Further Information

Exclusive Licensees
Since 1990, Contra Vision North America, Inc., has been the exclusive licensee of Contra Vision Ltd's Intellectual Property in the territory of North America (USA, Canada and Mexico) and Contra Vision Supplies Ltd has been the exclusive licensee for Europe and elsewhere. Printers will typically obtain a licence from one or other of these exclusive licensees depending on the location of the printer. However, information is required on which country or countries the Licensed Product is "made, used, sold or kept" (different ways of practising the patents), which may be in more than one country, to determine the patents to be notified as Licensed Products and royalties payable.

Financial Information Protected by Protx
Royalty payment is made through a world renowned "payment gateway", Protx, a company which is expert in processing payments and maintaining customer financial secrecy. The Contra Vision group receives no information regarding the Licensee's financial information, only that a commitment to payment of correct royalties has been made.

Notification of Intellectual Property on Licensed Products
Upon confirmation of the royalty payment commitment, a unique "Total Job Code" is emailed to the Licensee, to be incorporated on a single line of the "print pattern" for the particular job. It is essential that this Total Job Code is incorporated to let others know the product is licensed and to assist the Contra Vision group in policing any infringements that appear on the market. No reason will be considered to avoid such notification on each Licensed Product. The need to notify and protect our Intellectual Property is now widely understood.

Quality Standards
In order to maintain our reputation for quality, it is imperative that Licensees follow the "know-how" guidelines and practise the relevant patented methods of achieving consistent colour quality throughout the area of a see-through graphics product and from product-to-product in a production run.

Intellectual Property
Printers understand the Intellectual Property of copyright in relation to printed matter, for example trademarks, logos, texts, illustrations and advertisements. Other types of Intellectual Property include patents, trademarks, know-how and registered designs.

Information on these types of Intellectual Property can be obtained from national patent office websites, for example the UK Intellectual Property Office (www.ipo.gov.uk) or the US Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov). However, some basic information on patents may be found under the heading "Patents" below.

Contra Vision Ltd's Intellectual Property is not limited to patents, but includes registered and unregistered trademarks, the use of which is obligatory under the terms of this online licence agreement, and "know-how" which is provided to assist printers to produce the Licensed Products.

Patents
Patents are granted nationally and are governed by national patent laws. The scope of protection of a patent is defined by its "claims". An individual patent in a particular country provides the patent owner with the right:

(i) to stop others practising the claims of the patent by making, using, selling or keeping the invention in the particular country, or
(ii) to license others to enable them to practise the patent, typically in return for payment of royalties, for example "running royalties" as a percentage of sales of "Licensed Product" by the Licensee, which is used in this online system.

It is possible for products and/or method of production to "fall within the claims" of more than one patent, possibly owned by more than one company. Contra Vision licenses its own patents and also licenses patents owned by another party related to our Overlap Registration System™ of making see-through graphic panels. In many countries, a Licensed Product will "fall within the claims" of at least two, sometimes more, patents. Not practising our Overlap Registration System™ does not mean that one or more relevant patents will not be infringed. If in doubt, we recommend seeking the advice of a Patent Attorney.

Cautionary Notes
It has been found that to achieve consistent quality see-through graphic products by a "print only" method that it is necessary to overlap layers of say black, white and CMYK inks. Those not used to printing see-through graphics might initially question the need to do this, especially if they have been sold a printing machine with claimed "exact registration" or "dot on dot" registration, for example a UV inkjet flat bed machine that can be shown to superimpose inkjet deposits of one colour in one position of substrate with great accuracy. Unfortunately all printing machines have a tolerance in the delivery of ink and other factors come in to play. For example, printing a first layer of UV inkjet black lines causes the substrate and even the bed of a flatbed UV Inkjet printer to expand, which means that subsequent white and design colour layers cannot be superimposed with exact registration. Even single pass printing will typically reveal a white edge to a design layer, owing to the properties of white ink.