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After fuming for several years over the alleged infringements, officials decided to hire lawyers Down Under. The court filings are dated Dec. 22, 2017. While the Royal Canadian Mint is a Crown corporation allowed to sue other parties with its corporate name, the Royal Australian Mint is part of the Australian government — so the respondent in the case is in fact the Commonwealth of Australia.

According to a statement to court outlining steps taken to try resolving the dispute, the Royal Canadian Mint first contacted its Australian counterpart two years earlier to notify them of the existence of a patent on printing technology. The Australians had replied that they felt their methods were “sufficiently different to have not infringed.”

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Over the next two years the parties tried discussing the matter with a meeting, several phone calls and several letters, but there was no resolution to the dispute.

The statement of claim clarifies that the Canadian mint first applied for a patent on a “method of printing an image on a metallic surface, particularly on a coin surface” in 2006. The patent was open for public inspection from 2007 and granted in 2013.

The applicants say they are aware of “infringing” Australian coins printed with coloured ink “by forming a plurality of macropores of about 0.1 to about 0.5 mm across in a designated pattern on a portion of the metal surface, forming a plurality of micropores within the macropores, cleaning the surface, applying the ink and drying the ink.”