US 5930466

I'll search for authoritative information on this specific patent number.

Let me dig further into the specific patent's claims and any litigation records.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks for litigation/PTAB records and confirm the claim set.

US Patent 5,930,466 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic Data (confirmed from the patent record)

Foreign family members (same priority): TW399179B (1998-02-05), CN1147781C (1998-03-10), JPH10291342A (1998-03-11), EP0864995B1 (1998-03-11), DE69832223T2, KR19980080379A. All share the US priority date of 1997-03-11.

Abstract (verbatim)

"An improved printing system is provided that compresses bitmap print data by determining, per each vertical slice of a horizontal swath of the printed page, which one of two different data compression techniques to more efficiently compresses each individual slice, then temporarily stores this compressed data in a memory circuit until needed by the printhead for actual printing of the final output in the form of print media. When using slices containing seven (7) different words per slice, the present invention utilizes a single 'control bit' of a 'control word' to represent each of the data words of the slice. Depending upon which type of compression technique is used, the control bit for each data word will be set to either Logic 1 or Logic 0, depending upon the value of the data word as compared to a pre-determined data word value that is chosen by the system, and which may be used in both types of data compression techniques. After each slice has been analyzed by both types of data compression techniques, certain of the data words in the slice can be temporarily discarded, leaving behind less than seven (7) data words to represent that slice as compressed data. This compressed data for each individual slice will be matched up with a 'control word' that is made up of the individual control bits described above, thereby creating a relatively small data set that can be stored in memory in a space that would be less than the amount of memory required to store the uncompressed slices for the same print data. Later, these (compressed) data sets (one per individual slice) can be decompressed according to the proper decompression technique, and the full print data is then restored just before printing by the printhead. As part of the control word, a 'mode bit' can be set to either binary value of Logic 1 or Logic 0, thereby indicating which of the two data compression techniques was initially used for that slice. The two data compression techniques used are called a 'USE-X MODE' and a 'REPEAT MODE.'"

Plain-Language Overview of the Claims

Important caveat on claim text: The authoritative full text I was working from is truncated at line ~"...increase the complexity of the computer program as wel..." — i.e., it cuts off inside the Detailed Description before the claims section. I was not able to retrieve the verbatim claim language for this patent, and my last two targeted searches (for the claim text and for litigation) timed out. I therefore cannot quote the exact independent claims, and I am not able to state the claim count with authoritative confidence. Google Patents does not expose a claim list in the fetched record.

What the specification establishes about the claimed subject matter (this is a description of the disclosed invention, not a verbatim recitation of claims):

1. Slice-based compression (method). The bitmap page is broken into horizontal swaths, and each swath into vertical "slices" (a slice = one column of pel data for all nozzles of the printhead). Each slice is compressed individually, rather than compressing whole pages, blocks, or font characters.

2. Two competing compression modes, selected per slice.

   • USE-X Mode: The target word "X" (typically 0000₁₆ = blank) is the key. For each 16-bit word in the slice, the control bit is set to Logic 1 if the word equals X, and the word is omitted from the compressed data. Decompression re-inserts the X value at each Logic-1 position.
   • REPEAT Mode: The control bit is set to Logic 1 if the word equals the immediately preceding word (the first word is compared against X). Repeated/duplicate consecutive words are omitted.
   • Selection step: Both techniques are run on each slice, the word counts (size1 for USE-X, size2 for REPEAT) are compared, and the smaller result is kept. A tie defaults to USE-X.

3. Control word with a mode bit. Each compressed slice carries a "control word" whose bits indicate which source words were dropped; one bit (the "mode bit," Logic 1 = USE-X, Logic 0 = REPEAT) signals which decompression routine to use. The spec notes that if more than two techniques were used, the mode field would need more than one bit.

4. Apparatus/system aspect. A printing system (host computer + ink jet printer, e.g., a Lexmark 7000 Color Jetprinter) in which compression occurs at the host and decompression at the printer, with the compressed slices stored in RAM until the printhead is ready. The spec expressly states compression/decompression "could be accomplished within the host computer alone, or within the printer alone."

5. Slice geometry. The preferred embodiment uses 104-nozzle printheads, 16-bit words, ~7 words per 104-pel slice (the seventh word's upper/lower 8 bits unused); the flow charts illustrate an example slice of 13 words (208 pels).

So, functionally, the independent claims almost certainly cover (a) a method of slice-by-slice compression with per-slice selection between at least two compression techniques plus a mode indicator, and (b) corresponding apparatus/printing system claims. I am flagging this as an inference from the specification, not a verified quotation of the claims.

Litigation / Docket Search — Result

No 2026 CAFC docket, district-court suit, or PTAB proceeding involving US 5,930,466 was found. Searches surfaced only false positives that I discarded:

• Different patents sharing the digits "593": A "'593 patent" in the ParkerVision v. Qualcomm CAFC appeal (ParkerVision's own '593, ~35 claims) and a separate "'593 patent" in a PTAB petition about encoded clock/data transmission — neither is US 5,930,466.
• JP 5930466 B2 — a Japanese patent (KCI Licensing, wound-therapy/depressurization), unrelated to this US patent.
• Company registration "5930466" — a UK/Slovak corporate registry number (Transpique Enterprises LTD), unrelated.
• US 7,440,128 (Sunplus Technology) and US 2004/0032598 (Fagan, "Apparatus and method for data compression optimized by print head architecture") cite US 5,930,466 as prior art — confirming its use as a reference, but not litigation.

Given the patent expired on the anticipated 2017-03-11 date and there is no asserted-litigation trail, a 2026 CAFC appeal is highly improbable; my search found none, but I cannot rule out a low-visibility reexamination/PTAB record definitively.

Uncertainty Statement

• Claim text and claim count: not verified (source truncated; retrieval searches timed out). Do not rely on the overview above as a claim chart.
• Litigation/PTAB status: no records found, stated as absence of evidence, not proof of absence.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 5930466 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search litigation-specific databases more directly.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 5,930,466

Bottom line

I found no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,930,466.

I searched for the specific number (both 5930466 and 5,930,466) combined with litigation-oriented terms, and returned no case in which this patent was asserted. I want to be explicit about a limitation: I reached the end of my allotted search steps before I could complete a clean pass through the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and PACER/Docket Navigator, so this is a negative result based on the searches I was able to run, not a certified exhaustive clearance search.

Case table

There are no cases to populate this table. Nothing in the search results referenced U.S. Patent No. 5,930,466 as an asserted patent.

What I searched and what came back

The only on-topic appearance of the number was as a prior-art citation — e.g., Justia's reference lists for unrelated patents (U.S. Pat. Nos. 10,037,178 and 7,944,577) cite "5930466 | July 27, 1999 | Rademacher." A citation on the face of another patent is not litigation and should not be reported as such.

Important caution — identifiers that are NOT this patent

Per your strict rule on literal interpretation and non-auto-correction, I am flagging these matches so they are not conflated with U.S. 5,930,466:

• JP 5930466 B2 — a Japanese patent ("特許第5930466号"), directed to managing reduced pressure at tissue sites (negative-pressure wound therapy). This is an entirely different document and jurisdiction; the number similarity is coincidental.
• UK company registration no. 5930466 — belongs to "Transpique Enterprises LTD" in a Slovak registry filing. Not a patent at all.
• U.S. Pat. No. 6,562,046 and 6,287,313 — appeared in the Medtronic v. Sasso dispute; different numbers, different parties, irrelevant here.

Context on U.S. 5,930,466 itself

• Title: Method and apparatus for data compression of bitmaps using rows and columns of bit-mapped printer data divided into vertical slices
• Inventor: Timothy John Rademacher
• Original/current assignee: Lexmark International, Inc.
• App. No.: 08/814,850; Filed: 1997-03-11; Published/Granted: 1999-07-27
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime; anticipated expiration 2017-03-11
• Family (foreign counterparts): TW 087101506, CN 981060927, JP 10078413, EP 98301790 (EP 0864995), DE 69832223T, KR 1019980009150

This is an internal printer-architecture patent (slice-by-slice adaptive selection between "USE-X" and "REPEAT" compression modes). Such Lexmark portfolio patents were most commonly used defensively or in cross-licensing rather than as standalone assertion vehicles, which is consistent with the absence of any litigation record I could locate. The 2017 expiration also means any infringement action would now be time-barred, and damages would be limited to pre-expiration conduct.

Recommended next steps to confirm

If you need a certified negative, these are the sources I would run directly (I did not get clean returns from them before my step limit):

1. Unified Patents Litigation Portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (filter by patent number).
2. RPX Insight / Docket Navigator — district-court assertion history by patent number.
3. USPTO Patent Center / Patent Assignment for App. 08/814,850 — check for assignments that might signal a transfer to an NPE (none observed in the data provided).
4. CourtListener / PACER — full-text search for "5,930,466" and "5930466".

Caveat: I could not verify a complete absence of litigation with high confidence. I state only that no litigation was found in the searches performed, and I did not fabricate any case, party, or docket number to fill the table.

I'll verify the "no PTAB activity" default and check for any proceedings, appeals, or litigation tied to this patent.

Let me run more targeted checks for any proceeding referencing this patent number directly.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 5,930,466: 0. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM petitions — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. That absence is consistent with everything my web diligence turned up, and it is compounded by a fact that dominates the defensive analysis: the patent expired 2017-03-11 (20 years from the 1997-03-11 filing; Google Patents legal status "Expired - Lifetime," anticipated expiration 2017-03-11, per https://patents.google.com/patent/US5930466/en). A defendant today therefore faces a live-but-untested patent in the abstract sense only — there is no PTAB posture to inherit, because the window for an IPR closed with the patent term. Note also that no IPR filing ever occurred in the five-year window between the AIA's 2012-09-16 effective date and expiration, so no § 315(e) estoppel attaches to anyone.

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Proceedings

None to report. There is no proceeding number to list, and I will not manufacture one. For completeness, here is what I checked and what I ruled out:

• ODP structured data: zero AIA trial proceedings (canonical source, per the block in this prompt).
• Web search for IPRs/CBMs naming this patent: hits were false positives, not proceedings on this patent. Flagging the confusables so nobody repeats the mistake:
  • JP 5930466 B2 — an unrelated Japanese patent (KCI Licensing, wound-therapy/"reduced pressure" art), https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/97/3a/60/6865b100050542/JP5930466B2.pdf
  • IPR2016-00061 — challenges U.S. 9,165,593 B2, a different patent number, http://ptabtrialblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IPR2016-00061-Decision-Granting-Institution-20160513.pdf
  • IPR2015-00336 / IPR2015-00636 — LG petitions against U.S. 6,618,593 and 8,917,822; again different numbers, https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2015-00336/Inter_Partes_Review_of_U.S._Pat._6618593/
  • A non-IPR hit referencing "'593 patent" in IPR2021-00909 is U.S. 8,243,593 (Cloudflare v. Sable Networks), unrelated.
  • Non-patent "5930466" artifacts: a Slovak company registration number, a British Columbia drill-hole assay coordinate, an SKU in a marine-parts catalog. All noise.
• Litigation check: I found no district court or ITC action asserting U.S. 5,930,466. Lexmark's well-known enforcement campaigns (Inv. No. 337-TA-740 toner cartridges; Lexmark v. Impression Products; the Static Control cases; the K.Mizra and Flexiworld suits against Lexmark) involve different patent numbers. I could not exhaustively rule out a low-visibility assertion, so treat "never asserted" as a strong inference rather than a certified fact.

Because there are no proceedings, the per-proceeding fields (judge panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal) have no content. Nothing to quote, and I won't quote anything as if it existed.

The prior-art kit that never got used

If an IPR had been filed while the patent was live, the petition would have been built on the art the applicant distinguished during prosecution — all of which the specification itself characterizes, which makes them attractive § 102/§ 103 references:

That table is the full menu a defendant would have had. It is entirely unexhausted — no petitioner ever touched it, and no estoppel bars its use.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: nothing canceled, nothing sustained, nothing adjudicated. Every claim of 5,930,466 stands exactly as issued on 1999-07-27 — never tested in an IPR, PGR, CBM, or (as far as I can find) a validity trial. (I could not verify the exact claim count: the text I was given truncates in the Detailed Description, before the claims section, and I won't guess a number.) So there is no "narrowed-through-IPR" surviving-claim list to hand you. The claims are untested and expired.

Estoppel landscape: empty. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is petitioner-specific and attaches only to grounds actually raised or reasonably raisable in an instituted IPR that reached a final written decision. Zero IPRs means zero estoppel — no petitioner, no privy, and no defensive aggregator is foreclosed from anything. A defendant is free to run any § 102/§ 103 theory on any reference, including art never considered by the examiner. In practice this matters little, because…

The expiration is the whole game. With a term ending 2017-03-11, injunctive relief is off the table (there is no enforceable right to exclude), and § 286's six-year damages lookback makes a complaint filed on or about today recover nothing: the only window a current filing could reach — 2020-10-01 forward — falls entirely after expiration. A demand letter citing 5,930,466 in 2026 is asking for money on a patent that has no live exclusionary right and no recoverable damages period. I found no evidence of a troll or aggregator holding this patent; the chain of title is Lexmark International, Inc. (US08/814,850, filed 1997-03-11, assigned to Lexmark; foreign family TW399179B, CN1147781C, JPH10291342A, EP0864995B1, DE69832223T2, KR19980080379A). One genuine pattern signal exists in the family, though it's not a PTAB signal: the '466 patent is a precursor to later slice/segment-based print-data compression patents (e.g., U.S. 7,440,128, Sunplus, which cites '466 as prior art) — i.e., it reads as upstream art in the field rather than as an assertion asset.

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Recommended next steps

1. If you receive a demand or complaint citing 5,930,466, lead with expiration, not with PTAB. The patent expired 2017-03-11. No injunction; and under 35 U.S.C. § 286 no damages for any conduct more than six years before filing — which, for a suit filed today (2026-10-01), is a null set. Frame any response around § 281/§ 284/§ 286 rather than invalidity.
2. Do not spend money on an IPR. An IPR requires a subsisting patent; there is nothing left to challenge, and the Board would have no jurisdiction to cancel expired claims.
3. Preserve the invalidity record anyway, cheaply. The ten references in the table above, the '466 prosecution history, and any post-1999 art in the slice-compression space (e.g., the Sunplus '128 line) are your invalidity kit if someone attempts a pre-expiration damages theory for 2011–2017 conduct. No estoppel limits you.
4. Verify status yourself before relying on this. Confirm the expiration and maintenance-fee history through USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and pull the file wrapper; confirm the absence of proceedings at PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov) and PAIR/ODP. My "no PTAB activity" conclusion rests on the ODP structured block plus web diligence — I found no proceedings, but I cannot certify a negative, and my claim-level fields are silent because no decision exists to quote.

Bottom line: no PTAB activity on file — and given that the patent expired in 2017, the more useful answer for a defendant is not "the patent is hardened" or "the claims are dead," but "there is no live case to make." A PTAB practitioner's honest read here is that the proceeding list is empty because the patent aged out before it became worth challenging.

I'll research the assignment/ownership record for this patent from authoritative sources.

I now have the claim text and attorney of record. Let me check the assignment chain and Lexmark corporate history.

Major lead: Lexmark sold its inkjet patent portfolio (1,500+ patents) to Funai in 2013, and Funai later transferred assets to Slingshot Printing LLC. Let me verify whether US 5,930,466 was in those transfers.

Assignment / Ownership Report — U.S. Patent No. 5,930,466

Scope note & correction to prior sections. While researching this section I retrieved the verbatim claim text (Freepatentsonline record) that the earlier "Patent summary" section had flagged as unverified, plus the attorney of record. Those two open items are now resolved and are reflected below. Everything else in the prior sections stands.

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Inventors

Unusual patterns: None detectable. This is a single-inventor corporate filing — the ordinary Lexmark in-house pattern. There is no evidence of the inventors departing the assignee, and with only one inventor and no co-inventor data, the "all inventors departed within 12 months" tell is not applicable / not determinable from the record available to me.

Attorney of record (prosecution): Ronald K. Aust (listed on the FPO record as "Attorney, Agent, or Firm: RONALD K AUST"). This is Lexmark's in-house IP department in Lexington — i.e., this patent was prosecuted internally, not by outside counsel. That is relevant below because it means the original assignment recording likely also ran through the same internal correspondence channel.

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Original assignee

Lexmark International, Inc. — 740 West New Circle Road, Lexington, Kentucky. Named as assignee on the face of the issued patent and in the 1997-03-11 recorded assignment.

• Primary line of business: Laser and inkjet printers, consumables (ink/toner cartridges), and later enterprise print-management software. Formed 1991 from an IBM divestiture of its printer/typewriter/supplies operations.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — this is not an abstract corporate patent. The specification expressly identifies the commercial implementation: "a preferred printer, such as a Lexmark™ 7000 Color Jetprinter™ manufactured by Lexmark International, Inc. located in Lexington, Ky." The claimed slice-based "USE-X / REPEAT" compression was implemented in the host driver/printer firmware for Lexmark inkjet products. This is an operating-company, product-embodying patent at origination.
• Current status (as of 2026): Operating, but no longer an inkjet company. Lexmark exited the inkjet hardware business in 2013, selling its inkjet technology and assets — including approximately 1,500 inkjet patents worldwide — to Funai Electric Co., Ltd. for roughly $100 million (agreement announced 2013-04-02). Lexmark then pivoted to laser/enterprise software and was subsequently taken private (2016 consortium acquisition). Caveat: the 2016 go-private transaction is from my general background knowledge, not a retrieved source in this session; treat it as secondary.

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Assignment timeline

Important honest caveat up front: I was not able to query the USPTO Assignment Center API directly for this patent number in the steps available to me. The chain below is reconstructed from (a) the recorded assignment event surfaced on the patent record itself, (b) INPADOC/Espacenet assignment data for a Lexmark sibling patent that rode the same bulk recording, and (c) the litigation complaints filed by Slingshot Printing LLC. I could not verify that U.S. 5,930,466 appears on any post-issuance recording. Where a link is confirmed for the portfolio but not verified for this patent, I say so explicitly.

1. 1997-03-11 (executed) / recorded 1997-03-11 — Reel/frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Timothy J. Rademacher (sole inventor)
• Assignee: Lexmark International, Inc.
• Correspondent: Not retrieved (prosecution counsel of record was Ronald K. Aust, Lexmark in-house IP, Lexington KY)
• Context: Initial inventor-to-employer assignment, executed and recorded simultaneously with the application filing — standard corporate ownership capture, not a transfer in any commercial sense.
• Source: Patent record legal events ("Assigned to LEXMARK INTERNATIONAL, INC.; Assignors: RADEMACHER, TIMOTHY J.").

2. Effective 2013-04-01 (US recording) / deed dated 2013-10-07 for the GB counterpart — Reel 030416/0001

• Conveyance: Assignment (bulk portfolio sale)
• Assignor: Lexmark International, Inc. and Lexmark International Technology, S.A.
• Assignee: Funai Electric Co., Ltd. (Japan)
• Correspondent: Not retrieved.
• Context: Strategic divestiture — Lexmark's exit from inkjet hardware. Funai had been Lexmark's inkjet contract manufacturer since July 1997 and bought ~1,500 US/foreign inkjet patents plus the Philippines manufacturing subsidiary for ~$100M (≈JPY 9.5B).
• ⚠️ Verification status: NOT CONFIRMED for this patent. Reel 030416/0001 is the recorded US assignment for the Lexmark→Funai inkjet portfolio (I confirmed it against the Lexmark sibling patent US 6,935,795 / app 10/802,560 via INPADOC). I could not confirm that U.S. 5,930,466 is one of the patents on that reel. Notably, Google Patents' legal-events listing for US 5,930,466 shows no Funai assignment event — only the 1997 Lexmark assignment and the 2017 expiration. That is weak-to-moderate evidence the patent may have stayed with Lexmark, but Google Patents assignment coverage is not guaranteed complete.

3. ~2019-04 (approx.) — Reel/frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Funai Electric Co., Ltd.
• Assignee: Slingshot Printing LLC (Delaware LLC, 10015 Old Columbia Road, Suite B215, Columbia, Maryland 21046)
• Correspondent: Not retrieved. (Slingshot's litigation counsel of record has been Fitch, Even, Tabin & Flannery LLP; that is litigation counsel, not necessarily the recording correspondent.)
• Context: Transfer-to-asserter. Slingshot took "all substantial rights, title and interest." Slingshot's own complaints describe it as "in the business of licensing patented technology."
• ⚠️ Verification status: NOT CONFIRMED for this patent. Every Slingshot pleading I retrieved describes the transfer as covering "the Patents-in-Suit" — and U.S. 5,930,466 is not among any asserted patent list (HP 2019 lists: 6,137,502; 6,213,587; 6,243,115; 6,394,593; 6,485,124; 6,666,449; 6,773,088; 6,817,707; 7,014,299; 7,244,015; 7,258,434; 7,311,385; 7,819,498; 7,841,712; 7,938,523; 8,113,618. Canon 2022: 7,152,951; 7,195,341; 7,559,629; 7,938,523 — plus '341, '864, '246B, '823, '629 in IPR filings).

If the Assignment Center does have no post-issuance recordings for this patent, the finding is that Lexmark International, Inc. remained the owner of record through expiration. Given the 2017-03-11 expiration, this patent would have been dead before Slingshot's 2019 assertion campaign regardless — which is a plausible reason it was not carried into the assertion vehicle.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5930466
    1997 : Filed by Rademacher
         : Assigned to Lexmark International
    1999 : Patent issued
    2013 : Lexmark sells inkjet portfolio to Funai
         : Reel 030416 0001
         : Inclusion of this patent unconfirmed
    2017 : Patent expires
    2019 : Funai transfers assets to Slingshot
         : Transfer to this patent unconfirmed

(Note: Mermaid timeline labels cannot contain slashes or commas, so "Reel 030416 0001" is written without the slash.)

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Signals are assessed for this patent specifically. Where the signal is clearly present elsewhere in the same Lexmark inkjet portfolio but unverified here, I distinguish the two.

1. Shell-entity transfer — unclear (not verifiable for this patent).
Slingshot Printing LLC has the textbook profile: a Delaware LLC, principal place of business at a small Columbia, Maryland suite, self-described as "in the business of licensing patented technology" with no products (Canon answer, E.D.N.Y. 2:22-cv-00123, ¶2). But I cannot tie US 5,930,466 to any Slingshot acquisition — no reel/frame and no pleading names it. Per the operating rule, a suggestive name alone is not a finding.

2. Known asserter in the chain — unclear for this patent / present for the portfolio.
Slingshot Printing LLC is a documented high-frequency asserter — Slingshot Printing LLC v. HP Inc. (W.D. Tex., five suits filed 2019-06-11) and Slingshot Printing LLC v. Canon U.S.A., Inc. (E.D.N.Y. 2:22-cv-00123), plus IPR2022-01541. This is exactly the "known asserter" category the task asks about. However, this patent is not among the asserted patents, so the chain link to this patent is unproven.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not determinable.
I retrieved no recording correspondents for reels 030416/0001, the Funai→Slingshot link, or the 1997 original. I am not going to assert a repeat-correspondent pattern without the correspondent names, since a single appearance isn't a signal and I have zero appearances here. (The one attorney name I can confirm, Ronald K. Aust, is prosecution/attorney-of-record, a different role from assignment correspondent.)

4. Cascading transfers (<24 months) — not present.
The two candidate post-issuance links are ~6 years apart (2013 and 2019). There is no chain of LLC-to-LLC hops in rapid succession on this patent.

5. Pre-litigation transfer (within 6 months of first suit) — unclear.
The Funai→Slingshot transfer (~April 2019) sat ~2 months before the first Slingshot complaints (2019-06-11) — a classic pre-assertion timing. But that timing is established for the asserted patents, not for US 5,930,466, which was never sued on.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present.
Lexmark's 2013 inkjet disposal was a solvent strategic divestiture (announced before the deal; ~$100M consideration; Lexmark remained a going concern and completed the pivot to enterprise software). No Chapter 7/11 proceeding is implicated.

7. Privateering — not present on the evidence I have.
There is no retrieved evidence that Lexmark retained a financial interest in, or directed, Slingshot's later assertions. Funai bought outright; Lexmark exited inkjet. Patent Progress / EFF-style "privateering" coverage was not surfaced.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN.

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Verdict

Insufficient data.

For this patent specifically, the only record I can stand behind is the original 1997-03-11 inventor→Lexmark assignment; I found no verified post-issuance recording naming US 5,930,466, and Google Patents' legal-events listing for the patent shows no assignee change before the 2017-03-11 expiration. That is the literal "only the original assignment" case.

The strong NPE pattern that does exist — Lexmark → Funai (reel 030416/0001, eff. 2013-04-01) → Slingshot Printing LLC (~2019-04) → suits v. HP and Canon — is real but portfolio-level: it is documented for the Lexmark inkjet patents that Slingshot asserted, and US 5,930,466 appears on none of those asserted lists. Because this patent had already expired on 2017-03-11, it could not have supported a 2019+ damages claim anyway, which is a coherent explanation for its absence from the assertion vehicle. I am therefore declining to classify it as "NPE — high confidence" on the strength of a transfer I could not verify.

Verify directly (I was unable to complete these queries):

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 5930466)
• Legacy USPTO assignment search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search/result?q=5930466
• Cross-check reel 030416/0001 to see whether US 5,930,466 is among the conveyed patents.

Standing caveat: This is a negative result on the searches performed, not a certified exhaustive clearance. I did not fabricate any reel, frame, correspondent, or assignee to fill the gaps above.

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Provenance of the two corrections to prior sections

• Claim text now verified (claim 1 and dependent claims 2–6 quoted verbatim in the FPO record). Claim 1 confirms the earlier inference in the "Patent summary" section: a method of dividing print data into swaths/slices, testing two different compression techniques per slice, storing the more efficient result, and decompressing each slice with the compatible technique. Notably, claim 1 recites "non-character print data" — consistent with the spec's stated advance over the Bauman font-compression prior art. No contradiction with the earlier summary; the summary's inference was correct.
• Attorney of record now verified: Ronald K. Aust (Lexmark in-house). No contradiction with prior sections; this was previously unknown.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 5,930,466. Let me start with targeted searches.

Let me retrieve the remaining cited references and their bibliographic details.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 5,930,466 (Rademacher / Lexmark)

Search status note: I reached my allotted step limit partway through this task. I confirmed the existence and key bibliographic details for three of the cited references (Bauman US 5,272,768; Nagata US 5,237,645; Mahoney US 3,827,357) plus the family documents, but I was not able to run fresh lookups on Bohrer, Schoon, Holliday, Campbell, Zimmerman, Hsu, or Cook before the limit. Dates for those seven are given from my prior knowledge and are flagged as unverified in this session. Do not treat them as certified.

Critical caveat on the claim set (inherited from the earlier sections)

The authoritative full text supplied is truncated in the Detailed Description (cut off at "...increase the complexity of the computer program as wel..."). The claims section of US 5,930,466 was never retrieved. Google Patents' fetched record does not expose a claim list, and my claim-text searches returned nothing before the step limit.

Consequence for § 102 analysis: Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102 requires a single reference to disclose every element of a claim, arranged as in the claim. I cannot map references to claim numbers with authority. Below I map each reference to the disclosed claim concepts (inference from the specification), and I label every mapping as an inference. This is not a claim chart.

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A. The cited references (from the patent's own Background of the Invention)

US 5,930,466 discusses the following prior-art patents in its specification. These are the "patent citations" I can ground in the authoritative text I was given.

Additional references noted only in the foreign-family documents (appearing in the German translation DE 69832223 T2 of the same disclosure, ¶[0006], as background on block-based compression — not quoted in the US text I was given):

• EP-A-0730249 and EP-A-0545447 — described in the family as disclosing methods of compressing printer data using square/rectangular bitmap blocks.

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B. Potential § 102 anticipation analysis

Headline finding: none of the cited references appears to anticipate the independent claims. Every reference above lacks at least one element of the disclosed core invention — namely (i) per-slice compression of a swath's vertical slices, (ii) running at least two different compression techniques on the same slice and comparing their compressed sizes, and (iii) storing a mode indicator in the compressed stream to select the matching decompressor.

The two most relevant references (for § 103, not § 102)

US 5,479,587 (Campbell) and US 5,483,622 (Zimmerman) are the most substantive art because both confront the "printer with multiple compression methods" problem. To invalidate the '466 independent claim, an examiner or challenger would need to combine one of these (multiple techniques) with an art teaching that selection is made per data unit and the choice is flagged in the compressed stream — e.g., a mode/flag bit. The '466 specification itself supplies the rationale (the "mode bit" concept) that would be the obviousness gap. Neither reference alone reads on the full claim.

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C. Flags under the "do not auto-correct identifiers" rule

1. Mahoney patent-number discrepancy. The authoritative US text of '466 cites "U.S. Pat. No. 3,827,357." However, the same disclosure's Korean family member (KR 19980070729A) refers to "미국 특허 제 3,827,347 호" (U.S. Pat. No. 3,827,347) for the Mahoney reference. Per the literal-interpretation rule, I am reporting both numbers as written and not reconciling them. The confirmed Sperry Rand / Mahoney R. "On-the-fly printer with shortened print cycle" document is US 3,827,357.
2. "US 5,450,938 A — 9/1995 Rademacher" surfaced in a separate patent's reference list (US 9,582,954). Same inventor surname and a similar era, but it is not a citation of US 5,930,466 in the material I have — do not conflate.
3. False-positive identifiers (do not merge with US 5,930,466): JP 5930466 B2 (KCI Licensing wound-therapy patent) and UK company registration 5930466 (Transpique Enterprises LTD). Different jurisdictions/subjects; numeric coincidence only.
4. Prior-art citations of US 5,930,466 (i.e., later patents citing it — not prior art to it): US 7,440,128 (Sunplus), US 2004/0032598 (Fagan), and Justia reference lists for US 10,037,178 / US 7,944,577. These are citations by later documents and are relevant to follow-on art, not to the § 102 analysis of '466.

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D. Confidence and next steps

To finalize a defensible § 102/§ 103 chart, the following should be run directly (I did not complete them):

1. USPTO Patent Center / Patent Application 08/814,850 — retrieve the verbatim claims and the full "References Cited" list.
2. Google Patents "Citations" and "Cited By" tabs for US5930466A (patents.google.com/patent/US5930466A/en) — to capture the examiner-cited art, which often differs from the specification discussion.
3. EP 0 864 995 B1 search report (the European counterpart) — its "Documents considered relevant" table typically lists the examiner's citation categories (X/Y/A/D), which is the single most useful proxy for the anticipated claim mapping I cannot supply here.

Bottom line: Based on the references I can ground in the authoritative text, no cited reference anticipates US 5,930,466 under § 102. The references break down into (a) blank/block/font suppression art (Bauman, Nagata, Mahoney, Bohrer, Holliday, Hsu, Cook, Schoon) and (b) multiple-compression-technique art (Campbell, Zimmerman). Group (b) is the most relevant, but only as § 103 art when combined with a per-slice selection-and-flag teaching, which the '466 claims (unverified) appear to supply as the point of novelty.

I'll first attempt to verify the claim text (the prior sections flagged this as unverified), then build the obviousness analysis on the prior-art references of record.

I retrieved the verbatim claim text (claims 1–3) — this resolves the "claims unverified" flag from the prior sections. Let me pull the remaining claims and confirm the prior-art-of-record list.

Let me retrieve the dependent claims and the apparatus/system claims.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,930,466

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), using the prior art of record

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0. Correction to the prior sections (flagging a contradiction)

The two previously generated sections correctly flagged that the claim text was not verified — the authoritative Google Patents fetch is truncated inside the Detailed Description ("…would increase the complexity of the computer program as wel…") and never reaches the claims. That gap is now closed. The claims were retrieved verbatim from the Free Patents Online record for US5930466:

• https://www.freepatentsonline.com/5930466.html#1 (claims 1–3, verbatim)
• Family corroboration for the dependent/system claims: https://patents.google.com/patent/DE69832223T2?oq=6%2C993%2C661 (German claims text of the same family)
• https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5930466A](/patent/US5930466A)/en

Two prior-section statements should be read with these corrections:

1. "I cannot quote the exact independent claims" — now superseded; claim 1 is quoted below verbatim.
2. The prior sections' inference that the claims cover (a) a slice-by-slice method with per-slice selection among ≥2 techniques plus a mode indicator, and (b) corresponding system claims — is confirmed by the verbatim text and the family claims. Good inference; now grounded.
3. The prior sections' note that US 7,440,128 (Sunplus) and US 2004/0032598 cite US 5,930,466 is confirmed (Justia reference list). Important for §103 purposes: these are later documents. They are not prior art against the '466 patent and must not be used in any rejection. They are relevant only as evidence of post-1997 state of the art.

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1. The actual claim 1 (verbatim)

1. A method of compressing data to be printed, comprising:
(a) dividing initial print data of any type, including non-character print data, into a plurality of swaths of print information, each of said swaths containing a plurality of slices, and each of said slices having a plurality of bits representing pels to be printed;
(b) analyzing and, where appropriate compressing each individual one of said plurality of slices, using at least one data compression technique controlled by a processing circuit, and temporarily storing the resulting compressed data in a memory circuit as a plurality of compressed slices, such that when two different data compression techniques are used on each of said individual slices, each individual slice is examined to see which of the two different data compression techniques is more efficient in compressing the data for that particular slice, and then a compressed slice is created and stored using the more efficient of the two different data compression techniques for each of said plurality of slices; and
(c) decompressing where appropriate, using a corresponding data decompression technique that is compatible with said at least one data compression technique, each individual one of said plurality of compressed slices, thereby generating a plurality of uncompressed slices of print information for each of said swaths that are equivalent to said initial slices of print data before compression occurred, and presenting said equivalent print data of any type, including non-character print data, to a printing apparatus, such that the appropriate one of two different data decompression techniques that corresponds to said two different data compression techniques is used on each said individual compressed slice.

Claim 2: either technique may be used when both give an equal result. Claim 3: the two techniques are the USE-X mode and the REPEAT mode.

Dependent/system claims (family-corroborated, not verbatim U.S. text): a REPEAT-mode claim reciting generation of a control word whose bit "i" is set when the word at position i equals the word at position (i−1), with the first word compared to a predetermined variable "X"; a decompression method claim (inspect control word → insert X for each bit = 1 → insert stored data for each bit = 0 → delete the control word); and a printing-system claim reciting a host computer (first processing circuit / first memory circuit / first communication port) that divides data into swaths/slices and compresses them, plus the printer side.

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2. Prior art of record (from the patent's own Background section)

Supplementary reference (analogous art, but NOT verified as being of record in the '466 patent):

• EP 0 730 249 A2/A3 (Pritchard), "Method and apparatus for compression and decompression of data used by a serial printer" (priority 1995-02-20; published 1996-09-04). The abstract recites dividing a print swath into N microbands, dividing each microband into microblocks, and "comparing data in each microblock with a seed value to arrive at a compressed microblock based upon data differences from the seed value," then decompressing all microbands in parallel to the printhead. That is functionally the USE-X concept applied to swath-sub-units in a serial printer. Flag: it appeared in my search via a CPC-class listing, not from the '466 specification, so I cannot confirm it is prior art of record; verify against the patent's front page before relying on it.

Not prior art (do not cite in a rejection): US 7,289,243; US 7,440,128; US 2004/0032598 — all post-date the 1997-03-11 priority date.

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3. Level of ordinary skill (POSITA)

A POSITA here is a printer firmware/ASIC engineer with ~2–3 years' experience in ink-jet print-data pipelines, familiar with 16-bit word-oriented bitmap formats, swath/slice ("delta rotation") memory layout for nozzle arrays, DMA to printheads, and the standard printing-industry compression repertoire (blank/word-run deletion, run-length coding, LZW, M-compression). All ten references of record sit squarely within this person's field.

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4. Limitation-by-limitation mapping

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5. Proposed § 103 grounds

Ground 1 (primary, strongest) — Cook in view of Nagata, further in view of Campbell

• Cook teaches the heart of step (b): two alternative representations for a segment, compared, and the smaller one kept — "if the display list entries grow to a size that exceeds a pure pixel representation, then the display list is reconverted to pixels, using an adaptive compression technique."
• Nagata teaches the surrounding architecture required by steps (a) and (c): compress bitmap before storing it in printer image memory, store only the non-empty units, track the omitted units separately, reconstruct the full bitmap (zero-filling omitted units), and feed it to the print engine — for arbitrary bitmapped or RIPed non-character data, not fonts.
• Campbell (and/or Zimmerman) supplies the express teaching that a printer may employ more than one compression technique and select among them adaptively.
• Motivation. All three address the same problem (printer image-memory capacity / data volume), all are in the printer data-path, and each improves the other in the same way. Under KSR v. Teleflex, "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious." Selecting, per unit, whichever of two known encoders produces the smaller output is a predictable design choice with a finite number of identified solutions, using known algorithms for their known purposes, with no change in the underlying function of the printer.
• Note the "obvious to try" framing: the specification of the patent itself frames the whole invention as an identified design goal (see §6 below).

Ground 2 — Nagata in view of Zimmerman (or Campbell), further in view of Hsu

• Zimmerman/Campbell teach plural compression techniques in a printer, applied adaptively to input data.
• Hsu supplies the granularity and signalling: bitmap divided into segments at break entries, break entries kept in a table, and segments decompressed independently, in parallel, which is the slice-level compress/decompress-as-a-unit behaviour of claim 1(c).
• Motivation. Hsu's per-segment independence is a natural home for a per-segment choice of compression method, and Hsu's break-entry table is the natural place to record which method applies — i.e., the "mode bit." Combining a known adaptive multi-technique printer (Zimmerman) with known per-segment encoding/decoding (Hsu) yields the claim 1 selection-and-restoration loop.

Ground 3 — Bauman in view of Nagata, further in view of Schoon

• Bauman gives the USE-X mode almost literally: detect 16-bit strips that are entirely blank, omit them, record which ones were omitted in a table, and reinsert them when the bitmap is generated for printing — i.e., the "compare to a predetermined value; set control bit; drop the word; restore on decode" loop.
• Nagata removes the two limits the patent itself stresses: Bauman "works only with pre-determined character data" — Nagata does the same class of blank-region elimination on arbitrary bitmapped/graphics data. Hence claim 1's "any type, including non-character print data" is met.
• Schoon supplies the second, distinct technique (run-length/repeat) needed for the "two different techniques, pick the more efficient" and claim 3 REPEAT-mode recitations.
• Motivation. Same field, same purpose (reduce ROM/RAM needed to hold a printable image), and the two techniques are complementary in a way a POSITA would immediately recognize: blank-region elimination (Bauman/Nagata) compresses whitespace-dominated content, while run-length/repeat coding (Schoon) compresses repeated-content/contone content — the patent itself concedes this trade-off ("this may not be true … for contone data").

Ground 4 — Holliday in view of Schoon, in view of Nagata (or Cook)

• Holliday teaches dividing data into blocks, assigning unique identification codes by block type, and giving identical blocks the same code — a per-unit code that both compresses and, necessarily, tells the decoder what the unit is. That is the "control word carrying per-unit information + a code identifying the encoding" concept.
• Schoon supplies the run-length/repeat decoding; Nagata/Cook supply the printer-side bitmap compress-store-decompress-for-print context and the "keep the smaller representation" selection.
• Motivation. All three are storage-reduction techniques in copier/printer data paths; using a compact identification code to signal the encoding of a block is the obvious way to make independently decodable units self-describing.

Ground 5 — Mahoney in view of Nagata in view of Campbell/Zimmerman (secondary; useful to show the "swath/column analysis" motivation)

• Mahoney teaches determining the last printable data in a line and abandoning the rest of the line, i.e. that print data can be analyzed and treated differently unit-by-unit. It supplies a concrete reason to operate on data at the line/column level of granularity — the slice level required by claim 1(a) — rather than on whole pages.

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6. Motivation to combine — the decisive points

1. The applicant's own statement of the problem is the motivation. The '466 Background closes with: "…it would also be desirable to compress print data in a slice-by-slice manner, which can later be decompressed slice-by-slice… It would be even further advantageous to be able to select, in real time, from more than one data compression technique on a slice-by-slice basis. Such a procedure could be used on graphical data, and not merely pre-determined character (i.e., font) data." That sentence is effectively claim 1. An applicant's express articulation of the desired, unmet goal is strong evidence that reaching it was obvious to try (KSR; In re Kahn / In re Bergman reasoning on articulated design goals).
2. Same field, same problem, same solution type across all ten references (printer/copier image-memory and data-volume reduction).
3. The result is predictable and the effort trivial. The patent's own FIG. 9 computes both compression sizes (size1 for USE-X, size2 for REPEAT) in a single pass through the slice's words, then compares two integers. A POSITA writing a word-comparison loop would not regard computing both statistics and taking the smaller as an unpredictable advance. That FIG. 9 also time-stamps the combination as a routine programming matter.
4. Finite, identified solutions. The art identified a small, closed set of encoders for this purpose (blank/word-run deletion, run-length/repeat, M-compression, bit-run-length, LZW). Choosing two of them and keeping the better output is the paradigm KSR case.
5. Design-choice / architecture-driven parameters. Unit size (page vs. block vs. segment vs. slice), where the encoder lives (host vs. printer), and how to signal the encoding (control word / table / ID code) are the kind of "design incentives and other market forces" choices KSR says are not inventive — and the slice layout is dictated by the swath/nozzle architecture and the admitted "delta rotation" convention.
6. No secondary considerations are of record. No evidence of unexpected results, long-felt need with a nexus, copying, or industry praise appears in the patent or in the family. The patent is expired (anticipated expiration 2017-03-11 per the Google Patents record), so any § 103 analysis is now retrospective/defensive only.

Alleged teaching away — and why it doesn't hold. The specification distinguishes (i) Bauman because it "works only with pre-determined character data," and (ii) Nagata because it still sends full bitmaps to the print engine so blank areas cost the same print time. Neither is a teaching away: the first is a statement of a reference's scope (cured by Nagata's express application to ordinary bitmap/graphics data), and the second is a criticism of Nagata's printhead timing, not of its compression — the '466 invention also ultimately presents full uncompressed slices to the print engine, so it does not even avoid the criticized behaviour. A reference's limited application does not teach away when another reference in the same field shows the same technique applied generally.

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7. Where the patent could still fight (weaknesses in the grounds)

My bottom line: claims 1–3, and the dependent method/system claims described above, are more likely than not invalid under § 103(a). The single most damaging combination is Cook + Nagata + Campbell (or Zimmerman), with Bauman + Nagata + Schoon as a strong parallel ground that squarely meets the USE-X/REPEAT mode recitations. The strongest surviving hook, if any, would be a narrow reading in which the mandatory, per-slice, both-algorithms-run-and-compare step is held not to be suggested — but Cook's per-segment size comparison makes even that hook fragile.

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8. Confidence and remaining gaps

• High confidence: verbatim claim 1–3 text; the existence and content of the ten prior-art references as recited by the '466 specification itself; the fact that US 7,289,243 / US 7,440,128 / US 2004/0032598 are later documents and are not prior art.
• Moderate confidence: the exact wording and count of the U.S. dependent and system claims (claims 4 onward). I retrieved the German family claims (DE69832223T2) describing the REPEAT-mode control-word claim, a decompression-method claim, and a printing-system claim, and I have inferred — not read — the corresponding U.S. language. Verify at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5930466A/en (claims section) before filing any paper.
• Unverified: the issue dates I listed for the ten references in §2's footnote on §102 categories (recalled from training knowledge; all pre-date 1997-03-11, so all are available for §103, but Cook's March-1996 issue date would make it §102(a)/(e) art rather than §102(b) art — a point worth verifying).
• Unverified: whether the '466 patent's front page "References Cited" includes references beyond those discussed in the Background, and whether EP 0 730 249 (Pritchard) is among them. The Google Patents text I was given is truncated before that section, and I could not retrieve it.
• Not a legal conclusion. This is a technical/analyst assessment; validity, priority dates, and the scope of any claim term are legal determinations for counsel.

Single most useful next verification step: pull the claims (4 to end) and the front-page reference list from the USPTO Patent Center / FPO record for App. 08/814,850, and confirm the issue dates of Cook (US 5,500,928) and Pritchard (EP 0 730 249).