Markzware's attorney sheds light on several issues as the patent-infringement case moves through the early stages.In mid-May, Markzware filed suit against fellow PDF preflight software vendor Enfocus in the federal Central District of California court. The U.S.-based Markzware—whose flagship product is FlightCheck, a stand-alone preflight application—alleges that its Belgian rival infringed on its
U.S. patent with its Acrobat plug-in PitStop Pro as well as the stand-alone PitStop Server application.
The suit seeks a jury trial, and unspecified actual damages and triple punitive damages. The complaint lists general concerns about patent infringement without getting into the specific features that Markzware's citing as infringing. Attached to the complaint are product sheets for PitStop Pro and PitStop Server Pro. Also attached to the complaint is the patent, which contains a detailed diagram of how the Markzware product controls the checking, fixing and reporting of prepress problems with files in the preflighting process.
Michael Shimokaji, an intellectual property attorney representing Markzware, told PDFzone that the company feels Enfocus infringed upon Markzware's patented approach to identifying a document's creating application, verifying problems in the document, fixing those problems according to defined preferences, and reporting on the process.
"In general, patents are typically not specific to a single feature that 'suddenly causes infringement,'" Shimokaji said. "They're generally—and, like in this Markzware situation—a combination of different features, and those different features are spelled out by the claims of a patent."
Some market observers might ask, "Why now?" because these products have co-existed for many years, competing peacefully. Was there something in the most recent version of PitStop that caught Markzware's eye?
"With any business, they have a number of issues to address—including Markzware—and some issues take priority over others," Shimokaji said, adding that Markzware's concerns didn't necessarily crop up after the release of the most recent version of PitStop products.
Interestingly, Adobe is not named in the suit, even though PitStop Pro is an Acrobat plug-in and Acrobat itself has some preflighting features similar to those in PitStop and FlightCheck. But Shimokaji didn't let Adobe off the hook.
"It's not that Adobe is or is not an issue. Markzware is a company with a limited amount of resources, and they have to be able to prioritize those resources in terms of whatever function they might be addressing, be it marketing, sales, accounting or legal issues," Shimokaji said. "Enfocus happens to be more of a priority than any other potential infringers right now."
Shimokaji said that infringement claims have little to do with stand-alone applications—which FlightCheck, Acrobat and PitStop Server are—versus a plug-in like PitStop Pro.
Guido Van der Schueren, chairman of the board for Enfocus parent Artwork Systems, offered no comment for this story but stood by the company's public response, in which Artwork CEO Peter Denoo said, "Artwork Systems and Enfocus respect the intellectual property rights of third parties, and are currently conducting a full investigation into what appear to be unsupportable allegations made by Markzware. We do not expect this lawsuit to interfere in any way with Enfocus' ability to continue offering and supporting its popular PDF preflighting products, now or in the future."
The next step in the proceedings is an August hearing to set a trial date.
Content Management 
