The US Supreme court is taking more time to decide whether to begin the case on the dispute between Impression Products and Lexmark.
Reuters reported that the dispute is over the resale of single-use printer toner cartridges, and previously the case was decided in Lexmark’s favour earlier this year, with the US Court of Appeals ruling that the US remanufacturer had “infringed Lexmark’s patents by marketing refurbished Lexmark cartridges that originally were sold with ‘single use’ or ‘no resale’ restriction in the US and abroad”.
The case began when Impression was named in an IP infringement case in October 2013 referring to the “unlawful importation […] the sale for importation and/or the sale within the United States after importation” of a number of infringing remanufactured and cloned aftermarket cartridges. Impression moved to dismiss claims and overturn Jazz Photo, which impacts on patent exhaustion, or the “first-sale doctrine”, influenced by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kirtsaeng case in 2013, which prevented copyright owners from stopping imports and reselling content sold abroad.
The ruling in February decided that Impression “infringed the patent rights of Lexmark […] when it imported Lexmark’s toner products back into the United States after they were first sold abroad”, as well as that it was “liable for selling refurbished Lexmark cartridges that were originally marketed for a single use under its return and recycle programme”. Recently however, the US government backed an “overturn” of the decision, and “urged” the Supreme Court to review it.
However, Reuters said that the delay could signal “a move that could signal the court’s interest in the extent to which patent owners can control the use of their products after sale”. Impression Products is appealing the decision made by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in February which said that “Impression infringed Lexmark International’s patents by selling refurbished Lexmark cartridges that originally were sold with ‘single use’ or ‘no resale’ restrictions in the U.S. and abroad”.