Own USB driver taking precedence over usbhid

If you want to prevent binding to the usbhid driver, you can use its HID_QUIRK_IGNORE (= 4) setting. To stick with the example Karl Bielefeldt used, add

options usbhid quirks=0x15c2:0x0043:0x04

to some /etc/modprobe.d/*.conf file (and perhaps recreate your initramfs). That will tell hid-core to ignore that device. So usbhid will have a look at it but leave it for some other driver instead.

Own HID driver taking precedence over hid-generic

However, if your other driver is a HID driver not an USB driver, then you need usbhid to bind to the driver on the USB level, and you need your own HID driver to take precedence over hid-generic. This is the problem I'm facing my self, and for which I haven't found a solution yet, short of unbinding and rebinding the device later on.

Here's a thread with a fix for a similar problem. To summarize, you add something like the following to one of your /etc/udev/rules.d files:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="15c2", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0043", MODE="0666", PROGRAM="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n $id:1.0 >/sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbhid/unbind;\echo -n $id:1.1 >/sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbhid/unbind'"

http://lwn.net/Articles/143397/ is very similar to the above answer, maybe some more details.