Ink Jet SuperStore Fires Back at Lexmark Amended Complaint

Ink Jet SuperStore (IJSS) filed a motion to strike the amended complaint by Lexmark, which accuses 31 additional companies of infringing its patents in its John Doe case. In the original complaint, Lexmark charged 36 companies with having “sold or remanufactured, in the United States, empty Lexmark toner cartridges that were first sold outside the United States, thereby infringing the OEM’s patents.”

IJSS does business as TonerZone.com and Ink Jet SuperStore. It was one of the original defendants in Lexmark’s original complaint and agreed to a consent judgment and permanent injunction in April 2011. But in June 2012, Lexmark brought a contempt motion against IJSS, accusing it of violating the permanent injunction. According to industry analysts at Actionable Intelligence, Lexmark hopes to prove that IJSS sold cloned or remanufactured cartridges thereby infringing its patent rights.

To put an end to the amended complaint, IJSS filed the motion before the court saying the amended complaint failed to comply with Civil Rule 15. Under this rule, Lexmark was required to seek IJSS’s consent or to secure leave of the court before filing its first amended complaint. ISS claims that Lexmark actually failed to execute such a filing.

IJSS claims, “This Court is not Lexmark’s personal fiefdom in which it can keep an entire industry not to mention a small, out-of-state reseller of remanufactured cartridges subject to the beck and call of perpetual jurisdiction. There are procedural rules in place to guard against this sort of thing, and Lexmark has not complied with them.”

The latest deadline for Lexmark to identify and serve the remaining John Doe defendants was May 6, but it requested an additional 120 days to serve summons on newly identified John Doe defendants.