US 5881213

I'll search for the specific patent number as requested.

Let me run additional targeted searches for litigation/CAFC docket activity.

US Patent 5,881,213 — "Deferred Printing"

Verification note: I searched for the exact number 5881213 and found consistent records across Google Patents, USPTO-report, Justia, and the patent's own PDF/OCR text. The details below come from the authoritative patent text you supplied plus corroborating public records.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (as issued)

Facilities are provided within an operating system for supporting deferred printing of print jobs. The process of spooling a print job and the process of despooling the print job are decoupled, such that a printer need not be available at the time of spooling. Print jobs are spooled in a device-independent format, such as the enhanced metafile format. The print jobs may be spooled without a printer driver being installed for a target printer or without the target printer being connected to the system. Later, when the target printer becomes available, the print job is despooled and printed. A configuration database holds different printer configurations that list available printers in different environments... When a currently active machine configuration changes, the system checks for spooled jobs on printers that were previously unavailable and are now available and asks the user if the user wishes to start printing these spooled print jobs.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has 24 claims, of which eight are independent: 1, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, and 22 (12–14 and 22–24 are the medium/software counterparts of the method claims).

• Claim 1 (method — connection-state decision): When a user prints to a named printer while the computer is coupled to it, the job is spooled in the normal device-specific format; when the user prints to the same printer while it is decoupled (computer can't communicate with it), the job is instead spooled in a device-independent format so it can be despooled later. Core idea: the spool format is chosen based on connectivity at print time.

• Claim 6 (method — portable computer and network): While a laptop is connected to a network, a print job to a network printer is spooled in device-dependent form; while the laptop is disconnected, a job to the same network printer is spooled device-independently. On reconnection, the system determines the spooled job's printer is now available and despools it to print. This is the "roaming/mobile user" scenario.

• Claim 8 (system/apparatus): A computer system with a couplable/decouplable printer, a program that initiates print jobs, and an operating system spooler that spools in device-dependent format when the printer is coupled and in device-independent format otherwise (e.g., the type of target printer need not be known and its driver need not be available).

• Claim 10 (method — printer known but not yet installed): Before a printer has been installed on the computer (though the computer knows of it), a first print job destined for it is spooled in a printer-independent format for deferred printing; after the printer is installed, a later job to that printer is spooled in printer-dependent format for immediate printing.

• Claim 12 (computer-readable storage medium): The storage-medium counterpart to Claim 1 — instructions that (a) spool device-specifically when the printer is coupled and (b) spool device-independently when the printer is decoupled.

• Claim 13 (computer-readable storage medium): The storage-medium counterpart to Claim 10 — spooling printer-independently before installation and printer-dependently after installation.

• Claim 15 (method — transparent deferral / "fake success"): The program issues printing commands to the OS identifying a printer, expecting immediate printing. The OS determines the printer is presently unavailable, and in response (i) persistently stores the print-command information in device-independent format for later printing, and (ii) returns to the program an indication that the print job was successfully completed and printed, even though it was not actually printed. This "report success to the caller" transparency feature is a notable claim element (dependent claims 17–19 specify the unavailability reasons: driver inaccessible, printer not connected, or not authorized to print to it).

• Claim 22 (computer-readable medium): The medium counterpart to Claim 15's transparent-deferral method (including the false-success return).

Dependent-claim highlights: spooling in enhanced-metafile format (3, 7); driver not yet installed (4); despooling when the program is no longer running (5); despooler that prints once the printer is coupled and its driver available (9, 14); monitoring for printer availability before printing the deferred job (20, 21).

CAFC / litigation search result — uncertainty flagged

I found no authoritative CAFC 2026 docket entries for US 5,881,213, and I cannot confirm any. Searches of Federal Circuit materials for "5881213" or "5,881,213" returned no matching appeal, brief, or docket caption. The only litigation-adjacent hit for the number was an unrelated USPTO petition document (ptacts.uspto.gov, petition 1549382) that merely listed "US-5881213-$.DID." alongside other patent numbers in a document-tracking table — not a court proceeding.

Two cautionary points:

1. The patent expired 2014‑10‑05 (recorded as "Expired – Lifetime"), making a new 2026 Federal Circuit infringement appeal on this patent unlikely.
2. I want to be explicit: absence of search results is not proof of absence. I do not have direct, authoritative access to PACER or the CAFC docket system, so if you need a definitive "no litigation/no appeal" finding for 2026, it should be verified directly against PACER/CM‑ECF and the Federal Circuit's docket, or a commercial database (Lexis, Docket Navigator, Bloomberg Law).

Sources consulted (URLs)

• Google Patents, US5881213A — https://patents.google.com/patent/US5881213/en
• USPTO.report grant record — https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5881213
• Justia patent page — https://patents.justia.com/patent/5881213
• Google Patents PDF (embedded text) — https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e3/fb/d4/c68f1f24a7d0fd/US5881213.pdf

If you'd like, I can next compare this patent's claims against its sibling US 5,960,168 (the other continuation) or against a specific piece of prior art from its cited references (e.g., US 5,604,843, which shares inventor Shaw).

I'll search for litigation involving US 5,881,213.

Let me search litigation-specific databases.

Let me try litigation-specific databases with more targeted queries.

Bottom line

I could not identify any litigation — district court, ITC, or Federal Circuit — involving U.S. Patent No. 5,881,213 ("Deferred printing," Microsoft). Nothing in the search results ties the number to a plaintiff, defendant, case caption, or docket. Because I am reporting a negative, I want to be precise about what I checked and where the limits of that check lie (see "Caveats" below).

What I actually found for "5881213"

Notably, 5,881,213's anticipated expiration was 2014‑10‑05 ("Expired – Lifetime"), and the patent was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC effective 2014‑10‑14 (recorded 2014‑12‑09). A patent that expired in 2014 would have had to be asserted before that date for injunctive relief; damages would be limited by 35 U.S.C. § 286's six-year lookback. This is consistent with the absence of any assertion campaign in the record I retrieved — but it is contextual reasoning, not proof of non-litigation.

Caveats — please read before relying on the negative

1. Tool and access limits. This session's search returned general web results. I was not able to execute a direct query against the Unified Patents litigation caselist (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), Docket Navigator, RPX Insight, PACER, or CourtListener's docket search. A negative result from general web search is considerably weaker than a negative result from those databases.
2. Number-format sensitivity. Some databases index only the unpunctuated form ("5881213") and others only the punctuated form ("5,881,213"), and some index the asserted patent only in complaint exhibits rather than in a searchable field. Note also that I saw one unrelated hit — a Lithuanian corporate registry notice "Pranešimo Nr. 5881213" — which is plainly not this patent; I am flagging it so it is not mistaken for a litigation record.
3. Do not treat 5,960,168 as 5,881,213. They are parent/continuation family members with distinct claims. I found no litigation for either, but they must be searched separately.
4. No fabrication. I will not supply a plaintiff, defendant, case number, jurisdiction, filing date, or status for a case I cannot verify. Inventing a caption here would be worse than reporting "none found."

Recommended verification steps

To close this out with confidence, run these directly:

• Unified Patents litigation caselist — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist, filtered on patent number 5881213 (also check their per-patent page, e.g. portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/5881213).
• CourtListener / RECAP — https://www.courtlistener.com/?type=r&q=%225881213%22 and separately q=%225%2C881%2C213%22; the RECAP docket search surfaces complaints even when the patent is only in an exhibit.
• PACER Case Locator — nationwide party search for "Microsoft" as plaintiff with nature-of-suit 830 (patent), 1994–2014, then filter by patent-in-suit in the complaints.
• Google Patents — the patent's own page (patents.google.com/patent/US5881213/en) and the "Similar Documents" list (which surfaced US 5,602,974, "Device independent spooling in a print architecture" — a closely related, separately-owned patent worth checking for its own litigation history).
• Federal Circuit — cafc.uscourts.gov opinion search for the patent number, in case any district case was appealed and the number appears only in the opinion.
• PTAB — confirm the petition at ptacts.uspto.gov petition ID 1549382 and identify its subject patent; if '213 was relied on as prior art there, that proceeding is worth documenting, but it is a validity challenge involving a different patent, not litigation of '213.

If you want, I can take a specific follow-up angle — for example, focusing on the Flexiworld/Electronics For Imaging IPR families where '213 appears as a cited reference, or on Microsoft's 1994-era spooling portfolio generally — and report back on whether any of those trails lead to an actual case involving '213.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 5,881,213: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings for this patent, and independent web searches surface no PTAB trial naming it as the challenged patent. Breakdown by status is therefore moot — there is nothing active, nothing invalidated, nothing sustained, nothing settled, and no institution denials. The bottom-line defensive posture for a defendant is not "the patent has survived two IPRs and is hardened," and it is not "claims 1–5 have been canceled." It is simply: no one has ever attacked this patent at the PTAB, and the patent is expired (priority date 1994-10-05; anticipated expiration 2014-10-05, per the structured data and Google Patents). Any current assertion of this patent faces a threshold timing/expiration problem far more dispositive than any IPR would be.

I want to be explicit about a caveat: my searches returned several hits that mention 5,881,213 — but in every case the patent appears as a cited reference in someone else's PTAB petition (e.g., a claim-chart / prior-art citation line in a Unified Patents IPR petition document at ptacts.uspto.gov), or as a "Similar Documents" / "Cited By" entry on Google Patents (the Flexiworld Technologies family, JP 2012-079334, and others cite it as prior art). None of those is a proceeding on the '213 patent. Do not read those hits as PTAB activity against this patent.

---

No proceedings to detail

Because there is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, or Final Written Decision on file, I will not manufacture the per-proceeding blocks the template calls for — there is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to populate, and inventing one would violate the constraint against fabricating proceeding numbers. For completeness, here is what I checked and what I found:

---

Strategic summary

Claim status. No claim of 5,881,213 has ever been CANCELED by the PTAB, and none has been SUSTAINED by the PTAB either — because no IPR, PGR, or CBM was ever filed against it. Every claim (1–24, as issued) is therefore UNTESTED at the Board. The claims stand exactly as the examiner allowed them in 1999: independent claims 1, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, and 22, with their dependents. Meanwhile, the patent's anticipated expiration was 2014-10-05 (20 years from the 1994-10-05 priority date), and the structured data shows status "Expired – Lifetime." So the practical claim status is: untested by the PTAB, and expired by operation of law for over a decade.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue here — it only attaches to a petitioner who was actually a party to an instituted IPR, and there is no such petitioner. That cuts both ways for a defendant: there is no preclusive "IPR-art wall" constraining what prior-art grounds you could raise, but there is also no cheap, PTAB-validated path to invalidating the claims. Any defense would have to be litigated in district court or the ITC, where you would litigate validity and infringement of 1999-era claims without the benefit of a Board decision.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all). No PTAB appeals by the patent owner, because there is no FWD to appeal. No defensive aggregator — Unified Patents appears in my searches only because a different Unified petition cites 5,881,213 as prior art; Unified has not challenged this patent. The absence of PTAB activity is itself the signal here: this was a 1994-filed Microsoft OS patent that expired in 2014 and was reassigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC in 2014 — it was never a live assertion target during the IPR era (2012 onward), so it never attracted a petition. Contrast that with the Flexiworld Technologies family, which cites this patent heavily as prior art and did generate substantial later litigation — that is a different patent owner's fight, not this one's.

---

Recommended next steps

• No PTAB activity exists on US 5,881,213. State that plainly to whoever is evaluating this patent. There is no Final Written Decision to link to, no institution decision to read, and no claim canceled to quote. I will not connect you to a decision that does not exist.
• Lead with the expiration, not the Board. The structured data records an anticipated expiration of 2014-10-05 and status "Expired – Lifetime." If a demand letter cites 5,881,213, the first question is whether the asserted acts occurred before expiration — infringement liability (and damages) cannot attach to post-expiration conduct, and pre-expiration damages are time-barred under 35 U.S.C. § 286 in most scenarios. Verify current legal status against USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier before relying on this, since "Expired – Lifetime" is characterized in the source as a status assumption.
• If you do need to attack the claims (e.g., to support a validity challenge to a pre-2014 damages theory), you would be building from scratch: no petitioner estoppel to worry about, but no Board record either. The prior art that cites this patent — the Flexiworld family and other post-1999 references — is not itself available as § 102 art against a 1994-priority patent; you would need true pre-1994 references directed to spooling a print job in a device-independent format (e.g., the EMF/GDI spooling art and the § 102(b) references cited on the face of the patent, such as Hitachi's 4,829,468, Sharp's 5,081,579, and Xerox's 5,287,194).
• Bottom line for a defendant: the IPR story on this patent is a null set, and the real defense is expiration plus damages timing. Treat "no PTAB activity" as the headline, not as a gap in the research — I searched for it and it is genuinely absent as of the most recent ODP ingest and the date of these searches.

I'll verify the assignment record against public sources before reconstructing the chain.

Let me check for any additional assignment records and the sibling patent's chain.

Let me check for the correspondent of record and any assertion activity.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 5,881,213 ("Deferred Printing")

Verification-scope note: I reconstructed this chain from (a) the authoritative patent text/legal-events table you supplied, (b) Espacenet INPADOC legal-status records, and (c) third-party mirrors of the USPTO assignment data. I could not directly query the USPTO Assignment Center UI (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) from this environment, so reel/frame values below are the ones surfaced by Google Patents/INPADOC rather than a live Assignment-Center pull. Where I am inferring rather than reading a record, I say so.

---

Inventors

Pattern assessment: No unusual pattern. All four inventors share the Redmond, WA corporate address of the assignee, consistent with a normal in-house engineering team on an OS print-subsystem project (the patent is implemented "as part of the operating system 22," i.e., Windows NT). There is no evidence — in the patent text or the assignment records I could access — of the inventors departing Microsoft within 12 months of filing, and no separate inventor-held or inventor-assigned interests are recorded. The inventor set is not the signature of an NPE-created portfolio (no single prolific "named inventor of record" entity, no assignment to an individual).

---

Original assignee

Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) — named as assignee on the issued patent.

• Primary line of business: Software — operating systems and applications. The patented subject matter (decoupling spooling from despooling, device-independent enhanced-metafile (EMF) spooling, per-docking-state printer configurations) was shipped in a product: the specification expressly states the technology is implemented as part of "the MICROSOFT® WINDOWS® NT Operating System." This is a true operating-company patent, not a paper asset.
• Current status: Operating. Microsoft remains a going concern and has never filed for bankruptcy. On 2014-10-14 (recorded 2014-12-09) Microsoft carved its patent portfolio into Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (MTL), a wholly-owned subsidiary at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, which is the current assignee of record per Google Patents' legal events.
• Note on the patent itself: Legal status is Expired – Lifetime, anticipated expiration 2014-10-05 (20 years from the 1994-10-05 priority date). The patent was already expired or expiring at the time of the MTL transfer, and no maintenance fees were due after the Year-12 payment (2010-08-11).

---

Assignment timeline

The recorded post-issuance chain for US 5,881,213 is short — a single recorded transfer, and it is an intra-corporate reorganization, not an arm's-length sale.

• Executed 2014-10-14 / recorded 2014-12-09 — Reel 034541/0001
  • Conveyance: Assignment ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST")
  • Assignor: Microsoft Corporation
  • Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052)
  • Correspondent: CPA Global Limited, Liberation House, Castle Street, St Helier, JE1 1BL, Jersey. ⚠️ Flag: the same reel block (034541) covers the Microsoft → MTL bulk transfer of roughly 5,000 properties (~451 pages) recorded on 2014-12-09. A sibling property in the same block (app 10/369,006, reel 034541/0477) lists correspondent CPA Global Limited with the identical execution/recording dates. I did not see the frame-specific correspondent for 034541/0001 directly, so I mark CPA Global as the likely/probable correspondent for this frame on the strength of the shared reel block — not a confirmed read. CPA Global is a mass IP-recordation/annuity services firm; recurrence here reflects a bulk corporate transfer, not an NPE-family "repeat-player" attorney.
  • Context: Internal corporate reorganization — Microsoft centralized its patent estate into MTL for licensing administration. No change in ultimate control.

Gaps / caveats (stated plainly):

1. No pre-issuance assignment (inventors → Microsoft) is surfaced in the Google Patents legal-events table (which shows only STCF grant in 1999 and the 2014 MTL assignment). Because Microsoft is named on the face of the patent as assignee, an inventor-to-corporate assignment must have been executed during prosecution; its reel/frame simply is not exposed in the data I could reach. This is a data gap, not evidence of a missing assignment.
2. If the Assignment Center shows no records at all for this patent, the fallback reading is that the sole record is the 2014 MTL link; I could not confirm the complete set of records directly.
3. The sibling patent US 5,960,168 (app 09/205,629, the other continuation of the same 1994 priority chain) shares the same inventors and original assignee and would have been swept into the same MTL transfer.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "5881213")
• Legacy Assignment Search: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5881213/en

---

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5881213
    1994 : Filed by Microsoft Corporation
         : Inventors assign rights to Microsoft
    1999 : Patent issued to Microsoft Corporation
    2014 : Reel 034541 0001
         : Microsoft to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC
         : Bulk internal portfolio transfer

---

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. The only recorded post-issuance transfer (2014-10-14 exec / 2014-12-09 rec, reel 034541/0001) runs from Microsoft Corporation to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC, a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA — not a single-purpose licensing LLC at a registered-agent address. Although the name ends in "Licensing," the substance is an intra-corporate reorganization of an operating company's own portfolio (the same record series spans ~5,000 properties). No unaffiliated entity ever took title.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. No assignee in the chain (Microsoft Corporation; Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC) matches the public NPE lists named in the brief — Acacia, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, or Spangenberg entities — nor any Unified Patents / RPX high-frequency-plaintiff roster. MTL does license patents, and Microsoft has asserted patents as an operating company in other matters, but no assertion naming this patent was found.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — NOT PRESENT / UNCLEAR. The only correspondent surfaced is CPA Global Limited (Jersey) on the 2014 reel-034541 block. There is no recurrence within this chain (one transfer) and no basis to characterize CPA Global as an NPE-family filing agent; it is a mass corporate-recordation service. Marked not present as an NPE tell.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. The chain contains a single recorded transfer (2014), not multiple chained LLC hops within 24 months. No shared-correspondent multi-hop pattern.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. No infringement suit naming US 5,881,213 was found. The 2014 transfer post-dates the 1994 priority date by ~20 years, is an internal reorganization, and the patent expired 2014-10-05 — the transfer is unconnected to any assertion, let alone one within 6 months.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. Microsoft never filed Chapter 7/11; no court-supervised patent sale (Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid style) touches this asset.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No evidence — in the assignment record, in the RBX/Unified/Patent-Progress type sources I could search, or in any SEC filing — of Microsoft transferring this patent to an NPE to assert on its behalf.

8. Defensive aggregator / anti-NPE — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates within the original operating company's corporate family (Microsoft Corporation → MTL).

---

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the sense that no affirmative NPE/assertion theory is supported by any record: the ownership chain consists of the original inventors assigning to Microsoft and a single 2014-12-09 intra-corporate transfer to Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (reel 034541/0001, executed 2014-10-14, probable correspondent CPA Global Limited). There is no recorded transfer to any unaffiliated NPE, no known asserter in the chain, no pre-litigation transfer, and no assertion naming the patent — so none of the "NPE" or "operating-company assertion" verdicts is warranted, and the chain does not end at a defensive aggregator either. Substantively, this is a clean operating-company ownership chain that was never asserted and has been expired since 2014-10-05; if a substantive label is required, "operating-company, non-asserted" describes it, but the only affirmative evidence is the single internal MTL reorganization.

Bottom line for the ownership question: This is not an NPE/troll asset. The chain is Microsoft (original assignee, product shipped in Windows NT) → Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC (wholly-owned holding subsidiary) via the December 2014 bulk portfolio reorganization (reel 034541/0001). The one investigative artifact worth carrying forward is the correspondent pattern on the 034541 reel block (CPA Global Limited, Jersey) — useful as a baseline for distinguishing genuine bulk corporate transfers from NPE-family filings, since it is a mass-recording agent rather than a repeat-player plaintiff-side attorney. Verify the frame-specific correspondent for 034541/0001 directly in the Assignment Center before relying on it.

I'll verify the patent record and pull details on the cited references. Running targeted searches in parallel.

Verification note

I confirmed the target record against the authoritative patent text you supplied and live search hits (Google Patents US5881213A; the patent's own PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US5881213.pdf; uspto.report/patent/grant/5881213; Justia). This is US 5,881,213, application 08/960,722, filed 1997‑10‑29, priority 1994‑10‑05, granted 1999‑03‑09, Microsoft "Deferred Printing." I did not substitute any similar number. In particular:

• US 5,960,168 is the sibling continuation (app. 09/205,629) — a different patent with different claims. Not the target.
• US 5,602,974 ("Device independent spooling in a print architecture," filed 1994‑10‑05) and US 5,699,495 ("Point-and-print in a distributed environment") are Microsoft siblings that appear in the citing literature but are not among the references cited on the face of '213. They are same‑era/same‑assignee art, not §102 references to '213, so I treat them only as context.
• The 11 references below are exactly the "Patent Citations (11)" list printed on the face of US 5,881,213.

Source caveat (per your instruction): I queried via Google Patents / public web mirrors rather than the USPTO Patent Public Search API directly. The bibliographic data and the citation list match the authoritative patent text, but if you need a verbatim USPTO Full‑Text or PatentCenter record, that should be pulled directly.

---

Threshold: do these references even qualify as §102 prior art?

'213 has an effective priority date of 1994‑10‑05 and is a pre‑AIA patent. Under pre‑AIA §102 the cited references divide as follows (dates from the face of '213):

Two structural points matter for your analysis: (1) the three references that issued after the 1994 priority date (5,604,843; 5,566,278; 5,579,087) can only be §102(e) art, keyed to their filing dates, not their issue dates; and (2) none of the 11 identifies the target printer's own inventor overlap — 5,604,843 is a Microsoft patent but with different inventive entity.

---

Element‑by‑element relevance to '213's claims

Before mapping references, restate the distinctive limitations that any §102 reference must disclose to anticipate the independent claims (from your earlier summary, which I'm building on, not repeating):

• Format‑selected‑by‑connectivity — device‑specific spooling when the printer is coupled, device‑independent spooling when decoupled (claims 1, 6, 8, 12).
• Deferred despooling after availability — print later when the printer/driver becomes available (claims 2, 5, 9, 11, 14, 20, 21, 24; dependent to the above).
• Pre‑installation printer — spool printer‑independent before a known‑but‑not‑installed printer is installed, printer‑dependent afterward (claims 10, 13).
• Transparent "false‑success" return — OS tells the calling program the job printed even though it did not (claims 15, 22; reasons in 17–19).
• Enhanced‑metafile spooling (claims 3, 7).

The cited art clusters almost entirely in print servers, spoolers, and device‑driver interfaces — i.e., infrastructure that '213 builds on. That is a critical framing point: '213's own Background section concedes this field as conventional.

1. US 4,829,468 — Hitachi, "Print control system" (filed 1987‑09‑18; issued 1989‑05‑09)

• Source: citation list on face of '213.
• Description: A print control system — job control/formatting for a printer in a host‑peripheral arrangement. Generic host‑to‑printer control.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(b). This is the weakest of the set. It is not directed to device‑independent vs device‑specific spooling selected by connectivity, nor to transparent deferral.
• Potentially anticipates: none of the independent claims on the record available to me. Best characterized as background/§103 art only.

2. US 5,081,579 — Sharp, "System for changing print format" (filed 1986‑10‑06; issued 1992‑01‑14)

• Description: A system that changes print format — i.e., reformats/reconfigures the data representation delivered to a printer.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(b). The "format change" concept brushes against the device‑independent ↔ device‑specific conversion idea of claim 1's step (c)/(f) and claim 10's format switch.
• Potentially anticipates: on the available abstract alone, it does not disclose conditioning the spool format on whether the printer is coupled. It might be argued against a narrow reading of the "convert format" substeps, but not against full claims 1, 6, 8, 10, 12 or 15. §103 candidate for the format‑conversion aspect; §102 weak.

3. US 5,303,336 — Hitachi, "Printing system including print server" (filed 1990‑05‑14; issued 1994‑04‑12)

• Description: A printing system with a print server managing jobs among printers — job queuing/routing.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(e). Relevant to the spooler/queue/multi‑printer management environment of claims 8 and 6, and to the machine‑configuration/availability aspects.
• Potentially anticipates: it addresses a print server and job management but does not disclose the connectivity‑conditional device‑independent spooling that defines claims 1/6/8/12, nor the false‑success return of claim 15. §103 candidate (server + spooler architecture).

4. US 5,268,993 — Minolta, "Printer" (filed 1990‑06‑04; issued 1993‑12‑07)

• Description: A printer (title is generic; the face of '213 gives no informative subtitle).
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(e).
• Potentially anticipates: nothing specific is discernible from the citation metadata alone. Absent the full specification, I cannot responsibly tie it to any claim. Treat as background. (Flagged rather than guessed — I will not fabricate a disclosure.)

5. US 5,228,118 — Brother, "Printing system wherein one of printer drivers … is selected based on interpreters available on the printer" (filed 1991‑06‑29; issued 1993‑07‑13)

• Description: Printer‑driver selection driven by which interpreters (page‑description languages) the printer supports — i.e., choosing/composing the driver based on the target printer's capabilities.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(b). This is the cited reference most directly aimed at driver availability/selection, which is the conceptual heart of '213's claims 10/13 (printer known but not yet installed / driver unavailable) and claim 4 (driver not yet installed).
• Potentially anticipates: claims 10 and 13 are arguably the closest fit if 5,228,118 discloses (a) the driver being absent at the host and (b) a deferred spooling in a printer‑independent format before driver installation. On its title it concerns selection among drivers the system already has to match printer interpreters — which is a different thing from deferring a job because no driver exists. So: strong §103 reference against 10/13's driver‑availability rationale; not a clean §102 anticipation.

6. US 5,299,296 — Ricoh, "Multi‑function machine with interleaved job execution" (filed 1991‑10‑17; issued 1994‑03‑29)

• Description: A multi‑function peripheral that interleaves job execution among functions — job scheduling/sequencing.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(e). Touches the queue/scheduling mechanics of a spooler.
• Potentially anticipates: the despooling/monitoring concepts of claims 20/21 only in the loosest sense (job execution management). Does not disclose connectivity‑conditional format selection or false‑success. §103/background only.

7. US 5,287,434 — Monarch Marking Systems, "Barcode identification system spooler" (filed 1991‑10‑28; issued 1994‑02‑15)

• Description: A spooler used in a barcode identification/labeling system.
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(e). Establishes spooling itself as old — direct support for '213's admission that "many conventional operating systems support the spooling of print jobs" (Background).
• Potentially anticipates: none of the independent claims. Its value is as §103 evidence that spooling was well known, narrowing what '213 can claim as novel.

8. US 5,287,194 — Xerox, "Distributed printing" (filed 1992‑11‑25; issued 1994‑02‑15)

• Description (confirmed from the record): A printshop scheduler / print server that keeps print jobs in a print‑spooler storage (spooler 60), schedules jobs to local or remote printers based on printer capability and availability, and notifies the user where the job was scheduled and when completion is expected. Explicitly discusses allocating a job when "all printers are currently printing" and rerouting to "the next available printer on the network."
• §102 relevance: §102(a)/(e). This is the most substantive of the server‑centric references. Relevant to: availability‑based routing (claims 6, 8), user notification of where/when printing occurs (the "apprise the user" aspect of claim 15's environment and the machine‑configuration notification of the specification), and queue/availability determination (claims 20/21).
• Potentially anticipates: It does not appear to disclose spooling a job in a device‑independent format because the target volume/printer is offline/decoupled and later desp‑ooling it on reconnection; its model assumes the network server is reachable and merely re‑allocates among available printers. So §103 candidate; not a standalone §102 hit on claims 1/6/8/12/15.

9. US 5,604,843 — Microsoft, "Method and system for interfacing with a computer output device" (filed 1992‑12‑23; issued 1997‑02‑18)

• Description (confirmed from the record): A device‑driver architecture — a minidriver per device + a universal driver, invoked through the graphics device interface (GDI) using a device context handle. Explicitly frames its goal as an output‑device‑independent application environment ("an application program can output its data to various types of devices without modification… the operating system can redirect output of application program data to a display, printer, or file without the application program being aware of the redirection").
• §102 relevance: §102(e) only (filed 1992‑12‑23, before priority). This is the reference most aligned with '213's device‑independence mechanism — GDI + device context + driver indirection is exactly the infrastructure '213's FIGs 3–5 rely on. It is precisely the kind of art that made '213's use of EMF spooling implementable.
• Potentially anticipates: the device‑independent output interface recited in claims 1(c)/(f), 8, 10(c), 12, and the GDI/device‑driver invocation of claim 16. But it does not disclose deferred spooling on unavailability, connectivity‑conditional format selection, or the false‑success return. So it is the strongest §103 combination anchor, and possibly a §102 reference against the "device context / GDI / driver" sub‑limitations — but not the whole of any independent claim.

10. US 5,566,278 — Taligent, "Object oriented printing system" (filed 1993‑08‑24; issued 1996‑10‑15)

• Description (confirmed from the record): An object‑oriented printing framework with: a spooler that stores printable information in an intermediate storage location; a printer handler including a despooler that retrieves the stored printable information and forms a data stream; conversion of the print job to the "native imaging model of the print device"; and explicit support for connecting the local computer to a remote computer system having a print device. Its claim 8 recites steps: (e) spooling the printable information onto a storage device of the local computer; (f) connecting the local computer to a remote computer system having a print device coupled thereto; (g) converting the printable information to a native imaging model of the print device; (h)–(i) modifying and transmitting to the print device for printing.
• §102 relevance: §102(e) only.
• Potentially anticipates: This is the closest structural analogue in the cited set to '213's core: spool‑then‑later‑connect‑then‑convert‑then‑print is very near the FIG. 3 flow (steps 34→38→40). Relevance spans claims 1, 6, 8, 10, 12 and the despool/convert dependent claims (2, 9, 11, 14). The likely distinctions preserved are '213's (i) format selection conditioned on the printer being decoupled/unknown, and (ii) the transparent false‑success return (claim 15/22). But 5,566,278 merits detailed, side‑by‑side claim‑charting — it is the one reference I would not dismiss as mere §103 filler.

11. US 5,579,087 — Xerox, "Constructing a multi‑segment print job from multiple local or remote sources using a network interface" (filed 1994‑08‑09; issued 1996‑11‑26)

• Description (confirmed from the record): A network user interface that builds a multi‑segment print job from documents dispersed locally/remotely on a network, identifies segment locations, specifies job characteristics, selects a printer on the network, and forwards segments to that printer — with segments not all retrieved to the workstation before printing.
• §102 relevance: §102(e) only; filed 1994‑08‑09, ~2 months before '213's priority.
• Potentially anticipates: It addresses network print job composition/forwarding and printer selection (relevant to the network/portable‑computer claims 6 and the multi‑printer environment of 8). It does not disclose spooling in a device‑independent format on a portable computer while disconnected and desp‑ooling on reconnection — its orientation is online job assembly. §103/background.

---

Consolidated relevance map (claims ← references)

---

Bottom line

1. No single cited reference discloses every element of any independent claim, and I found no clean §102 anticipation on the record available to me. The two references that come closest to the core "spool first, print later when the printer becomes available" idea are US 5,566,278 (Taligent) and, for the device‑independence machinery, US 5,604,843 (Microsoft) — both are §102(e)-only art keyed to their pre‑1994 filing dates.

2. The references that are most likely to matter are §103 combinations, not standalone anticipations: e.g., 5,566,278 (spool + later connect + convert) in view of 5,604,843 (device‑independent GDI/driver interface) and 5,228,118 (driver availability/selection), against claims 1, 6, 8, 10, 12.

3. Claim 15/22 (the transparent "false‑success" return) appears to have no counterpart in any of the 11 cited references — the OS falsely reporting "printed" to a program whose job was actually deferred is not a feature of server/scheduler/driver‑architecture art. If any validity attack targets '213, this limitation is its strongest point of distinction.

4. Two honesty caveats you asked me to preserve:

   • I analyzed from the citation metadata on the face of '213 plus abstracts/claims where they surfaced in search. I do not have the full specifications of US 4,829,468, US 5,268,993, or US 5,228,118 in front of me, so for those I have flagged rather than asserted what they disclose. I did not fabricate disclosures.
   • Your instruction was to search the USPTO database. My retrieval was via Google Patents/patent‑images.uspto.gov/uspto.report mirrors; the data matches the authoritative patent text, but a Government‑record pull (PatentCenter / Patent Public Search) would be the belt‑and‑suspenders confirmation. I also found no litigation involving '213 in this pass — consistent with the earlier section's negative and with its 2014‑10‑05 expiration.

If you want, I can next build a claim chart mapping Taligent '278's claims 4–5 and 8–12 element‑by‑element against '213's claims 1, 6, and 8, or pull the full specifications of the three references I flagged to firm up the §102 vs §103 boundary.

I'll verify the disclosure and dates of the key prior-art references before mapping them to the claims.

Let me verify the remaining cited references and confirm the same-day sibling patent.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,881,213 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: April 26, 2026 · Patent: US 5,881,213 ("Deferred printing," Microsoft) · Effective filing date: October 5, 1994 · Grant: March 9, 1999 · Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2014‑10‑05)

Builds on (does not repeat): the claim summary, litigation section, and PTAB section already generated. Those sections established the claim set (independent claims 1, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 22), the absence of any litigation or AIA trial, and the expiration. This section assumes that work and addresses only § 103.

Two contradictions / corrections to the earlier sections I must flag up front:

1. US 5,602,974 is not "separately-owned." The earlier litigation section described US 5,602,974 ("Device independent spooling in a print architecture") as "a closely related, separately-owned patent." My search results show Microsoft Corporation as the assignee, with the same 1994‑10‑05 date and the same inventor lineage ("Shaw et al."). Search results control here. This materially changes the § 103 analysis — see § 1.3 below.
2. US 5,602,974 is a same-day-filed Microsoft sibling, not merely a "similar document." It should be treated as a family/ODP issue first and a prior-art reference second.

Search limitation (disclosed): my verification calls returned full disclosure text for US 5,602,974, US 5,572,087, US 5,287,194, US 5,604,843, US 5,303,336, and US 5,602,974's family data. The tool hit its step limit before I could independently confirm the disclosure text of US 4,829,468, US 5,081,579, US 5,228,118, US 5,268,993, US 5,287,434, US 5,299,296, and US 5,566,278. For those seven I use only their titles and the assignee/date data on the patent page, and I mark them [title-only, unverified disclosure] rather than asserting content I did not retrieve.

---

1. Threshold issues that determine whether any § 103 case can be made

1.1 Which references are actually available as § 103 art

The page's prior-art section supplies eleven U.S. patent citations. Sorting them by the operative pre‑AIA subsection (the patent's 1994‑10‑05 filing date predates the AIA, so pre‑AIA § 102/§ 103 governs):

Two consequences the earlier sections did not develop:

• The 44 "Cited By" references are useless as § 103 art. Every one of them post-dates 1994 (Xerox 5,974,234; IBM 6,288,790; the entire Flexiworld/EFI/Sharp families). They are cited against the '213 claims by later examiners; they cannot be cited against a 1994‑priority patent. Anyone building a § 103 challenge from the "Cited By" list is building on sand.
• The three § 102(e)-only references are the most technically on-point and the most legally fragile. US 5,604,843 is the GDI/minidriver reference; US 5,579,087 is the network-job-assembly reference; US 5,566,278 is the object-oriented printing reference. All three reached the examiner, and all three depend on § 102(e) rather than a printed publication.

1.2 The same-day sibling problem — US 5,602,974

My search confirms US 5,602,974 was filed on 1994‑10‑05 (priority date 1994‑10‑05; issued 1997‑02‑11; assignee Microsoft Corporation) and claims, in the alternative, exactly the '213 concept:

"The document is spooled so that it is stored on the storage device in a device-independent format. The document is then later de-spooled to print the document on the selected printer. Thus, where the computer system is a portable computer, the document may be spooled while the portable is disconnected from the printers and then later de-spooled when the portable computer is again connected to the printers." (US 5,602,974, Summary)

That is claim 6 of the '213 patent, in Microsoft's own words, in a same-day filing. Three things follow:

1. As § 103 art it is problematic, not strong. Its filing date is the same day as the '213 priority date, not before it; and § 103(c) (in the pre‑AIPA form applicable to a 1997-filed application) applies to § 102(f)/(g) art, with the AIPA expansion to § 102(e) art effective November 29, 1999 for applications filed on or after that date — a rule whose application to a 1994-priority/1997-filed case I flag as uncertain and requiring verification, not as settled. If the current regime's common-ownership carve-out applies, US 5,602,974 (Microsoft) and US 5,604,843 (Microsoft) are disqualified as § 103 combination art altogether, which would explain a great deal about why the '213 claims issued over art that reads so close to them.
2. It is a double-patenting target. Two Microsoft patents, same filing date, overlapping specification, claims that differ mainly in when the device-independent spool decision is triggered. That is a non-statutory (obviousness-type) double patenting question, not an obviousness question — and it is a cleaner attack than § 103 if the goal is to take down the '213 claims.
3. Inventor overlap matters. If the inventive entities of '213 (Shaw, Teng, Sykes, Endres) and '974 overlap, the "by another" requirement of § 102(a)/(e) is defeated for the overlapping subject matter. The '974 inventor list is reported as "Shaw et al." Verify the full entity before relying on either reference.

1.3 The patent's own admission

The Background of the '213 patent states: "When spooling print jobs, if a printer is unknown, the print job cannot be spooled. Moreover, if a print driver for the target printer is not yet installed, the print job cannot be spooled." This is a specification admission that spooling itself, and device-specific spooling, was conventional. The § 103 question therefore collapses to a narrow one: was it obvious in 1994 to (a) spool in a device-independent format and (b) select between device-specific and device-independent spooling based on whether the target printer is reachable? The specification also admits the "return success at spool time" behavior at FIG. 3 step 36 ("the application program that initiated the printing request is informed that it is done printing… The printing is completed asynchronously") — a direct admission against claims 15 and 22, discussed in Ground F.

1.4 Level of ordinary skill

B.S. in computer science or electrical engineering, or equivalent, plus two to three years designing printer drivers, spoolers, or OS graphics/output subsystems, with working familiarity with GDI/metafile architectures, network print servers, and portable-computer docking. This is a routine-skills art in 1994: spooling, print queues, network print servers, printer availability databases, and metafiles were all mature, documented technologies (see US 5,287,194 and US 5,303,336 below).

---

2. Grounds of rejection

Ground A — Claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12: availability-triggered spool-format selection

Combination: US 5,287,194 (Lobiondo/Xerox) in view of US 5,566,278 (Taligent) and/or US 5,579,087 (Xerox), further in view of US 5,604,843 (Microsoft).

Motivation (KSR-recognizable):

• Known elements, predictable result. Spooling, print queues, availability databases, and printer routing were each known; combining an availability check with a format decision yields nothing more than the expected sum of the parts.
• Design incentive / design choice. US 5,287,194 itself poses the problem of jobs that cannot complete on the designated printer and resolves it by inspecting availability and deferring/redirecting, prompting the user with alternatives. Once availability is already being polled (which '194 does continuously), keying the spool format to the availability answer is a design choice within the ordinary skill.
• Market pressure. Portable-computer docking was the central 1993–94 problem in this art; '194's own user-prompting mechanism ("electronically prompting said user if any of said locations cannot complete said job") is the same user-notification hook the '213 patent uses at FIG. 7 steps 73–75.

Weakness of this ground: '194 is a scheduler reference — its disclosure is directed to distributing whole jobs among available printers, and it does not expressly teach that an unreachable printer is nevertheless offered as a print target whose job is stored in device-independent form. Under a strict reading, the "spooling the second print job in a device-independent format rather than the device-specific format" limitation of claim 1 requires a reference that actually switches formats. The strongest such reference on the page is US 5,602,974 — and it is the common-owned same-day sibling (§ 1.2). This is the central weakness of the § 103 case against claims 1, 6, 8, and 12.

---

Ground B — Claims 6 and 7 (portable computer / network)

Combination: US 5,602,974 (Microsoft) in view of US 5,287,194, or alternatively US 5,579,087 in view of US 5,287,194 and US 5,303,336.

If US 5,602,974 qualifies as art, claim 6 is nearly anticipated: '974's Summary expressly recites spooling on a portable computer while disconnected and de-spooling when reconnected, in device-independent format. Add US 5,287,194 for the "determining that the printer is now available" step (its availability file and scheduler perform exactly that determination). Claim 7 (EMF) adds only the admitted-in-spec known format.

Motivation if '974 is disqualified: US 5,287,194 supplies network-printer availability and user notification; US 5,579,087 supplies network delivery of a print job to a selected network printing device from multiple local/remote sources; US 5,303,336 supplies a print server that stores document data in a spool file part and converts between differing terminal protocols. A POSITA seeking to let a laptop user queue network print work while away from the office would predictably combine a portable file-based spool with a network availability check.

---

Ground C — Claim 8 and 9 (system claim)

Combination: US 5,303,336 (Hitachi) in view of US 5,287,194 and US 5,604,843.

US 5,303,336 discloses a print server comprising a "printing spool file part" that stores document data received from terminals, plus a printer controller that processes the stored commands — i.e., a spooler that "produces a spool file that holds the spooled print job." Server-side protocol conversion to a common printing protocol supplies the device-independent/device-dependent flexibility element. US 5,604,843 supplies the couplable/decouplable processor-and-printer architecture through its minidriver/universal-driver split, in which a device context carries device attributes and is passed to GDI on every call — the exact mechanism the '213 specification describes in FIG. 4 step 44 and FIG. 5 step 48.

Motivation: US 5,303,336's entire stated object is "free from the problems of the prior art… capable of dealing with different kinds of terminals and different kinds of printing protocols by a single print server" — i.e., the reference itself articulates the goal of decoupling the job format from any one printer's protocol, which is the '213 system's stated objective.

---

Ground D — Claims 10, 11, 13, 14 (printer known but not yet installed)

Combination: US 5,228,118 (Brother) in view of US 5,604,843, further in view of US 5,303,336.

• US 5,228,118 discloses "a printing system wherein one of printer drivers through which print data is sent from a data processor to a printer is selected based on interpreters available on the printer." [title-only, unverified disclosure] This is capability-conditional drivers/data-format selection — the functional ancestor of "decide the data format based on what the target device can accept."
• US 5,604,843 discloses the universal-driver/minidriver model in which device characterization data for a printer model is a separable data structure, explicitly framed as a reusable "printer model… collection of attributes" used by a Windows Generic device driver. A POSITA reading '843 would understand that a printer the OS "knows of" can be represented by characterization data before a full, installed driver exists.
• US 5,303,336 supplies the "convert at print time to the common protocol" mechanism, i.e., completing the device-specific conversion after the fact.

Motivation: The 1992–94 driver-proliferation problem (one driver per printer model, large driver installs) motivated exactly the universal-driver/minidriver architectures of '843 and the capability-negotiation of '118. Deferring installation while still letting the user queue the job is the predictable commercial answer to "I'm on the road and don't have the driver."

Weakness: '118 is the weakest mapping on the page — its selection is of device-dependent drivers by capability, not of a device-independent spool format. The "before the printer has been installed at the computer… spooling in a printer-independent format" element of claim 10 is only partially met. Absent '843 ('102(e)-only, Microsoft-owned), Ground D is thin.

---

Ground E — Claims 15–19, 22, 23 (transparent deferral / "fake success")

Combination: US 5,287,194 in view of US 5,303,336, further in view of US 5,529,296/5,287,434 and US 5,513,126.

This is the strongest § 103 ground on the page, for one reason: the "return success anyway" element is admitted prior art in the '213 specification itself.

Motivation: Returning success at spool time is not an invention; it is what spooling is — it is the mechanism by which the cited art achieves the "reduced processing delays" that the '213 Background concedes as the purpose of spooling. No POSITA would have needed any motivation to make a spooler report success when it queues a job, because every spooler of record does exactly that. Under KSR, a claim to the recognized, inherent consequence of a known technique is obvious.

Caution on the priority claim for '126: US 5,513,126 is listed on the page under "Family Cites Families (10)" (i.e., cited in the prosecution of a family member), not under the '213 "Patent Citations (11)" list. Confirm which application's IDS it appears in before relying on it for claim 19. If it is unavailable, claim 19's "not authorized" rationale should be supported by '194's user-prompting/alternative-location logic or treated as unsupported.

---

Ground F — Claims 20, 21 (monitoring + retrieval)

Folded into Ground E. These claims add only an express "monitoring" step on top of an availability-determination step that US 5,287,194 already discloses as continuous (a database file of "current availability of all printers on the network"). Adding the monitoring step to Ground E is a one-reference addition with no new result.

---

3. Grounds summary

---

4. The patentability counter-case (what a patent owner will argue)

1. No reference teaches switching spool format based on connectivity. This is the honest point of novelty. US 5,287,194 selects which printer, not which format, and expressly prompts the user to choose an alternative location; US 5,303,336 and US 5,604,843 are fixed-architecture references that never condition format on reachability. Expect a "teaches away" argument: US 5,287,194's whole thesis is to print promptly on an available device, which a POSITA might read as directing away from queueing to an unavailable one.
2. § 102(e) references are impeachable. US 5,604,843 and US 5,566,278 are § 102(e)-only — they take their prior-art date from filing, they are thin on printed-publication form, and they require proof of "by another."
3. Common ownership kills the best combination. US 5,602,974 and US 5,604,843 are both Microsoft's. If the applicable § 103(c)/§ 102(b)(2)(C) carve-out reaches them, the two references that map most directly onto claims 1, 6, 8, 12, and 15 are unavailable for combination, and the remaining non-common art (Xerox, Hitachi, Brother, Taligent) does not clearly disclose device-independent spooling of a queued job for an unreachable printer.
4. Secondary considerations. None identified on the page. No unexpected results, no licensing, no commercial-success evidence — and no litigation history to supply an inducement/copying narrative. If the patent owner asserts any, the burden is to prove nexus to the switching limitation, not to spooling generally.
5. Claim 12's own wording is an obstacle to clean analysis (see next section), which cuts both ways: it may be construed narrowly, or attacked for indefiniteness.

---

5. Claim-wording anomalies worth logging (literal, per the strict-intepretation rule)

• Claim 12, step (c) reads "supporting the print job to the printer in a device-specific format." Read literally, "supporting" is not "spooling," and the step is indeterminate. This is almost certainly a transcription/OCR artifact for "spooling," but I am not auto-correcting it; it should be verified against the USPTO face copy. Claim 13 (a sibling medium claim) correctly reads "spooling," which is evidence for the transcription theory.
• Claim 12, steps (d)–(f) drop claim 1's "that identifies the printer among a plurality of printers" from the second request and omit the antecedent "computer" before "initiating a second print job." A counterpart paragraph appears in claim 1 as "in response to a second user request to print on the printer that identifies the printer among a plurality of printers." Any obviousness analysis of claim 12 should proceed on the narrower reading supplied by claim 1.
• Claim 2 requires the printer driver to become "coupled to the computer," which is an odd subject for coupling; the step is best read as the printer+driver becoming mutually available. Do not let a reference mapping for claim 2 turn on the driver's physical coupling.
• Claim 1's preamble recites a printer "configured to receive print jobs in a device-specific format." This is a capability recital and, under Baldwin Graphic, is unlikely to be limiting — but if a challenger relies on it, note it is met by every commercial printer in the cited art.

---

6. Bottom line for a § 103 challenge

• Best claim to attack: claim 15 (and its medium twin, claim 22). Its only genuinely distinctive element — telling the application the job printed when it did not — is admitted in the '213 specification's own description of the asynchrony of spooling, and is the inherent behavior of the spoolers in US 5,287,194 and US 5,303,336. Combine those with US 5,604,843 for the GDI-call-and-return architecture, and the motivation is supplied by the reference art's own stated purpose.
• Best technical read, worst legal footing: claim 6. US 5,602,974 says, in Microsoft's own words, what claim 6 says. But it is same-day-filed, commonly owned, and likely sharing inventors — which makes it an obviousness-type double patenting target, not a § 103 reference.
• Hardest element to meet for claims 1, 6, 8, and 12: the conditional format switch. No non-common reference on the page discloses selecting the spool format based on whether the target printer can be reached. Expect to need either (a) an additional, non-family reference teaching format selection by device capability/reachability, or (b) reliance on US 5,602,974 with the § 103(c) common-ownership issue resolved in the challenger's favor.
• Everything must be re-verified. No PTAB proceeding exists (per the earlier section), so there is no Board record, no claim construction, and no estoppel to build on — and no post-2014 assertion is possible given the 2014‑10‑05 expiration. This analysis is therefore useful for a validity opinion or a late-damages defense, not for an IPR strategy.

References (URLs):

• US 5,881,213 — https://patents.google.com/patent/US5881213/en
• US 5,602,974 — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5602974A](/patent/US5602974A) ; disclosure text also at http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5602974.html
• US 5,287,194 — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5287194A](/patent/US5287194A)/en ; claim text at http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5287194.html
• US 5,303,336 — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5303336A](/patent/US5303336A) ; http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5303336.html
• US 5,572,087 — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5579087A](/patent/US5579087A) ; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[5579087](/patent/5579087)
• US 5,604,843 — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5604843A](/patent/US5604843A)/en

Verify before filing anything: the full disclosure of US 4,829,468, US 5,081,579, US 5,228,118, US 5,268,993, US 5,287,434, US 5,299,296, and US 5,566,278 (marked title-only above); the complete inventive entity of US 5,602,974; whether US 5,513,126 appears in the '213 record; and the applicable version of pre-AIA § 103(c) for a 1994-priority/1997-filed application.