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Ingram, Amazon Lose Patent Battle On On-Demand Printing
from the this-is-non-obvious? dept
These days, there are a ton of on-demand printing operations out there that will let people create a book on the fly. In some areas, they're just catching on, sometimes for vanity publishing and sometimes for better inventory control. However, it turns out that someone has a patent on the idea of on-demand printing - and a jury has ruled that Amazon and Ingram are both violating that patent. Both defendants say they believe the patent is not valid and will appeal. Unfortunately, the actual patent is not clearly explained in the article. They do say that the inventor met with Ingram prior to them starting up their own on-demand printing service - so he might have some claim. The real question is what the patent really covers - and if it's simply for the idea of on-demand printing, if that's really patentable.
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Internet Bookmobile
I hope this doesn't affect Bewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile.
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Patent Silliness
[Snip]
>>The real question is what the patent really covers - and if it's simply for the idea of on-demand printing, if that's really patentable.
Since when is it necessary to present a credible idea for patenting? Amazon/Microsoft/et al have been patenting 1's and 0's for cryin' out loud. The USPTO is too busy/lazy/incompetent to check for prior art anyway.
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Looks like 5,465,213
This looks like it. Lancaster wrote about BOD publishing in January 1990, for what that's worth.
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Re: Looks like 5,465,213
The whole article boils down to "when a customer wants one print out a copy of the book on a laser printer".
That's does not seem to be worth a patent. I'm sure that prior to 1990 some organization printed documents, even just plain text ASCII ones when a customer wanted one.
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Re: Looks like 5,465,213
The `inventor' filed his patent some months after the Lancaster articles. I just pointed at those to show that the idea of printing one-off books had been published. Lancaster isn't the `inventor' on that patent.
The `invention' compared to the articles seems to be `um, automate the finishing'.
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