DSF

The companies that have bought the license may think that the patent Sawgrass have is worthless, but see that paying the license fee to Sawgrass a better option as it is cheaper, easier and quicker than going through a huge legal battle.

Also, think what would happen to the market of inks, if a manufacturer actually did go through a court battle (and didn't settle early!) and went on to show that Sawgrass' patent was fairly meaningless. This would mean the current semi-monopoly and price fixing would disappear, and anyone could free and easily sell sublimation inks without any worries, there would suddenly be so much competition that the bottom would fall out of the market, prices would plummet of ink, and the bigger ink companies would then make less profit and have less motivation to produce these inks. So, we potentially could have much cheaper inks, although quality may be iffy, but the producers would make less profit. It is in all the ink companies interests to keep the Sawgrass patent "myth" going for as long as possible.

I understand and agree, I wonder what would happen if someone out there made a new dye sub ink by a different process and patented it.

That's the point - they have!
Sawgrass' patent is for a formulation of ink which is protected when used in a printer which uses heat in the print head - i.e. so the ink only actually sublimates when in the heat press, and not in the printer.
Maybe Sawgrass found this too tricky to achieve in real life, and so seem to have abandoned the idea of using inks in those type of printers, and now stick to putting their inks into Epsons which don't use heat in the print head. I would bet that the other sublimation inks available (i.e., not from Sawgrass) don't have this "enforcing agent" in their formulation and so are different and outside of the scope of the Sawgrass patent.
For more information on this, try googling TOG vs Sawgrass as this was basically the ruling of the court in that case, but TOG settled out of court before the judge made his final ruling, but the court documents show that TOG would have won.

pisquee;56552 wrote: For more information on this, try googling TOG vs Sawgrass as this was basically the ruling of the court in that case, but TOG settled out of court before the judge made his final ruling, but the court documents show that TOG would have won.

Given none of us can give an expert opinion on the papers it might be a little step too far to draw the conclusion that TOG settled out of court because they would have won. At least one of the top people at TOG then went on to work for Sawgrass as their enforcer of the patent within Europe on the basis that if their company (TOG) couldn't beat Sawgrass with the millions of dollars backing they had then there isn't much point in smaller companies trying to do that same. Whilst I might be paraphrasing the conversation I had a few years ago it went something along those lines.

If you feel strongly about it then pull your vast resources together and challenge the legal standpoint. If you're convinced TOG would have won then you've nothing to loose...