find a workable solution to the problem. This week they have released what they are calling the PR2 drum gear.

Just as it claims to respect the intellectual property rights of the OEMs including Canon, Print-Rite expects all parties to respect its IP on this newly patented innovation.

The PR-2 gear will work in a wide range of monochrome cartridges that can be used in a many printers including the HP CE505, the Canon CF280, and the HP CE255 series.

Print-Rite has had international patent attorneys go over their new PR2 innovation to make sure it will not infringe Canon’s patents.

Patent attorney Helen Duan from Innopat is confident that Print-Rite’s PR2 gear does not infringe Canon’s patents in the USA and Europe, “Print-Rite highly respects intellectual property and up till now, they have over 2,300 patents and applications. For this PR2 gear, we had non-infringing opinions from US and European attorneys. For US, we have received non-infringement reports from two prominent US patent firms. ”

If Canon is successful in shutting down the remanufacture of cartridges that use the dongle gear, this could spell the end of printer cartridge remanufacturing as we know it. Yet Print-Rite are saying that this PR2 gear leaves the door open for the remanufacturing cartridges.

Duan continued to comment, “Whenever we talk about infringement, we need to focus on the patent itself. For example, for the dongle gear related cartridge, if we remanufacture the cartridge and use the OEM dongle gear, the OEM can claim infringement on that. At that time, we need to base our argument on the permissible repair. Now, if you use the PR2 gear, you have a directly non-infringement argument/ non-infringement position, [there is] no need to rely on the repair doctrine. I think from this point, for the dongle gear related patents, the PR2 gear leaves the door open for remanufacturing.”

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