US 6705781

I'll verify current status and check for any 2026 litigation/docket activity before summarizing.

US 6,705,781 B2 — Verification Summary

Sources checked: Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6705781), uspto.report (https://uspto.report/patent/grant/[6705781](/patent/6705781)), plus citation-level results at Justia and FreePatentsOnline. No auto-correction of any identifier was applied.

Confidence note: Bibliographic data above is high-confidence (matching sources across Google Patents, uspto.report, Justia). The precise expiration date depends on any PTA granted; I cannot independently verify the 2022-04-30 adjusted-expiration figure beyond the Google Patents record.

CAFC / 2026 docket check — negative finding

I searched specifically for CAFC 2026 docket activity for US 6,705,781. No Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case, and no 2026 litigation activity, was located. What surfaced were only citation cross-references — third-party patents (e.g., Flexiworld/Samsung, Silverbrook, Airprint) and examiner citations listing "6705781 | March 16, 2004 | Iwazaki" as prior art. The patent is also cited as prior art by many later Flexiworld Technologies patents (e.g., US 10,592,201; US 10,960,463 lines of family).

Uncertainty: I do not have authoritative access to PACER or the CAFC docket system, so I cannot state affirmatively that no such case exists. I can only report that targeted web searches returned no CAFC 2026 docket entry. Treat this as "not found," not "proven absent."

Abstract (as issued)

Text data contained in a mail received by a user's mobile phone, and attachment file data attached to that mail, are downloaded from the mobile phone into the printing system. Application software corresponding to the attachment file data is selected from application software stored in the printing system, and the attachment file data is opened with the selected software. The text data and the opened attachment file data are printed onto a printing medium.

Plain-language overview of each independent claim

Claim 1 — Core method (mobile phone → kiosk printing of mail + attachments).
A print service method in three steps: (a) download from the user's mobile phone both the text of a received mail and any file attached to it; (b) pick, from application software stored in the printing system itself, the software matching the attachment type, and use it to open the attachment; (c) print the mail text and the opened attachment onto a medium. The key inventive hook is that the kiosk, not the phone, resolves and runs the attachment's native application.

Claim 10 — URL-driven Web printing.
Same start (download mail text from the user's phone), but the text contains a URL. The printing system then acts on that URL itself: it goes online via its own Web browser function, retrieves the Web page data, and prints both the mail text and the fetched Web content. Distinct from claim 1 in that the second data source is the live Internet rather than a local application.

Claim 19 — Remote-submitted job with phone-based identity handshake.
Here the printing data comes from a terminal connected to the Internet (e.g., a PC), which submits the print data plus user identification information. Later, at the kiosk, the user's mobile phone supplies its own identification information. The system compares the two; printing happens only if they match. This is the "print from anywhere, release at the kiosk by proving phone identity" model.

Claim 26 — Apparatus claim for the mail/attachment path (claim 1 in system form).
A printing system with: a radio connecting section receiving an e-mail from the user's mobile phone; an e-mail analysis section that separates the e-mail into text data and attachment file data; a printing section; and a microprocessor orchestrating the receipt, separation, application selection/opening, and printing of both parts.

Claim 29 — Apparatus claim for the URL/Web path (claim 10 in system form).
A printing system with: a radio connecting section receiving the e-mail; an e-mail analysis section that extracts the URL from it; a Web browser functioning section that fetches the page at that URL from the Internet; a printing section; and a microprocessor coordinating all four.

Dependent-claim landscape (brief)

• Ad-based subsidy cluster (2–8, 11–18, 20–25, 27–28, 30–31): pre-printed advertisement on the medium (claims 2, 11, 20, 27, 30); added advertisement data (5, 14, 23, 28, 31); free-of-charge printing (3, 6, 12, 15, 21, 24); discounted charge (4, 7, 13, 16, 22, 25); and profile-based ad selection using user profile information registered in the phone (8, 17).
• Mail-list selection cluster (9, 18): download the phone's list of received mails, let the user pick one at the kiosk, then download only that mail's content — avoiding automatic printing of everything.

Practical significance / observations

• The specification describes a convenience-store copier on a LAN with an advertisement database server 3, an application server 4, a router 6, and a Bluetooth (short-range radio) link to mobile phone 7 — the attachment-handling and ad-subsidy architecture is the commercial core, with the ad revenue used to discount or zero the user's printing fee.
• The URL claim (10) and identity-matching claim (19) anticipate the modern "cloud print / secure release" workflow, which is likely why the document is so heavily cited by later Flexiworld and Silverbrook mobile-printing families.
• Status caveat: with the patent now expired, the claims have no remaining enforceable term; any 2026 "docket" relevance would be historical or prior-art/citation value rather than active infringement litigation — and, as noted, no such 2026 CAFC case was found.

I'll search litigation databases for US patent 6705781.

Let me try more targeted litigation sources.

Let me check a few more specialized litigation databases.

Litigation Report: US Patent 6,705,781

Patent Identified (verified literal match)

• US 6,705,781 B2 — "Printing service method for printing system and the printing system"
• Inventor: Ryuji Iwazaki | Original/Current Assignee: Toshiba Tec Corporation
• Application No. US 09/961,856 | Filed: 2001-09-24 | Granted/Published: 2004-03-16
• Priority: JP 2000-303769 (2000-10-03)
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime (adjusted expiration 2022-04-30)
• CPC: H04N1/00204, H04N1/00307, H04N1/00244, H04N1/00127 (mobile phone → printer connection/combination art)

Finding on Litigation

No district court litigation, ITC action, or Federal Circuit appeal involving US 6,705,781 was identified in the sources searched. I am reporting this as a negative finding, not as positive confirmation that none exists.

Searches were run across patent-litigation and patent-data aggregators (Unified Patents Portal, Justia Patents, Docket Alarm, PACER Monitor, PTAB/PTACTS filings, and general web queries keyed to the exact number and to "Toshiba Tec" as plaintiff/patent owner). The only hit corresponding to this exact patent was a bibliographic/citation reference — US 6,705,781 appears as a cited reference on later third-party patents (e.g., the Flexiworld/Flexijet family, including US 8,595,717 and US RE42,725, and US 7,805,720), which is a prior-art citation, not evidence of litigation.

Note on a near-miss that must not be conflated with this patent: PACER Monitor surfaced Encryptawave Technologies LLC v. Toshiba Corporation (4:25-cv-00171, E.D. Tex.), naming Toshiba Tec Corporation and Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions as defendants. That is a different asserted patent (encryption-related) and a different Toshiba entity than the owner of the '781 patent; it says nothing about the '781 patent. I flag it only to prevent confusion between a shared corporate name and an asserted patent.

PTAB / Post-Grant Activity

None identified for US 6,705,781. No IPR, PGR, CBM, reexamination, or derivation proceeding tied to this patent number appeared in the PTAB/PTACTS results. (As expected — the patent is pre-AIA, expired, and issued in 2004; IPR/CBM availability would be limited.)

Outcome / Current Status Table

Basis, Confidence, and Caveats

• Confidence in the patent identification: High. The number, title, inventor (Iwazaki), assignee (Toshiba Tec), and dates match the authoritative full text.
• Confidence in the "no litigation" conclusion: Moderate. Public litigation databases are incomplete and inconsistent in coverage of older patent assertions (pre-2010 suits may not be digitized or may be missing from free aggregators); PACER itself is not a full-text-searchable database by patent number for all historical cases, and it is paywalled. A truly comprehensive check would require a paid database (LexisNexis/Lex Machina LexisNexis PatentAdvisor / Lex Machina, RPX Insight/Cornerstone, Docket Navigator / Docket Alarm) searched by patent number across all 94 district courts, plus ITC EDIS and the Federal Circuit.
• Not verified in a paid/full coverage source: whether any short-lived, settled, or dismissed assertion existed that never generated a published opinion.

Recommended next steps (I could not reach these within this session's tool limits):

1. Lex Machina or Docket Navigator search restricted to 6,705,781 (both allow patent-number-keyed case lookup across all districts — the most reliable single check).
2. USPTO Patent Assignment Search for the '781 patent's reassignment history — a sale/assignment to a monetization entity (PAE/NPE) would be the classic predicate for later assertions and would warrant a deeper docket search.
3. ITC EDIS and CAFC docket keyword search on the patent number.
4. PACER "Case Locator" (national) for party-based searches pairing Toshiba Tec with printer/imaging defendants.

If any of those searches return cases, I can expand each into the requested plaintiff / defendant / jurisdiction / case number / filing date / outcome fields with citations.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before writing up.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks before concluding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 6705781: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block that accompanies this query — the canonical source — reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings ever instituted, filed, or terminated against this patent, and multiple web searches (patent number alone, patent number + "IPR"/"CBM", patent number + "Toshiba Tec", petitioner-side checks) surfaced nothing contrary. Bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record to work from — no claims have been canceled, no FWD exists to cite, and no petitioner has already burned prior art against these claims. That cuts both ways: the claims are untested and un-narrowed, so you cannot buy your way to a cheap defense by pointing at someone else's win, but you also face no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no Board precedent construing the claims against your positions. Note the more fundamental point first: the patent's adjusted expiration is 2022-04-30, so it is expired as of today (2026-10-01) — damages exposure for post-expiration conduct is nil, and the practical question is only backward-looking damages for pre-expiration infringement.

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No per-proceeding sections are supplied because there are no proceedings to describe. I will not manufacture EPG numbers, panels, or dispositions that do not exist.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: wholly untested. All 31 claims stand as issued. That includes independent claim 1 (mobile-phone mail download → application-software selection and opening of attachment data → printing), independent claim 10 (URL extraction, Web-browser retrieval, printing of text plus Web page data), independent claim 19 (PC-to-printer data upload with phone-number identification matching at the kiosk), and independent claims 26 and 29 (the apparatus counterparts to claims 1 and 10, respectively). None canceled; none sustained against a challenge; none construed by the Board. Dependent claims 2–9, 11–18, 20–25, 27–28, and 30–31 were likewise never litigated at the PTAB.

Estoppel landscape. Because no AIA petition was ever filed, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is not triggered by anyone. Every petitioner-side ground — § 102 and § 103 art, and any § 112 written-description or enablement attacks cognizable under § 311(b)'s IPR limits — remains available to a defendant raising them for the first time. The prior-art record is comparatively sparse at only 15–16 references of record (see the "Patent Citations" set), the most substantive being EP 1056247 A2 (Canon, "Printing system for e-mail," published 2000-11-29), US 6,480,189 B1 (Xerox, "Mobile e-mail document transaction service"), US 6,430,601 B1 (Xerox, "Mobile document paging service"), US 6,405,055 B1 (Silverbrook, hand-held phone with integral printer), and the Canon/Casio/Funai Japanese applications (JP 2000-357071, JP 2001-010150, JP 2001-125982, JP 2001-245028). That is a thin record for a 2000-priority printing-service patent, and the primary reference — the Canon e-mail printing system — is directly on point for at least the claim 10 URL/Web-browser concept. There is no evidentiary reason to think the claims are invulnerable; there is simply no one who has tried.

Pattern signals. No serial petitioner activity, no follow-on challenge from a defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or similar proceeding appears anywhere in the record), and no patent-owner appeal activity — unsurprising given there was never a trial to appeal. The only litigation-adjacent data point is the sibling Japanese application JP 2002-108578 A, which was abandoned (not granted), while the US case granted as 6705781 with a 2000-10-03 priority date; the commercial-practice reality is that Toshiba Tec's kiosk/embedded-print patents of this era saw little third-party assertion, which is consistent with the total absence of PTAB filings.

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Recommended next steps

1. Lead with expiration, not with prior art. The Google Patents legal-status line reads "Expired - Lifetime, expires 2022-04-30." Confirm this against USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) and the maintenance-fee record before doing anything else. If your accused conduct post-dates 2022-04-30, the damages theory collapses regardless of validity, and an IPR would be a waste of money — the Board will not institute on an expired patent where there is no live dispute (the AIA trial's purpose is claim-scope adjudication going forward, and mootness-adjacent arguments are strong).
2. If you are facing a demand letter citing claims 1, 10, 19, 26, or 29 for pre-2022 conduct: there is no FWD to link to and no cancellation to quote. Tell the patent owner's counsel plainly that (a) the patent is expired, and (b) no PTAB panel has ever construed a single term of any claim — so whatever claim-construction position the letter relies on is untested and unadopted by any adjudicator.
3. If you nonetheless need a validity challenge (e.g., in a pre-expiration damages case where invalidity still matters for past royalties), the § 315(e)(2) field is wide open. Anchor the petition on EP 1056247 A2 (Canon) in view of US 6,405,055 (Silverbrook), and for claim 19's phone-number identification gate, look to US 6,430,601 / US 6,480,189 (Xerox mobile document transaction/paging). Note that with the patent expired, IPR is likely unavailable; a district court invalidity defense or an ex parte reexamination is the realistic vehicle.
4. Verify my negative before relying on it. I searched the number, the number plus proceeding-type tokens, and petitioner/owner names, and found nothing; the ODP block independently reports zero. But an IPR filed and terminated within the last ingest cycle, or a CBM filed pre-SAS that was never indexed, could evade both. Run the number directly through PTAB E2E / PTAB Center (https://ptab.uspto.gov/) and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board Decisions search, and — if any proceeding turns up — treat my "no proceedings" conclusion as superseded by that record.

Caveat on confidence: I could not locate any proceeding-related document, docket entry, EPG number, or CAFC appeal for this patent, and I am not aware of any from training data either. I am reporting the absence as the accurate state of the record, not as an inference from missing data.

I'll start by trying to pull the actual USPTO assignment record and corroborating sources before building the report.

The search confirms Flexiworld appears only as a forward-citing party, not an assignee. Let me try to pin down the actual USPTO assignment record and reel/frame data.

Data-access note (read first): I was unable to directly query assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov — neither index surfaced a machine-readable record or a reel/frame number for this patent, and my live searches were exhausted before I could pull the raw Assignment Center hit. I therefore did not obtain a reel/frame number for any link in this chain, and I will not invent one. The authoritative ownership data available to me is the Google Patents legal-events table for US 6705781, which mirrors the USPTO assignment record. Everything below is grounded in that plus corroborating court/PTO filings; where I could not verify something, I say so.

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Inventors

Unusual patterns: None detectable. There is one inventor, and the JP priority chain (JP 2000-303769, filed 2000-10-03) and the US filing (2001-09-24) are only ~12 months apart, which is the normal Paris Convention window. There is no evidence of inventor departure within 12 months of filing, and with a single inventor there is no multi-inventor exodus pattern. The "all inventors departing before a fire-sale" tell is not present — but note that this assessment is inferred from the absence of any subsequent assignment, not from employment records I could inspect.

Caveat: I could not verify Iwazaki's specific job title or whether he remained at Toshiba Tec after issuance; I found no source bearing on that.

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Original assignee

Toshiba Tec Kabushiki Kaisha (referred to in English as Toshiba TEC Corporation) — named on the issued patent and still the current assignee per the Google Patents "Current Assignee" field.

• Primary line of business: Japanese manufacturer of retail/commercial hardware and imaging equipment — point-of-sale (POS) terminals and store systems, multifunction peripherals and copiers (e-STUDIO line), barcode/label printers, thermal and inkjet print heads, and RFID. A publicly listed Japanese company (Tokyo Stock Exchange); historically affiliated with Toshiba Corporation. It is an operating hardware manufacturer, not a holding or licensing vehicle.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Not determinable from the record. The claims (1, 10, 19, 26, 29) require a specific combination: a copier/printer with a radio connecting section that receives an E-mail from a user's mobile phone, an E-mail analysis section that splits text from attachment data, and (in claims 10/29) an on-board Web browser that fetches a URL found in the mail text. Toshiba Tec certainly shipped copiers/MFPs, but I found no evidence that any Toshiba Tec shipping product implemented the claimed mobile-phone-to-copier-Bluetooth print pipeline with advertisement attachment. This is a documented-embodiment gap, not a finding of non-practice.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no acquisition of the patent portfolio. The US patent expired 2022-04-30 (Google Patents "Adjusted expiration," status Expired – Lifetime), consistent with a 2001-09-24 filing plus ~217 days of patent term adjustment.

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Assignment timeline

Only one assignment is recorded. Google Patents legal events show exactly two 2001-09-24 events — "Application filed by Toshiba Tec Corp" and the inventor→assignee conveyance — and no post-issuance assignment, security interest, merger, change of name, license, or release of any kind through expiration in 2022.

• 2001-09-24 (executed) / recorded 2001-09-24 — Reel/Frame: not retrievable from the sources I could access (see data-access note above; Google Patents does not expose a reel/frame for this entry, and I did not fabricate one)
  • Conveyance: Assignment (recorded by USPTO as "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"); Google Patents flags the event type as a reassignment, i.e., a post-filing-entity transfer into the assignee of record
  • Assignor: IWAZAKI, RYUJI (sole inventor)
  • Assignee: TOSHIBA TEC KABUSHIKI KAISHA
  • Correspondent: Not exposed in any source I could reach. Because this is a pre-issuance inventor assignment, the correspondent of record would be the prosecuting attorney/firm handling appl. 09/961,856 rather than a recording agent for a downstream buyer — so even if retrieved, it would carry little NPE-diagnostic value. No correspondent recurs anywhere in this chain, because there is no chain.
  • Context: Internal — standard employee-invention assignment to the applicant corporation, executed and recorded concurrently with the 2001-09-24 US filing. Not an acquisition, fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

Why there is no more to list: Toshiba Tec held the patent from filing to expiry. There is no intermediate entity, no licence-of-record, and no security agreement. Under the Assignment Center convention, a single pre-issuance inventor assignment with nothing after it is the classic signature of a patent that never left its original operating-company owner.

Per your instruction, this is not a "no records" case — one record exists — so I continue to the signal analysis below. If your Assignment Center query returns additional post-2004 records (e.g., a Change of Name to reflect the "Toshiba Tec Corporation" English rendering), that would be a correction to this report, and I could not rule that out.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6705781
    2000 : JP priority application filed
    2001 : US application filed by Toshiba Tec
         : Ryuji Iwazaki assigns to Toshiba Tec
    2004 : Patent issues as US 6705781 B2
    2022 : Patent expires after full term

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate: 0 strong signals, 0 weak-but-corroborated signals, 1 non-signal context item (Flexiworld forward citations).

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Verdict

Insufficient data (only the original assignment)

The record contains exactly one link — the 2001-09-24 inventor→Toshiba Tec conveyance recorded against appl. 09/961,856 — with no post-issuance assignment at all, so every downstream NPE tell (shell transfer, cascading LLCs, repeat correspondent, pre-litigation timing) is structurally impossible rather than merely unevidenced. Toshiba Tec, a publicly listed Japanese POS/imaging manufacturer, remained the assignee of record through the patent's 2022-04-30 adjusted expiration, and I found no litigation naming US 6705781. The only entity worth naming in the vicinity — Flexiworld Technologies — appears solely as a forward-citing party and a plaintiff on different patents; there is no assignment, no reel/frame, and no complaint connecting it to this patent, so it must not be counted as a signal.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center search: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 6705781)
• USPTO Patent Assignment Search (legacy UI): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6705781/en
• USPTO PatentCenter for appl. 09/961,856: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/

Two honest caveats. (1) I could not pull the reel/frame for the 2001-09-24 record; if you re-run the Assignment Center query and it returns a reel/frame plus a correspondent, please substitute it — a Change of Name record for the "Toshiba TEC Corporation" English rendering is plausible and would not change the verdict. (2) The "did Toshiba Tec ship a product embodying the claims" question is genuinely unresolved; if product-evidence existed, this patent would fit the "operating-company, never-asserted, expired" profile, which is the most common outcome for corporate-held imaging patents of this era.

I'll research each cited reference to build a grounded § 102 anticipation analysis. Let me start with targeted searches.

Let me research the remaining key references in parallel.

I hit the session's tool-step limit partway through the reference-by-reference lookups, so the analysis below combines (a) the authoritative full text you supplied, (b) the Espacenet INPADOC family record and the Google Patents citations page I retrieved, and (c) the abstracts/front-page data I confirmed for the four most substantive references (Xerox '189 and '601, Silverbrook '055, Canon EP 1056247). Where I could not independently verify a reference's content, I say so explicitly.

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Prior-Art Analysis — US 6,705,781 B2

0. Exact-number confirmation (no similar-number substitution)

The number 6705781 resolves, literally and without correction, to:

• US 6,705,781 B2 — "Printing service method for printing system and the printing system"
• App. 09/961,856; filed 2001-09-24; granted 2004-03-16
• Inventor Ryuji Iwazaki; assignee Toshiba Tec Kabushiki Kaisha
• Priority JP 2000-303769, filed 2000-10-03
• Family: US 2002/0038612 A1 (2002-04-04) and JP 2002108578 A (family ID 18784926)
• CPC: H04N1/00204, H04N1/00244, H04N1/00307 (mobile-phone ↔ printer/network art)

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6705781 , https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/inpadocPatentFamily?CC=JP&NR=2002108578A , https://uspto.report/patent/grant/6705781

Note on scope: Google Patents / USPTO-derived data was reachable; I could not reach the USPTO PatentCenter full document or a USPTO search interface directly in this session (tool-step cap). Everything below therefore rests on the patent's own front-page "References Cited (16)" list (the authoritative record you provided) plus the corroborating lookups noted above.

1. The § 102 critical dates that govern everything below

Pre-AIA § 102 applies (application filed 2001-09-24; § 102 as amended by the AIA applies only to applications filed on/after 2013-03-16).

• Invention/priority date: 2000-10-03 (JP 2000-303769). This is the presumptive § 102(a)/(e) threshold.
• One-year statutory bar (pre-AIA § 102(b)): 2000-09-24 (one year before the US filing).
• § 102(e): a US patent or US-published application counts if filed before the invention date.

Consequence — and this is the single most important finding in this task: because the '781 priority date is 2000-10-03, most of the Japanese references on the front page do not qualify as § 102 prior art at all, because they were published after 2000-10-03 (and pre-AIA § 102(e) does not reach foreign applications, which must qualify under § 102(a)/(b) by publication date). The Espacenet family record shows the same list appearing at the JP family level (JP 2002108578 A), which is a strong indication several of these were pulled into the "citations" set from the Japanese search report / IDS rather than relied on as anticipatory art against the US claims.

Only the US patent references cleanly qualify as § 102 art (§ 102(b) and/or § 102(e)).

2. Reference-by-reference analysis

A. US references — these DO qualify as § 102 prior art

B. Foreign references — published AFTER the 2000-10-03 priority date → NOT § 102(a)/(b) art

None of these can anticipate, because each was published after the '781 priority date, and pre-AIA § 102(e) does not cover foreign applications. (Publication dates below are taken from the front page / Espacenet.)

C. Non-patent citation

• Related U.S. application Ser. No. 09/703,830, filed 2000-11-02, inventor Shiro Takagi, "Electronic Information Management System."
  • Titled "Related U.S. patent application" on the face of '781, so it was listed as a co-pending/related application, not as § 102 art.
  • It is also disqualified by date for § 102(e): filed 2000-11-02, 30 days after the '781 priority date (2000-10-03).
  • Relevance: none as § 102 art; co-pending-application provenance only.

3. Roll-up: does any cited reference anticipate a claim?

Dependent-claim clusters (2–9, 11–18, 20–25, 27–28, 30–31 — pre-printed ads, added ad data, free/discounted charge, profile-based ad selection, mail-list selection): none of the 16 references is directed to the ad-subsidy or mail-list-selection features as claimed. They rise and fall with the independent claims above.

4. Bottom line

• On the record provided, no cited reference appears to anticipate any of the 31 claims under 35 U.S.C. § 102; the citations read as background / § 103-type art, with EP 1056247 A2 (Canon, "Printing system for e-mail") and US 6,487,189 B1 (Xerox) being the two most substantively relevant.
• A significant subset — seven of the sixteen front-page references (JP 2000-357071, JP 2000-339237, EP 1056247, JP 2001-010150, JP 2001-125982, JP 2001-245028, JP 2002-175212, JP 2002-140253, JP 2002-176450) plus the NPL item — are published/filed after the 2000-10-03 priority date and therefore are not § 102 prior art against the '781 claims at all.

5. Confidence and caveats

• High confidence in: the '781 identifiers (verbatim match across Google Patents / Espacenet / uspto.report); in the front-page citation list (from your authoritative full text); in the confirmed abstracts of US 6,487,189, US 6,430,601, US 6,405,055, and EP 1056247.
• Moderate confidence in the § 102 date reasoning: the priority date of 2000-10-03 is an assumption (Google Patents' own label), and if the applicant established an earlier actual invention date, or if the '781's effective date were otherwise shifted, the foreign references published in late 2000 (EP 1056247, JP 2000-339237, JP 2000-357071) could become relevant. Conversely, if the priority claim were imperfect, the calculus shifts too. I cannot verify perfection of the JP priority claim from available sources.
• Not independently verified: the full disclosures of items 1–4, 8, 9, 11–16 beyond their titles/abstracts (tool-step cap); the exact filing dates of US 6,487,189 and US 6,430,601 (both shown as priority 1998-09-30 with 1999-03 filings — sufficient for § 102(e) either way).
• Why so many post-priority JP documents appear: the Espacenet INPADOC record shows the same citation set attached to the JP family member (JP 2002108578 A), indicating the "Patent Citations (16)" list on the US face is at least partly populated from the Japanese search report / IDS rather than from examiner-chosen § 102 art. I flag this as an inference, not a confirmed fact.

If you want, I can, in a follow-up session, verify the full text/claims of any specific reference (e.g., pull the claim chart of US 6,487,189 against claim 10, or EP 1056247 against claim 1) now that the framework and dates are established.

I'll verify the content of the key prior-art references before building the §103 combination analysis.

Now let me verify the remaining cited references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 6,705,781 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note. This builds on the earlier sections (verification, claim overviews, dependent-claim landscape) and does not restate them. The prior art analyzed is the "Patent Citations (16)" and "Non-Patent Citations (1)" set listed on the Google Patents page for US6705781 — i.e., the references of record on the face of the patent. Where a reference's content could not be fully verified within this session's tool limits, that is flagged inline rather than asserted.

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1. Governing legal framework

One structural point that drives everything below: the claim term "printing system" in claims 1, 10, 19 is not limited to the copier chassis. The patentee's own specification (FIG. 1) treats the copy machine 1, the advertisement database server 3, the application server 4, and the LAN 2 as one cooperative system, and expressly contemplates the application software living on a remote server (¶ "the attachment file data can be opened by appropriate application software stored in the application server 4"). That self-defined breadth is what lets Canon's application-server architecture read directly onto "application software stored in the printing system" — a Phillips-style construction risk that materially strengthens every § 103 combination below.

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2. Statutory qualification of the cited art (gate check)

Before any combination argument, each cited reference must actually be prior art. Because the critical date is 2000-10-03, the Japan/EP publications of record fall on the wrong side of a strict § 102(a) analysis for subject matter supported by the JP priority document.

Consequences of this gate check — and it cuts both ways:

1. The Canon art (EP 1 056 247 / JP 2000-339237) is the single most on-point reference, but it is also the most attackable on date. It published 2000-11-29, ~8 weeks after the asserted priority date. If the applicant is entitled to 2000-10-03 for a given claim, these publications are not § 102(a) art for that claim. This is the patentee's best § 103 defense.
2. That defense fails for any claim not supported by the JP priority document. Claim 10's URL-fetch-and-print feature is the likeliest candidate for a priority gap (the U.S. and JP claim sets are not before me, so I flag the possibility, not the conclusion). If claim 10 loses the JP date, its effective date becomes 2001-09-24 and EP 1 056 247 A2 (2000-11-29) becomes clean § 102(a) art against it. That is the pivotal factual question in this case. It should be resolved before relying on Canon for claim 10.
3. The US patents are date-proof. US 6,128,661; 6,430,601; 6,487,189; 6,405,055; 6,240,445; 6,275,848 are all § 102(e) art as of their respective 1997–1999 filing dates, regardless of the priority fight. The most defensible rejection strategy therefore anchors on the Xerox + Microsoft + Silverbrook + IBM/Openware set, and uses Canon only as a "teaching" or secondary reference.
4. § 103(c) is unavailing to the patentee against the US set. Pre-AIA § 103(c) disqualifies only § 102(e)/(f)/(g) art that was commonly owned. None of US 6,275,848 (IBM), 6,128,661 (Microsoft), 6,240,445 (Openware), 6,487,189/6,430,601 (Xerox), or 6,405,055 (Silverbrook) was commonly owned with Toshiba Tec. The commonly-owned Takagi application (09/703,830) is not § 102 art anyway (post-dates the critical date).

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3. Level of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

In view of the field (FIG. 2 hardware: Bluetooth radio section, LAN section, Web browser section, MIME e-mail analysis section, image processing section) and the 2000 timeframe:

A bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent) plus 2–3 years of experience in network-attached document processing / mobile data services; or a master's degree plus ~1 year; the PHOSITA is familiar with (a) MIME/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and Content-Type-based dispatch to application software, (b) short-range radio (Bluetooth/IR) device-to-peripheral links, (c) embedded/networked MFPs with browser functions, and (d) the commercial practice of kiosk/public-access printing.

This is a routine-engineering level of skill. The combination of these four bodies of knowledge is exactly the sort of predictable, incentive-driven combination KSR holds obvious.

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4. Claim 1 — mobile phone → printing system download of mail text + attachment, opened by locally-stored application software

4.1 Element-by-element mapping

4.2 Why the combination would have been made (motivation)

The motivation is not reconstructed; it is expressly stated in the references themselves:

1. Canon states the problem the '781 patent purportedly solves — mobile phone/PDA users cannot print, and cannot open e-mail attachments. Canon then supplies the solution (application server converts the received e-mail, including attachments, into print data at a printer). That is a teaching, not an after-the-fact rationalization.
2. Xerox supplies the missing transport. Canon's weakness is that mail must be addressed to a printer/app server; it does not retrieve mail already sitting on the user's phone. Xerox supplies precisely that: a short-range (IR/RF) link from a mobile device to a network printer that retrieves and immediately prints. Combining them is the classic KSR rationale #(1)/(3): a known technique (short-range mobile-to-printer document transfer) applied to improve a similar system (e-mail-to-printer conversion) in the same way, yielding the predictable result — the user walks up, beams the mail, and gets a printout.
3. Microsoft supplies the identifier/handshake and application-dispatch architecture that the '781 apparatus claims recite structurally (radio link selection + stored settings keyed to a device identifier + applications on both sides).
4. Silverbrook confirms the market already expected e-mail from a mobile phone to become a printed page, removing any "teaching away" argument that mail-on-phone-to-print was non-obvious.

4.3 Expectation of reasonable success

Every sub-step (MIME Content-Type parsing → application dispatch; short-range RF file transfer; rasterization/print) was individually known and routine. The combination required no new discovery.

4.4 Residual novelty the combination does not cleanly reach

The directness of the transfer — the phone's own stored copy of the mail, pushed locally to the kiosk over Bluetooth, without the network/mail-server hop of Canon — is the one feature that is not verbatim in the US set. Xerox's "beaming a token to an IR-equipped network printer" is the closest analog, but a token references a network-stored document, whereas claim 1 downloads the mail itself from the phone. This is the strongest § 103 counter-argument available to the patentee (see § 8).

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5. Claim 10 — URL in the mail text → printing system fetches and prints the Web page

5.1 Mapping

5.2 Motivation and KSR rationale

Canon's homepage-printing claim group makes the Web-fetch half of claim 10 an express disclosure, and there is a documented, non-hindsight motivation: the pre-existing practice of embedding URLs in e-mail and the known desire to obtain a hard copy of "the page behind the link." The addition of the URL-extraction step is the simple substitution of a known element (URL parsing, the same technical family as the e-mail-address analysis Canon already performs) for the attachment-selection step of the claim-1 path — KSR rationale #(2). Nothing in the art teaches away; the references point the same direction (get content to a printer without the phone needing the capability).

Date caveat (repeat, because it is dispositive here): for claim 10 the Canon reference only becomes clean prior art if claim 10 is not entitled to the JP 2000-10-03 priority date. If it is entitled, the § 103 case for claim 10 must be rebuilt on Xerox alone (URL-based tokens over IR/RF to a network printer capable of Internet retrieval) — which is plausible but less airtight and would need verification of whether Xerox's printers themselves contained the browser function or merely received a token for a URL.

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6. Claim 19 — remote-submitted print job released only upon phone-identity match

This is the claim with the cleanest, most date-proof § 103 case, because every core element is disclosed in US references that are § 102(e) art as of 1997–1998 filing dates.

Motivation to combine (strong, KSR rationale #(5), design incentive)

The problem is inherent to the field: a kiosk in a convenience store that prints whatever a remote PC submits will either (i) print unattended pages that a stranger can walk off with, or (ii) require the sender's credentials be typed at the kiosk. The known solution to "hold the job until the right person arrives" is to verify identity at release. Using the mobile phone the recipient already carries as the identity token — and using its telephone number as the comparison value — is expressly suggested by Openware's identifier-usage teaching and by Microsoft's identifier-comparison architecture. The telephone number is the single most obvious choice of identifier for a mobile phone in 2000; that is a design choice / predictable variation, not invention.

This claim also has the least favorable eligibility optics (a coordination-of-human-activity flavor under Alice step 1), but that is a § 101 overlay and does not affect the § 103 conclusion.

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7. Claims 26 and 29 (apparatus) and the dependent clusters

7.1 Claims 26 and 29

These are the system-form recitations of claims 1 and 10 and are obvious for the same reasons, with a cleaner structural overlap, because the recited "sections" map almost one-for-one onto the cited hardware:

The apparatus claims add nothing to the method claims for § 103 purposes: they recite the same functions in means-plus-function form, and "a patentee who chooses to claim an apparatus in functional terms does not thereby escape a § 103 rejection when the functions are the same ones the prior art performs."

7.2 Claims 2–8, 11–18, 20–25, 27–28, 30–31 — the advertising-subsidy and profile clusters

Honest assessment: this is the weakest part of the § 103 case on the record as cited, and probably was the real point of novelty.

What this means practically: if this patent is being attacked on § 103, the independent claims are the vulnerable target and the advertising-dependent claims are comparatively well-defended on the cited record. A challenger would need new art (pre-2000-10-03) disclosing ad-subsidized public printing — e.g., coupon-on-receipt / ad-sponsored print kiosks — which is not among the 16 cited references. Conversely, if the patent is being asserted, the presence of the Canon art of record on the face of the patent (a § 102(a) problem the examiner already considered) is a serious validity exposure.

KSR note on the commercial features: the ad-subsidy and free/discounted limitations are essentially business-model limitations. Under pre-AIA § 103 they are still weighed, and KSR's "design incentive / market forces" rationale goes some distance — the incentive to let advertisers pay so the user prints free is obvious — but the absence of a disclosed advertiser-paid-print prior art reference in the cited set means the evidentiary gap is a gap, not a mere argument. I will not manufacture a reference I did not verify.

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8. Counterarguments the patentee would raise — and how they fare

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9. Bottom line

The decisive open question for the whole analysis is the priority-date scope of claim 10 (and of any claim whose subject matter may not appear in JP 2000-303769). If that scope is confirmed against the applicant, the two most damaging references (Canon EP 1 056 247 A2 and its JP family member JP 2000-339237) drop out of § 102(a) for the affected claims, and the § 103 case thins to the Xerox/Silverbrook/Microsoft/Openware set — still sufficient for claims 19 and 9, adequate for 1/26 on a motivation-plus-expectation theory, and weakest for the URL claim.

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10. Confidence and unverified items (stated explicitly)

High confidence: the bibliographic dates in § 2 (from the Google Patents "Patent Citations" table); the statutory posture rules applied (pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b)/(e), § 103(c)); the content of US 6,128,661, US 6,430,601, US 6,487,189, US 6,405,055 and EP 1 056 247 A2 as quoted above (verified against Google Patents / EPO Global Patent Index / patentimages PDFs this session).

Not verified in this session — treat as leads, not findings:

• The substantive disclosure of JP 2001-125982 A and JP 2001-010150 A (Casio) — cited by the examiner for the advertising/billing concept, but I could not pull their full texts. Their titles support only the "right neighborhood" inference; both also carry the post–critical-date § 102(a) problem.
• The substantive disclosure of JP 2000-357071 A (Canon), JP 2001-245028 A (Funai), US 5,964,847 (IBM), US 6,275,848 (IBM), and US 6,240,445 (Openware). The Openware mapping in § 6 rests on the title of record ("using an identifier appended to a shared telephone number") and must be confirmed against its specification before being relied on in a rejection.
• Whether EP 1 056 247 A2 has a US family member with a § 102(e) filing date before 2000-10-03. A citation page surfaced US 7,441,003 ("Payment based electronic mail printing system utilizing search criteria") in the same citation neighborhood as EP 1 056 247 A2; if US 7,441,003 shares the Canon 1999-05-26 JP priority and was filed in the US in 2000, its § 102(e) date would defeat the priority-date defense outright. This is the highest-value single verification item and I did not complete it.
• The claim-by-claim content of JP 2000-303769 (the priority document) — necessary to fix the priority scope discussed in § 2 and § 8.

No auto-correction was applied to any patent or publication number. Every identifier above is reproduced literally as it appears on the page (e.g., JP 2002-140253 A, JP 2000-339237 A, US 6,405,055 B1), including the ones that fall outside the prior-art window.