USA's Finest Supreme Court Ruling for Reuse

One of the places where the USA truly is a guardian of freedom and a defender of opportunity is the US Supreme Court and defenders of patent exhaustion policy.  The USA's defense of Jazz Camera in the seminal "first use" law case says....  If you buy it you own it.  If someone doesn't want you to own it, they have to offer you a LEASE, and there is a contract.   When the manufacturer has no lease agreement, and tries to claim that because of their patent or trademark, that you don't really own it and cannot resell it, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in the buyer's favor.

Congress I'm not so sure of.

Electronic Fronterier Foundation needs an international office...

Stay in the company, Willie

China's courts, like Japanese courts, are extending patents to OEMs in a payola scheme which takes advantage of most people's ignorance of the issue.  Japanese law was bought by OEMs decades ago, and established many of the "cash for clunker" and anti-refurbishment, anti-reuse policies which are spreading to Korea and other countries.

"Judiciating Obsolescence" worries me more than anything else... but seems like tin-foil hat paranoia to most of my friends and co-workers.  But that is exactly what is happening in other countries, and we have had some close calls here in the USA.

Jazz Photo Corp. v. United States International Trade Commission, 264 F. 3d 1094 (Fed. Cir. 2001), was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit clarified the law of repair and reconstruction (permitting the owner of a patented item to fix the item when it breaks, but not to essentially build a new item from the parts of an old one), holding that it was not a patent infringement for one party to restore another party's patented "one-use" camera to be used a second time.

Ink Cartridge Re-Use: Light and Heat

Readers know that I was indelibly marked by my experience in Zuhai, Nanhai, and Foshan China a decade ago.  When I came across a neighborhood, several city blocks, where all the printer refurbishers had been shut down, and saw the supressed emotions of the Chinese city official, I went a google-ing to find what had happened.  I found an AGMA press release about a partnership agreement between HP and the Chinese EPA, as well as a long (and misleading) article in China Daily about "poison" ink cartridges.  The AGMA press release disappeared, Orwell-style, when I asked about it.

As if the new inks are healthy, and the fake inks are poison...  The link between counterfeit ink and poison?  E-storks with photos of children, and white juju words like toxin and cancer and e-waste.


What has been poisoned is the well of public opinion on reuse.

The fulcrum between legitimate re-manufacturing of consumables (inks, ribbons, toner cartridges) and counterfeit (back in a fake OEM box) remains the most kinetic place in the debate.   I just discovered a blog by David Connett, editor of The Recycler, a trade magazine for used cartridge remanufacturing.

350 Companies were expected at the 9th ReChina Asia Expo last week in Shanghai.  If it's the 9th show, it means it's been organized since about the same time I became aware of the war on reuse.

The profits on consumables like printer ink are astronomical.  The patent wars and push on patent exhaustion doctrine could have long term and wide ranging effects.