Epson was able to shut down a local ink manufacturer in Taiwan after a court agreed with them that this company was infringing on their patents. This is another victory for Epson in their never-ending series of worldwide lawsuits. Earlier this year they sued 24 ink companies in the U.S. while they were also suing a company in England that they said infringed on one of their patents. In 2005, they sued a company in France and one in Hong Kong under similar circumstances.

What makes this case interesting is that the company they are suing, U-Bar, makes a product that you won’t really find here in the U.S. They sell continuous ink supply systems, which are popular in countries like the Philippines but are really only used here for commercial machines. They look something like this:

Now you can probably see why Epson would want to shut down someone who makes this and also why you won’t really find anything like this in the U.S. If people could just have their own systems where cartridges were obsolete and they could just use by the bottle, then there really wouldn’t be much money to be made for Epson or any other printer manufacturer out there. Refilling your own cartridge using bottles of ink is a good alternative, but a lot of people here still haven’t accepted that as their own solution to high ink prices.

Epson hits Taiwanese ink system maker [PC Advisor]