Quark Stands Accused of Patent Infringement by RR Donnelly

Print services provider sues Quark and Eastman Kodak subsidiary Creo of substantial infringment in terse press release

RR Donnelly, a print ser­vices provider with oper­a­tions world­wide, has sued Denver-based Quark, Inc. and Eastman Kodak sub­sidiary Creo, Inc. over claims that Quark and Creo have infringed on a range of Donnelly-held patents in areas of dig­i­tal print pro­duc­tion. The terse press release, released today, only announced the following:

“

CHICAGO, Jan. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ – R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (NYSE: RRD) announced today that it has filed a law­suit in the Federal Court in Delaware against Quark, Inc. and Creo, Inc. (a sub­sidiary of the Eastman Kodak Company). The law­suit alleges that prod­ucts man­u­fac­tured and sold by the defen­dants infringe an exten­sive port­fo­lio of RR Donnelley patents in the area of dig­i­tal print process­es, which are cen­tral to a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of RR Donnelley’s ser­vice and prod­uct offer­ings. The com­plaint seeks mon­e­tary and injunc­tive relief from both defendants. 

”

The entire press release (which con­tains lit­tle more else than a cor­po­rate bio and a caveat on “forward-looking state­ments” can be viewed via this link which opens in a new window.

RR Donnelly’s home page is at http://​www​.rrdon​nel​ly​.com.

2 thoughts on “Quark Stands Accused of Patent Infringement by RR Donnelly”

  1. hunter

    Quark has got­ten away with steal­ing a logo, now they’re try­ing to get away with steal­ing Donnelly’s patent­ed process­es. I think they took on some­one too big this time. Donnelly has the resources where­as the Scottish Arts Council did­n’t. I’m not sure, but has­n’t Donnelly been a huge Quark cus­tomer and con­se­quent­ly would­n’t Quark have been in a good posi­tion to know (and steal) spe­cial process­es Donnelly has developed?

  2. Pariah S. Burke

    Playing mod­er­a­tor here, it’s impor­tant to think log­i­cal­ly and calm­ly about this news.

    Firstly, law­suits are often a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. The fact that RR Donnelly alleges infringe­ment of its patents does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that infringe­ment occured.

    Secondly, great minds real­ly do think alike. If Quark and Eastman-Kodak did, in fact, infringe on RR Donnelly’s patents, it may not have been inten­tion­al or with fore­knowl­edge of said patents. Most often, tech­nol­o­gy patent infringe­ments are acci­den­tal and the result of two or more peo­ple com­ing with the same idea independently.

    To wit: A few years ago, Adobe and Macromedia trad­ed law­suits alleg­ing infringe­ment of user inter­face ele­ments devel­oped by each com­pa­ny. Adobe, for exam­ple, claimed that Macromedia had co-opted the tabbed palette idea and imple­men­ta­tion that had become a hall­mark of the Adobe prod­ucts’ inter­faces. Macromedia coun­ter­sued at the same time. Macromedia lost the suit because it was proven that the com­pa­ny did infringe upon rel­e­vant Adobe patents. However, that infringe­ment was­n’t will­ful; palettes and tabbed palettes was a log­i­cal next step in orga­ni­za­tion large amounts of infor­ma­tion , tools, and options in a soft­ware pro­gram. Macromedia reached that evo­lu­tion­ary step on its own, but after Adobe.

    Lastly, it’s also impor­tant to note that this is busi­ness. While no com­pa­ny wish­es to be sued, I doubt there were strong emo­tions going around with­in the offices of any of the three par­ties. In all like­li­hood, the legal firms retained by Quark and Eastman-Kodak received the RR Donnelly notice, then calm­ly went to work gath­er­ing evi­dence to ascer­tain if the alle­ga­tion had mer­it. If they choose to fight the suit, it will be done civil­ly and with­out the intru­sion of “good guy” or “bad guy” labels. It’s just business.

    None of the par­ties involved in the RR Donnelly suit have as yet com­ment­ed on the suit. Thus the par­tic­u­lars are not known, and one should not make assump­tions or vil­li­fy one par­ty or the other.

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