The company has filed the IP lawsuit against HP over alleged infringement of eight of its patents relating to printhead technology.
A Memjet printhead
In a press release, Memjet announced that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, in which it alleges “infringement of eight Memjet patents related to its page-wide ‘waterfall’ printing technology”. The company stated that it seeks to “both enjoin” HP from “its unauthorised use of Memjet’s patented page-wide waterfall technology” and to “recover damages resulting” from the use of the technology in HP’s PageWide printers.
The PageWide printhead technology is used in the OEM’s Pro X generation of office printers, its T-Series of commercial presses and its PageWide XL series of machines, and Memjet says that HP “has stated its intention to use its PageWide technology across its printing portfolio including in future wide-format and 3D printers”.
The patents cited in the case include: US patent 6,575,549, “Ink Jet Fault Tolerance Using Adjacent Nozzles”; 6,880,914, “Inkjet Pagewidth Printer For High Volume Pagewidth Printing”; 7,156,492, “Modular Printhead Assembly With A Carrier Of A Metal Alloy”; 7,325,986, titled “Printhead Assembly with Stacked Ink Distribution Sheets”; 8,662,636, “Inkjet Printhead Having Rows Of Printhead Segments”; 8,678,550, “Printhead Assembly With Laminated Ink Distribution Stack”; 8,696,096, “Laminated Ink Supply Structure Mounted In Ink Distribution Arrangement Of An Inkjet Printer”; and 9,056,475, titled “Inkjet Printer With Web Feed Maintenance Assembly”.
Memjet also commented: “Memjet has invested substantial resources in the research and development of its page-wide waterfall technology over the last decade. Memjet has protected that investment through the development of its significant patent portfolio, including several thousand US and foreign patents in the page-wide inkjet printing space.”
You can read The Recycler’s David Connett’s thoughts and analysis of this case here.