Toshiba America’s Copier Divisions Suing 2 Distributors : Courts: They and their parent company claim that their trademark was used to sell counterfeit photocopier supplies.

Toshiba America’s copier products divisions have sued two distributors that allegedly used Toshiba’s trademark to sell counterfeit photocopier supplies.

The Electronic Imaging Division and the Toner Products Division of Toshiba America and their Tokyo-based parent company, Toshiba Corp., filed the trademark infringement suit in November in federal court in New Jersey.

Tod Pulsifer, director of sales and marketing for Toshiba’s copier unit, said Toshiba thinks that counterfeiting is rampant in the $2-billion toner industry. Toner is photocopier ink.

“It’s like an iceberg,” Pulsifer said. “You don’t know how much is under the surface.”

The suit alleges that Repeat-O-Type Manufacturing Corp. in Wayne, N.J., sold counterfeit toner. On Feb. 10, Toshiba added Densigraphix Kopi Inc. of Boucherville, Canada, as an additional defendant.

Pulsifer said longtime Toshiba toner dealers could not tell the difference between the counterfeit and real toner because the bottles and labels were so similar. He said the counterfeit bottles were labeled “for use in” Toshiba copiers.

Camille Cobran, president of Densigraphix Kopi, said his company has never sold any counterfeit toner of any kind. On its own, Densigraphix redesigned its packaging for Toshiba-compatible toner products to make it “more obvious to the customer that those products were not original Toshiba products.”

“A number of the major copier manufacturers are, in my opinion, trying to use charges of ‘counterfeiting’ to keep independent distributors from selling toner products of any type and thereby force the consumer to buy such products only from their dealers,” Cobran said.

Pulsifer said in response that Toshiba believes in fair competition but is concerned about the quality standards of counterfeit toner and its reputation in the industry.

Fred Keen, president of Repeat-O-Type, confirmed that his company did sell products that appeared to be counterfeit.

Keen said his company purchased the apparently counterfeit products for about six months from Densigraphix. As soon as Toshiba voiced its objections, he said, Repeat-O-Type stopped selling the products.

“The fact is that Repeat-O-Type is nothing more than a middleman,” he said. “These were small quantities. Normally, most of what we sell has a Repeat-O-Type label.”

The federal court has issued a restraining order preventing Repeat-O-Type from making or selling counterfeit toner products, pending a formal hearing.

Pulsifer said Toshiba took the unusual step of issuing a press release and launching a legal campaign to focus attention on product counterfeiting “before it becomes uncontrollable.”