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Patents for essential printer technologies should be well expired by now, patent terms not to exceed 20 years by international convention, if I'm not mistaken.
by Clamchop 3y ago
Patents for essential printer technologies should be well expired by now, patent terms not to exceed 20 years by international convention, if I'm not mistaken.
You can't benefit from the latest but the inkjets and lasers of 20 years ago were pretty good and had more or less assumed their modern form already.
My suspicion is more that it is a difficult market make decent margins in. The effort to lock in consumers to name-brand consumables, even by Brother these days, seems to belie that problem. Maybe there are other hurdles like sweetheart deals with chem manufacturers as well, I don't know.
- ElevenLathe 3y agoIncumbents don't need to win any suits against you, just drag them out long enough to bankrupt you. You're probably right that you could build a nice printer with unpatented tech, but you'll end up in front of a judge in the eastern district of Texas anyway, possibly for years.
- Clamchop 3y agoUntrue, clear-cut cases with plain facts like a patent being expired are dismissed with prejudice straight off the bat. Judges can be unreasonable but not to that degree, even in shitty districts. I can't find a single example of this happening. Perhaps it has given someone some trouble but it would be exceedingly rare. It's hard to imagine anyone trying, the law explicitly forbids it.