The company has won its case against four resellers of non-genuine toner cartridges.
Wirth Consulting reported that after a three-year-long case, the District Court of Munich ruled that the four resellers based in Germany had “infringed on Samsung Electronics’ EP 1975744B1 patent as amended by the European Patent Office” in its decision on 3 February 2016, “a feature of cartridges for Samsung’s CLT-X5082 printer […] cartridges for other printers (such as the CLP-X660, CLT-X6092) may also infringe the patent”.
The resellers were said to have eventually recognised that they had “infringed the patents” and stopped selling the products, and the court ordered that they pay damages to Samsung as well as some of the legal costs. The case had begun in 2013, with the OEM said to have seen a “noteworthy end to a three-year-long effort”.
Late last year, the OEM also won a court case against two resellers in the Netherlands for patent infringement of cartridges, with those said to have until 27 February to appeal the decision. Representatives from Samsung said that the lawsuits “will be a strong warning message to generic cartridge resellers in Europe to not infringe Samsung’s intellectual property”.
Kiho Kim, President of Samsung Printing Solutions, said: “Samsung takes patent-infringement issues very seriously. It is our responsibility to provide our customers with the most convenient printing environment possible. This not only extends to printing devices, but also to print supplies, including toner cartridges.”
The company also won another case against German resellers in March 2016, and officials from the company stated that “using non-genuine toner cartridges may result in low-quality prints, as well as various printer problems such as excessive noise”.