US 5625757

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

Let me search specifically for litigation/docket information and additional details.

Let me search for the patent's abstract and any litigation records.

Summary of US Patent 5,625,757

Bottom line: US 5,625,757 ("the '757 patent," published as US5625757A) is a Hitachi-originated patent titled "Printing system." It issued 29 Apr 1997, expired 21 Dec 2014, and I found no evidence of any CAFC 2026 litigation or docket involving it. Details and citations below, with explicit flags where I could not verify something authoritatively.

Bibliographic data

Sources: Google Patents bibliographic record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5625757A/en) and SumoBrain claim text (https://SumoBrain.com/patents/us/Printing-system/5625757.html).

Note on naming: the Google Patents "Definitions"/front-matter and the assignment record spell some names slightly differently ("Junichi Kazama" vs. assignment's "KAZUMA, JINICHI" / "JINICHI KAZUMA"). I have not auto-corrected these; both spellings appear in the source material. One EPO search report also lists the '757 reference as "OKADA TADASHI ET AL," i.e., leading with a different inventor — I did not reconcile this discrepancy.

Abstract

Uncertainty flag: I was not able to retrieve the verbatim abstract text with authority. The search results returned the specification, claims, and citation records, but not the abstract paragraph itself. Rather than reconstruct and present a fabricated abstract, here is a faithful paraphrase drawn from the claim text and specification summary that I did retrieve:

The patent discloses a printing system in which one or more terminal devices (clients), printers shared among them, and one or more "printer/spooler control servers" (print servers) are networked, optionally with a distributed printing management server that maintains a printer configuration management table. The print server watches printer status, notifies the originating terminal of printer error type and location when an error occurs, and holds the job in a printer-error-recovery waiting state until both (a) the error is released and (b) the terminal issues an error-recovery instruction, after which printing restarts — optionally reprinting only from a designated or error-occurred page. Related aspects cover logical-specification-level print instructions, alternative-printer recovery, print-job status/history queries, and printer-specification acquisition.

If you need the exact abstract wording, it should be verified directly against the front page of the granted patent (USPTO PatentCenter) rather than against secondary sites.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Uncertainty flag: I retrieved only the beginning of the claim set. Claim 1 is confirmed as an independent system claim, and claims 2–4 as retrieved are dependent (2 depends on 1; 3 depends on 1; 4 depends on 3). I could not verify whether the patent contains additional independent claims later in the set, so the following should be treated as covering the independent claim I could confirm, not necessarily the entire independent-claim set.

Independent Claim 1 — a networked printing system with controlled error recovery. In plain terms:

A printing system has three parts:

1. A terminal device (client) that can transmit a print job, and that includes means for instructing error recovery to the print server.
2. Printers that actually print based on the job.
3. At least one print server connected to the terminal over a network and to the printers (directly or over the network), which includes:
   • means to forward the received job to whichever printer it is destined for;
   • printer management means that records the relationship between the terminal and the destination printer (so the server knows where a printer physically is);
   • printer status watching means that monitors the destination printer;
   • printer information notifying means that reports back to the originating terminal; and
   • printer status recording means that stores the watch results.

The inventive core is the control behavior on error. When the watching means detects a printer error, the server:

• stops execution of the print job, and
• notifies the originating terminal of both the positional information of the errored printer (obtained from the printer management means) and the sort/type of error (from the status recording means).

The server also has first shifting means (print-execution → printer-error-recovery-waiting state) and second shifting means (waiting → print-execution state). On error detection, the server moves the printer into the recovery-waiting state and keeps it there. It only moves back to the printing state — and restarts the job — when two conditions are both satisfied: (a) the watching means detects the error has been cleared, and (b) the terminal's error-recovery instructing means issues an instruction to the server. This two-condition gate is what prevents the server and printer from autonomously resuming before the user/terminal is ready, a behavior the patent criticizes in the prior art.

Dependent claims retrieved (for context, not independent):

• Claim 2 — On restart, the server cancels the job at the printer and retransmits it to reprint (server-side reprint).
• Claim 3 — The server stores the error-occurred page's page information and error message; the terminal can choose to re-execute all pages, an arbitrary designated page, or the error-occurred page, and the server transmits the corresponding portion of the job.
• Claim 4 — In the arbitrary-page and error-page cases, the server edits the job into a new job starting from that page ("page extracting edition") rather than retransmitting from the head.

CAFC 2026 docket / litigation check

Result: no hits. I searched for the specific number in connection with CAFC 2026 dockets and litigation generally, and found no Federal Circuit case, district court case, PTAB proceeding, or 2026 docket naming US 5,625,757. The number appears in search results only as a cited prior-art reference in later patents/applications (e.g., EP 1 837 820 A1; US 20080265042A1; US 6,817,792; US 8,717,592; KR 100981802; and EPO/PCT search reports), never as an asserted or litigated patent.

Two important caveats:

• The patent has been expired since 2014-12-21. An expired patent can still be the subject of an appeal over past damages, but this makes a fresh 2026 CAFC docket unlikely and is consistent with finding nothing.
• I could not directly query the USPTO PatentCenter/assignment database or the CAFC docket system in this session — the searches were web-based. If you need a definitive "no litigation" statement, this should be confirmed against the USPTO PatentCenter litigation/assignment tabs and the CAFC PACER/RECAP docket directly.

Related/family information encountered

• Japanese family members (per an EPO search-report annex): JP 7230372 A (1995-08-29) and JP 7306764 A (1995-11-21).
• Cited prior art within the specification: JP-A-2-67168; JP-A-3-192463; JP-A-3-224778; JP-A-2-60781; JP-A-2-166511.
• A related Hitachi filing appearing in citation lists: US 5,802,260 (1994-11-28). I did not verify its relationship to the '757 patent.

Overall uncertainty summary

1. Abstract text — not retrieved verbatim; paraphrase only.
2. Full independent-claim set — only claim 1 confirmed as independent.
3. Litigation/CAFC status — no results found, but not confirmed against primary docket databases.
4. Inventor-name spelling discrepancies across the Google Patents front matter, the assignment record, and an EPO search report — left as-is, not auto-corrected.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 5625757.

Let me search litigation-specific databases for this patent number.

Let me try litigation-specific databases and record searches.

Litigation Search Results: U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757

Patent identified (confirmed literally): U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 — "Printing System." Application No. 08/361,226. Filed 1994‑12‑21. Priority 1993‑12‑24. Granted 1997‑04‑29. Inventors: Seiji Kageyama, Satoru Matsumoto, Makoto Kitagawa, Takuya Shimakawa, Junichi Kazama, Tadashi Okada. Original assignee Hitachi, Ltd.; later assigned to Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. Status: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2014‑12‑21). (Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5625757](/patent/US5625757)/en; https://uspto.report/patent/grant/5,625,757)

Finding: No litigation located

Based on my searches across publicly available sources, I found no evidence of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 — no district court infringement action, no CAFC appeal, and no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR) that I could identify.

Specifically:

• No case (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date) could be identified for this patent number.
• The patent appears in the record only as prior art / a citation in other patents and in one EPO search report — where it was cited as an "X" (particularly relevant) reference against Samsung's EP 0 996 055 A3 ("Network printer system and method of processing waiting print job when print error occurs"). Being cited as prior art is not litigation.

Important caveats and disambiguation

I want to be explicit about a real risk of confusion, since several similarly-numbered patents are heavily litigated, and I was directed not to auto‑correct or conflate identifiers:

Note particularly that one search returned results for US 5,572,576 (Klausner visual voicemail), which is a different patent, and another for US 5,748,575 (IST), also different. Neither is U.S. 5,625,757, and I have not counted those as litigation involving this patent.

Limitations on this search

• My access was limited to general web searching plus the sources returned (Google Patents, uspto.report, Justia Patents, PACER Monitor, Unified Patents, court document repositories).
• I could not directly query the Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist), PACER, CourtListener/RECAP, or Westlaw/Lexis docket databases in a targeted way for this specific number before reaching my tool limit.
• Given the patent expired on 2014‑12‑21, any enforcement activity would necessarily predate that date, but I still found none.

Recommendation

I cannot confirm that zero litigation exists — only that no litigation surfaced in my searches. Because this is a legal-status question where a false negative is possible, I recommend verifying directly against primary docket sources before relying on this:

1. CourtListener / RECAP — search docket entries for "5,625,757".
2. PACER — full-text search across district courts.
3. Unified Patents litigation portal and USPTO PTAB (for any IPR/PGR) and USPTO Assignment records.
4. Lex Machina / Docket Navigator for comprehensive patent‑case coverage.

If those confirm no hits, the correct answer is: No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before finalizing.

Let me run a few more targeted checks for litigation/troll-activity and any PTAB filings tied to this patent number.

PTAB Landscape — U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 ("Printing system")

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file against US 5,625,757: 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials — the USPTO Open Data Portal returns an empty AIA-trial set for this patent as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web checks surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM bearing this patent number (no proceeding numbers to report; I will not invent any). The bottom-line defensive posture is unusually strong for reasons that have nothing to do with PTAB: the patent expired on 2014-12-21 (20 years from its 1994-12-21 filing date, per the Google Patents bibliographic record), so a defendant targeted today faces a patent with no prospective infringement exposure and, because of the 35 U.S.C. § 286 six-year damages lookback, effectively no recoverable past damages — the claims are not "hardened," they are time-barred as an assertion vehicle.

Why no per-proceeding entries follow

Because the canonical list is empty, there are no proceedings to profile in the requested claim-by-claim format. Two of the three AIA vehicles are also categorically unavailable here, which matters for how you read the null result:

• PGR is legally impossible. Post-grant review applies only to patents with an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16. This patent's priority date is 1993-12-24 and its filing date is 1994-12-21 — roughly 19 years too early. Its absence is not a signal about litigiousness; it is a statutory dead end.
• CBM was available in principle (2012-09-16 to 2020-09-16) but very unlikely to have been instituted. The claims recite a printing system with printers, a print server, printer status watching, and error-recovery shifting — i.e., a "technological invention" that would likely have been knocked out under the § 18(d)(1) exception. Combined with expiration in 2014, the practical window was ~27 months.
• IPR was available in principle for the ~27 months between 2012-09-16 and the 2014-12-21 expiration (the Board can and does institute on expired patents where past damages are at stake), but no petition appears in the public record.

Verification trail (so you can re-run this yourself)

• Structured source (canonical): the "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied with this task — USPTO ODP, AIA trial records for US 5,625,757 — returns no proceedings.
• PTAB E2E / PTAB Center (party and patent search): https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ — search by patent number 5,625,757 or application 08/361,226.
• USPTO PTAB Decisions (public FWDs): https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions — nothing captioned to this patent surfaced.
• USPTO Patent Center (prosecution + reexam flag): https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ — application 08/361,226. (Also worth checking for any ex parte reexamination, which is outside the AIA-trial list but leaves a visible reexam certificate.)
• CourtListener / RECAP (any CAFC or district docket): https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%225%2C625%2C757%22 — no appellate or district hit tied to this patent emerged.
• Google Patents (bibliographic + legal status): https://patents.google.com/patent/US5625757/en — legal status "Expired - Lifetime," anticipated expiration 2014-12-21, current assignee Ricoh Printing Systems Ltd (assigned 2005-09-09 from Hitachi, Ltd.).

Strategic summary

Claim status — CANCELED: none. SUSTAINED: none. UNTESTED: all. Every issued claim stands exactly as granted, because no adjudicative body has ever narrowed them. On the published text, claim 1 is the broad, independent system claim (terminal equipment + printers + a print server with printer-status watching, printer-status recording, first/second shifting means between a print-execution status and a "printer error recovery waiting status," and restart only upon both error release and a terminal-originated recovery instruction); claims 2–5 are dependent, covering cancel-and-retransmit reprinting (claim 2), error-page notification with head/specified/error-page reprint selection (claim 3), page-extracting editing of the print job (claim 4), and further reprint mechanics (claim 5). I did not independently verify the full issued claim count beyond the claims visible in the published text, so treat the total count as needing a Patent Center confirmation rather than an assumption. Practical upshot: there is no IPR-narrowing record to cite and no canceled claim to hand a court — the defense here is expiration and damages timing, not patentability.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2) is a non-issue, and the more useful bar is § 286. Because no IPR was ever instituted against this patent, no petitioner or privy is estopped from anything: there is no IPR-estoppel gatekeeper blocking you from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground in litigation, and there is no estoppel you can borrow from someone else's earlier challenge. The real constraint runs the other way: § 286 limits recovery to infringement occurring six years before the complaint is filed. A complaint filed on or after 2020-12-21 can reach only post-2020 infringement — but the patent expired 2014-12-21, so no infringing acts are possible in the recoverable window. On these facts, even a fully valid and literally infringed claim yields no damages. Add that the patent expired before SCA Hygiene–era laches defenses were abolished, and note that equitable defenses are largely academic when the damages number is zero.

Pattern signals — there is no pattern to read. No repeat petitioner, no serial filings, no joinder motions, no IPR-then-litigation sequencing. The patent never attracted a defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, RPX, or New Bay Capital-style petition appears in any search result tied to this number), and the 2012–2014 window — precisely the years when NPE-targeted printing and network-peripheral patents drew Unified/RPX petitions — passed without a challenge. The absence of IPRs is not the "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" signal, because the patent appears never to have been asserted in a U.S. district court at all in the searches I ran; the only Hitachi-side enforcement activity I found in the record is unrelated (e.g., Hitachi, Ltd. v. Proview International Holdings, N.D. Cal. 3:05-cv-02305, and Hitachi entity disputes in Japan concerning different patents). Resolve the causation one way: no assertion → no defendant with standing/motivation → no IPR.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not brief an IPR as your primary defense — it is close to pointless. Even if a petition were filed (the Board can institute on an expired patent), the only thing IPR could win you is a cancellation order on a patent that already cannot support a damages award. An IPR would be cost without defensive value here; a § 286/expiration motion beats it on economics and on certainty. PTAB's statutory machinery is described at 35 U.S.C. § 314(b) and § 316(a)(11) (institution within 3 months of the preliminary-response deadline; final written decision within 1 year of institution) — none of which you need, because there is no active proceeding with any institution deadline, oral hearing, or FWD due date to calendar.
2. If you are currently on the receiving end of an assertion letter citing this patent, the first response is a date argument, not a validity argument. Demand the accused acts be identified by date. Any accused conduct after 2014-12-21 cannot infringe; any conduct before 2020-12-21 (six years preceding a complaint filed today, 2026-09-19) is § 286 time-barred. The complaint is answerable on the pleadings.
3. Confirm the asset's chain of title before responding. Current assignee of record is Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. (reassignment recorded 2005-09-09 from Hitachi, Ltd.); the original assignee was Hitachi, Ltd. (1994-12-21). If the asserting party is neither Ricoh Printing Systems nor a documented successor, add a standing/ownership motion — and check whether the patent was ever reissue-, reexam-, or disclaimer-affected in Patent Center before conceding its claims read as printed.
4. Preserve the record for a fee-shifting posture. If a demand rests on an expired patent whose recoverable damages window is empty, that is the raw material for an § 285 exceptional-case argument and, where the letter misstates the expiration date, potentially state-law/UCL exposure. Preserve the demand letter, the envelope/dates, and any pre-suit notice.

Caveat on completeness: My conclusion is limited to the sources reachable here. The ODP block is the authoritative list and it is empty; web search corroborates. I could not access PTAB E2E or Patent Center directly to query the reexamination and reissue flags in real time, and a preexisting, non-publicly-captioned or freshly filed petition (if one were somehow filed on an expired patent) would not necessarily be reflected. Before you rely on "zero proceedings" in a filing, run one live PTAB E2E patent-number query on 5,625,757 and one Patent Center reexam check on 08/361,226 and print the results.

I'll research this patent's chain of title across the sources specified.

Let me probe further for the assignment reel/frame details and any subsequent transfers.

Let me check for any downstream transfers or litigation involving this patent.

Ownership & Assignment Reconstruction — US 5,625,757 ("Printing system")

Source note / limitation up front: I was able to retrieve the legal-events record for this patent from Google Patents and corroborating corporate-history sources, but I was not able to pull the underlying USPTO Assignment Center entries with their reel/frame numbers or correspondent-of-record fields. The Assignment Center is a JS-driven query interface that does not expose stable per-patent permalinks to a text crawler, and none of the secondary indexes I reached (uspto.report, Google Patents, Espacenet, Unified Patents, Justia) reproduce reel/frame for this patent. Do not treat the reel/frame field below as verified — I have not fabricated numbers and have marked them as unresolved. Verification path: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 5625757) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Inventors

Named on the face of US 5,625,757 (per Google Patents and uspto.report):

Notes on patterns:

• All six are Hitachi, Ltd. employees working in Hitachi's printer organization. The specification self-identifies the commercial product line — it references the "Printer Driver Programmer's Guide (manual No. 3050-3-026-30) for the Hitachi Creative Station 3050" — i.e., the inventors were working on a shipping Hitachi printer/print-server product, not a paper-only portfolio asset.
• Name-transcription discrepancy worth flagging (literal, not auto-corrected): the recorded assignment data as surfaced by Google Patents lists assignors as "KAZUMA, JINICHI" and "OKADA, TAKASHI", whereas the granted patent lists "Junichi Kazama" and "Tadashi Okada." Same four other names match cleanly. This is most likely a romanization/transcription variance between the assignment cover sheet and the printed patent, but the two spellings should be reconciled against the reel/frame images before relying on either.
• No unusual departure pattern. There is no evidence in the record of inventors leaving Hitachi within 12 months of filing, and no fire-sale precursor. The patent stayed with Hitachi for ~11 years post-issue before the one corporate transfer below.

Original assignee

Hitachi, Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan) — named assignee on the issued patent (recorded at filing, 1994-12-21).

• Business: Diversified Japanese electronics/manufacturing conglomerate; the relevant unit was its printer business, which produced line-matrix, high-speed laser, color laser and POD-oriented printers, and supplied printer engines/components OEM to Canon, HP, Lexmark and others.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, on the record of the specification itself. The claimed system (client → print server → network printer with error reporting, spooler-preserved print jobs, reprint-from-error-page, logical-specification printer selection) is described as implemented on Hitachi's own print-server/printer line, and the specification expressly cites the Hitachi Creative Station 3050 driver manual. This is an operating-company-origin patent, not a filing-shelf asset.
• Current status of that business: Not bankruptcy, not a fire-sale. On 2004-10-01 Hitachi transferred 100% of the shares of its wholly owned printer subsidiary Hitachi Printing Solutions, Ltd. (Hitachi PRS, incorporated Oct 2002) to Ricoh Co., Ltd. for ¥44,085 million, under an agreement signed 2004-08-09 (basic agreement 2004-03-31). The company was renamed Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. ("RPS") in October 2004 and its US arm became Ricoh Printing Systems America, Inc. This was a going-concern carve-out and sale to a strategic acquirer, and Hitachi continued to sell RPS-built printers under the Hitachi brand (OEM agreement from April 2006).

Assignment timeline

Chronological recorded events. Reel/frame could not be retrieved for either entry — see the source note above.

• 1994-12-21 (executed) / recorded 1994-12-21 (same date per Google Patents legal events) — Reel/frame NOT RETRIEVED

  • Conveyance: Assignment (inventors → company)
  • Assignor: Seiji Kageyama; Satoru Matsumoto; Makoto Kitagawa; Takuya Shimakawa; Jinichi Kazuma (as recorded; patent prints "Junichi Kazama"); Takashi Okada (as recorded; patent prints "Tadashi Okada")
  • Assignee: Hitachi, Ltd.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable from the sources reached; unverified. This is the field that matters most for the NPE analysis below, and it is missing.
  • Context: Ordinary employment assignment at filing — no separate commercial transaction.

• 2005-09-09 (recorded) / effective on the 2004-10-01 share transfer — Reel/frame NOT RETRIEVED

  • Conveyance: Assignment (per Google Patents legal-event entry, "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST")
  • Assignor: HITACHI, LTD.
  • Assignee: RICOH PRINTING SYSTEMS, LTD.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable; unverified. Under my operating rules I will not name a correspondent without a source, and I have no source for this one.
  • Context: Internal reorg / strategic acquisition — the patent followed Hitachi's printer business into Ricoh's hands via the 100%-share purchase of Hitachi Printing Solutions, Ltd. Not a transfer to an asserter.

No further assignments appear in the legal-events record. No transfer to any IP-holding LLC, no security interest, no license record, no merger conveyance beyond the above. The patent's recorded status is Expired – Lifetime, with anticipated expiration 2014-12-21 (20 years from the 1994-12-21 filing).

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 5625757
    1993 : Priority date filed
    1994 : Application filed by Hitachi Ltd
         : Inventors assign to Hitachi Ltd
    1997 : Patent granted
    2004 : Ricoh buys Hitachi Printing Solutions
    2005 : Recorded assignment to Ricoh Printing Systems
    2014 : Patent expires

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The only post-issuance transfer is Hitachi, Ltd. → Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. on the 2005-09-09 record. Ricoh Printing Systems is an operating printer manufacturer (¥60bn net sales; 820 direct employees; US subsidiary continuing the Hitachi product line), not a licensing shell. No "IP/Holdings/Ventures"-suffixed assignee, no registered-agent address, no single-member LLC.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither Hitachi, Ltd. nor Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. appears on the referenced NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). No Unified Patents or RPX high-frequency-plaintiff listing surfaced for either entity in connection with this patent.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not assessable. I could not retrieve the correspondent-of-record for either entry, and the assignment-center permalink structure did not yield the field. This is the single most important gap: with only two links in the chain there is unlikely to be a recurring NPE-style correspondent anyway, but I decline to mark this "not present" without the data. Flagging for manual retrieval at the Assignment Center.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. One post-issuance transfer, executed ~11 years after the patent issued and ~8 years after grant-date maintenance. No chained LLCs, no sub-24-month succession, no shared correspondent addresses.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. I found no infringement suit naming US 5,625,757 in any of the sources searched. The 2005-09-09 record predates nothing; there is no assertion to precede. (The patent is cited extensively as prior art — e.g., in EP 1 385 083, EP 0 977 119, EP 0 996 055, EP 0 917 042, and against US 9,146,698 / US 9,298,402 — but that is prosecution citation, not litigation.)

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Hitachi did not file for bankruptcy and there was no §363 sale. The printer business left Hitachi through a negotiated share sale to Ricoh.

7. Privateering — not present. Hitachi's divestiture was a cost/portfolio rationalization ("i.e.HITACHI Plan II"), and Hitachi remained a seller of the divested unit's products under its own brand. There is no evidence Ricoh or RPS was given the patent to assert against Hitachi's competitors on Hitachi's behalf.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents or OIN. It terminates at an operating company, and the patent has since expired.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

Justification: the recorded chain is effectively the original employment assignment (1994-12-21 to Hitachi, Ltd.) plus a single corporate transfer recorded 2005-09-09 from Hitachi, Ltd. to Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd., a Japanese operating printer manufacturer acquired by Ricoh on 2004-10-01 — an operating-company-to-operating-company transaction with zero NPE characteristics. None of the eight NPE signals is present, but I cannot upgrade to a clean "operating-company / non-asserting" conclusion because I could not retrieve the reel/frame or correspondent-of-record for either entry, and I cannot positively exclude an unindexed later record: the "Insufficient data" call reflects that evidentiary gap, not a suspected hidden NPE chain. Independently, the patent is Expired – Lifetime as of 2014-12-21, so it cannot be asserted today regardless of title.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "5625757") and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — request the full abstract of title, which will supply the reel/frame and correspondent for the 1994-12-21 and 2005-09-09 entries.

I'll research the cited prior art for US 5,625,757, starting with the USPTO record and patent databases.

Let me retrieve the front-page "References Cited" list for US 5,625,757 from patent databases.

Let me pull the citation list from Justia and FreePatentsOnline records for this patent.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 ("Printing System")

Scope note first. I was asked to "search the USPTO database" and analyze "each patent citation for 5625757." Two clarifications that materially affect the answer:

1. I could not retrieve the patent's front-page (56) "References Cited" list from a primary USPTO source within my available searches. The authoritative full text supplied to me (the Google Patents rendering at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5625757/en) contains the specification and claim set but omits the "References Cited" / "Citations" block. I will not guess at it. Everything I attribute to a (56) citation below is either (a) confirmed from the patent's own specification text, or (b) flagged as unverified.

2. "Patent citation" is ambiguous and runs in two directions. Backward citations = prior art cited against 5,625,757 (the relevant set for §102). Forward citations = later patents citing 5,625,757 (legally irrelevant to §102 because they postdate the 1993-12-24 priority date). I treat both, but keep them separate so neither is mistaken for the other.

A. Backward citations confirmed from the patent's own text

These are the references the patent itself identifies as prior art. Publication dates are the controlling dates for §102(a)/(b) purposes; the critical date is the 1993-12-24 priority date (filing 1994-12-21), so a reference must predate the invention/one-year grace period.

Direct §102 conclusion on the confirmed set: No reference in Category A anticipates independent claim 1. Claim 1 requires, in combination: printer-status watching means; printer management means storing the terminal↔printer relationship; printer information notifying means reporting both the positional information of the error-occurring printer and the sort of error to the terminal; first shifting means (print-execution → error-recovery-waiting) and second shifting means (waiting → execution); and restart conditioned on both detection of error release and an error-recovery instruction from the terminal equipment. Neither JP-A-2-67168 nor JP-A-5-138994 discloses any of the error-handling elements. They are §103 background references against the specification-acquisition aspects only.

B. The (56) U.S. patent citation list — a gap you should close

I was not able to obtain the enumerated U.S. Patent Documents listed in the (56) block of 5,625,757. I am therefore not listing any U.S. patents as "cited prior art" of this patent, because I cannot verify them. To complete the task rigorously:

• Google Patents "Citations" panel — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5625757A](/patent/US5625757A)/en (expand Citations → Patent Citations and Non-Patent Citations).
• USPTO PatentCenter for Application 08/361,226 — the scanned front page (item 56) and the examiner's Form PTO-892 / PTO-1449 Information Disclosure Statements.
• uspto.report/patent/grant/5,625,757 and the patent's own PDF (linked from the Google Patents page).

Note one confirming data point that a (56) list exists with non-patent literature: the SumoBrain rendering of the same patent ends the front-matter with "OTHER PUBLICATIONS … Manual No. 3000-9-106-20," i.e., there is a populated non-patent-literature block I could not fully read (https://sumobrain.com/patents/us/Printing-system/5625757.html).

C. Forward citations — NOT prior art (listed only to prevent conflation)

These patents cite 5,625,757 as prior art. Because they all postdate the 1993-12-24 priority date, their only status is as evidence of what the '757 disclosure is understood to teach — they are legally incapable of anticipating any claim of 5,625,757.

Separately, per the earlier litigation section, 5,625,757 was cited as an "X" (particularly relevant) reference in the EPO search report against Samsung's EP 0 996 055 A3 ("Network printer system and method of processing waiting print job when print error occurs") — again, art used against others, not art against the '757 patent.

D. Verdict and honest limitations

• Most relevant prior art for U.S. 5,625,757, on confirmed evidence: JP-A-2-67168 and JP-A-5-138994 — both admitted background in the '757 specification for the printer-specification-recognition aspect, and both distinguishable (they place the specification database in the host).
• §102 anticipation: I identify no single reference that anticipates independent claim 1 or its error-recovery dependent claims. The Category-A references are §103/background material directed at a different problem (specification identification), and the Category-C documents are post-priority and legally unavailable as §102 art.
• What I could not do: (i) read the front-page (56) U.S. list; (ii) read the full text of JP-A-3-192463, JP-A-3-224778, JP-A-2-60781, JP-A-2-166511; (iii) read "Manual No. 3000-9-106-20." Claims mapping for those four JP references is therefore not asserted.

E. Discrepancies / flags

• Priority-date discrepancy: Google Patents and uspto.report give the priority date as 1993-12-24; the Unified Patents portal listing shows US-5625757-A, Priority Date: 1993-12-23. This is a one-day difference (consistent with a JST→UTC conversion artifact of the JP priority application). Neither date changes the analysis, but I flag it rather than silently normalizing.
• Number disambiguation maintained: I did not conflate US 5,625,757 with US 5,572,576 (Klausner, visual voicemail) or US 5,748,575 (IST). Those are different patents, and their litigations are not attributed here. (The earlier litigation section's table contained a typographical artifact "5,625,576" — the correct Klausner number is 5,572,576.)
• All of the above is prior-art/technical analysis, not a legal conclusion; assignee status (Hitachi → Ricoh Printing Systems) and expiration (2014-12-21) are as previously reported and were not re-verified here.

I'll gather the prior art references associated with this patent before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me retrieve the specific citation lists (Patent Citations / Cited By) for this patent, plus verify dates and content of the key prior-art references.

Let me retrieve the full claim set and the complete "Patent Citations" (prior-art) list for this patent.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 5,625,757 Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Patent: U.S. 5,625,757 ("Printing System"), App. No. 08/361,226, filed 1994‑12‑21, JP priority 1993‑12‑24, granted 1997‑04‑29, original assignee Hitachi, Ltd., later Ricoh Printing Systems, Ltd. Status: expired (anticipated expiration 2014‑12‑21). Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US5625757](/patent/US5625757)/en

0. Scope, governing law, and evidence caveats

Governing law. Because the application was filed before 2013‑03‑16, pre‑AIA § 103 applies: the prior art must predate the applicant's invention (here presumptively the 1993‑12‑24 JP priority date, which the specification's disclosure supports). Obviousness is judged under Graham v. John Deere and KSR Int'l v. Teleflex — the TSM test is one permissible framework, but the correct inquiry is whether the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious, including "obvious to try," predictable variation of known elements, and design incentives in the field.

Critical date: 1993‑12‑24. References published on/after that date, or U.S. applications filed on/after that date, are not § 102(a)/(b)/(e) art (subject to the nuances flagged below).

Evidence caveat you should read literally (per the operating rules)

The full patent text supplied for this task (the authority) does not contain a formal front-page "References Cited" section; it contains only the references the specification itself discusses. In searching, I retrieved a list headed "Patent Citations (18)" — but that table belongs to US 6,817,792 B2 ("System for printer suggested upgrades to correct errors"), a later patent that cites US 5,625,757; it is not US 5,625,757's own citation list. I flag this rather than silently importing it, exactly as instructed regarding identifiers.

Likewise, the Google Patents family page for US 5,625,757 lists JP H07‑175685 A (Ricoh, "Network printer") with a 1993‑12‑17 date — but the publication date shown is 1995‑07‑14, i.e., after this patent's filing date. As a foreign published application it is not § 102(a)/(b) art, and I found no verified U.S. counterpart, so I do not rely on it below.

Where I am relying on references retrieved from family/citation pages rather than from the patent text itself, I say so and grade my confidence.

Claims at issue (functional families)

The claim set is long; I group it into the families that actually drive the § 103 analysis. (Claim numbering varies slightly across the secondary sources I retrieved — e.g., one source shows the "method of obtaining specification information" claim numbered 8 while another shows alternative-printer subject matter at 8 — so I analyze by subject matter, and note the numbering caution rather than reconciling it.)

1. The prior art relied upon (with dates and provenance)

Deliberately excluded (and why):

• US 5,620,264 (Seiko Epson, "Error control system for a printer") — filed 1994‑06‑02, i.e., after the 1993‑12‑24 priority date. Not § 102(a)/(b)/(e) art against the priority‑date invention (it would be art only against the actual U.S. filing date if priority were lost for a given claim).
• US 5,802,260 (Hitachi, filed 1994‑11‑28) and the JP H07‑175685 A Ricoh publication (1995‑07‑14) — post‑date this patent.
• US Ser. No. 07/936,659 (1992‑04‑28) and 08/266,699 (1994‑06‑28), incorporated by reference — same‑applicant work; pre‑AIA § 102(e) requires "by another," and § 103(c) common‑ownership considerations apply. These are treated as part of the specification, not as third‑party art.

2. Level of ordinary skill

A person of ordinary skill at the 1993 critical date would have: a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science, or equivalent, plus 2–3 years of experience in network printing, print‑server/spooler software, or printer‑controller firmware, including familiarity with TCP/IP or SPX/IPX LANs, printer control languages (PDL), and LAN printer‑status protocols (lpd, NetWare RP, and the parallel‑port print‑server devices discussed in US 5,323,393).

That artisan would be acutely aware of the two problems the patent recites as its motivation — (i) users must know each printer's capabilities to route jobs, and (ii) print servers could not obtain or act on detailed printer error information — because the prior art itself frames both problems. US 5,323,393's Background expressly complains that then‑existing LAN print devices "do not allow the printer to transmit sufficient amounts of data to the LAN," returning only "off‑line" and "out of paper," and that "little else" is available; the patent's own Background makes the identical complaint about the "report from the printer to the print server and a report from the print server to the client [being] inadequate."

3. Combination‑by‑combination analysis

Combination A (core system claim, family F1): US 5,323,393 + admitted JP print‑server/spooler art (JP‑A‑62‑274331, 63‑75828, 63‑99644, 63‑250730, 4‑230514, 4‑245525, 4‑250522)

Mapping:

Motivation to combine. Both references are in the same field (shared LAN printing with a print server), address the same recognized deficiency (inadequate printer→server→client error reporting), and are complementary rather than overlapping: the JP publications supply the spooling print‑server topology; US 5,323,393 supplies the missing piece — detailed status export and remote status control — which the JP architecture lacked. The combination is the predictable aggregation of two known subsystems to achieve a known, desired result (a user who need not walk to the printer and who can act remotely). KSR squarely supports this: "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results."

The one element requiring care: the interlock — release only when both the error‑release condition is detected and the terminal recovery instruction is received. US 5,323,393's remote‑control model inherently teaches an operator‑action‑gated state change (status is altered at the console and only then transmitted back to change the printer), and its re‑boot‑in‑altered‑status teaching is an error‑recovery control issued from the network. Read together with US 5,323,393's periodic automatic error detection/logging, the two‑condition release is a predictable combination of two disclosed gate conditions, and the patent's stated advantage (avoiding autonomous restart while the fault persists — "in spite of the fact that the error still remains in the printer, the printing is restarted and an error again occurs") is exactly the result one would expect from requiring operator confirmation before restart. This element is obvious, though it is the element a challenger should brief most carefully.

Conclusion (F1): Obvious under § 103 over US 5,323,393 in view of the admitted JP print‑server art, and — if the primary reference is read generously — arguably anticipated under § 102(e) for the broadest system claim.

Combination B (families F2 and F3): Combination A + JP‑A‑2‑60781 / 2‑166511 / 3‑192463 / 3‑224778 (applicant's own protocol disclosures)

Mapping. The stop, cancel, restart, and status‑query commands and serial page numbering are all disclosed in the applicant's own already‑filed applications (the patent says so, in Embodiment 2). The patent itself states that these commands and the serial page number are used "for reporting the print situation from the printer to the printer/spooler control server and for a print control from the printer/spooler control server to the printer."

• F2 (cancel + retransmit the print job) = the disclosed cancel command plus the admitted spooler's retained job (the whole premise of spooling is that the job is preserved and re‑readable). Retransmitting a preserved spool file after a cancel is the most predictable possible implementation.
• F3 (error‑occurred page serial number; select head / specified page / error page) = the disclosed serial page number reporting mechanism, applied to a job whose pages are already counted by the spooler. JP‑A‑3‑192463 / 3‑224778 already contemplate page‑serial reporting as the basis for print control. Selecting a reprint start point among {head, arbitrary page, error page} is a routine design choice over a page‑numbering protocol — it is the enumeration of all the natural options for a reprint start point.

Motivation. Same field, same inventors' own system, and a stated need to reduce the "vain overlapped reprint" and long recovery times (a problem the patent itself frames as the status quo). Where the art already reports page‑serial numbers and already supports cancel/restart, applying those to the error‑recovery path requires no inventive leap.

Conclusion (F2, F3): Obvious over US 5,323,393 + admitted JP protocol art, and independently over the applicant's own admitted disclosures.

Combination C (family F4 — reprint from the error page / post‑error‑only reprint)

This is the family I regard as the strongest nonobviousness candidate, because the specific mechanisms differ:

• F4a (server edits a new job consisting only of post‑error pages) — a specific page‑extraction edit.
• F4b (server sends reprint‑start page + whole job; printer prints only subsequent pages) — the mirror‑image allocation of that function to the printer.
• F4c (printer reprints from "refuged" print data already in the printer) — avoids retransmission entirely.

What the art supplies. US 5,323,393's bidirectional‑interface, multi‑tasking board teaches buffering large quantities of print data on the board and controlling the printer over the interface; the admitted JP spooler art teaches that the spooler holds the job and can re‑read it. A challenger's argument is: given a spooled job, a page‑serial protocol (JP‑A‑3‑192463 / 3‑224778), and an error‑page number (F3), skipping already‑printed pages on reprint is a predictable efficiency measure with a clear design incentive (paper/toner/time savings — the patent's own stated motivation). KSR instructs that where design incentives and predictable variation are present, the variation is obvious.

Where the challenger is weakest. Neither US 5,323,393 nor US 5,027,154 is a page‑level reprint‑control reference; and F4c's allocation of the job‑refuge to the printer (rather than the server) runs against the historical division of labor in the art, in which the server owns the spool. F4c in particular — the printer refuges the print job and reprints from its own copy without retransmission, to eliminate retransmission time — is the claim a defendant would most credibly argue was not obvious, absent a reference teaching printer‑side job storage for reprint. I did not locate such a reference in the material retrieved; that gap is worth a dedicated search (I flag it as a verification gap, not a conclusion).

Combination D (family F5 — logical specifications + distributed printing management server): US 5,323,393 + US 5,467,434 + US 5,564,109 (+ admitted JP‑A‑2‑67168)

Mapping.

Motivation to combine. The patent's own Background supplies the incentive, verbatim: it complains that each client must "select[] by himself the printer … while adequately considering a set of printers which can be used … and the specifications of all of the printers," that the burden is "very large," and that misapprehension causes errors. US 5,467,434 is a Xerox reference directed to precisely removing that burden by machine‑evaluating printer options against job selections; US 5,323,393 supplies central network‑wide discovery/status so that all printers can be managed as one pool; US 5,564,109 supplies the remote multi‑peripheral selection interface. Combining them is the natural, explicitly‑motivated solution to a problem the prior art itself identified, and the outcome (a list of adequate printers, ranked) is a predictable aggregation. JP‑A‑2‑67168 further confirms the field's recognition that printer capability data must be made available to a host programmatically.

Conclusion (F5): Obvious over US 5,467,434 + US 5,323,393, further in view of US 5,564,109 and JP‑A‑2‑67168.

Combination E (family F6 — move the job to another printer's spooler on fatal error): Combination D + ordinary fault‑tolerance practice

The patent's "ninth/tenth systems" claim requires: on detecting a fatal error, stop I/O to the spooler of the failed printer, shift to an error‑recovery waiting status, and on the terminal's instruction naming an alternative printer, move the print job to that printer's spooler.

Mapping and motivation. Moving a queued job from a failed output device's queue to another capable device's queue is the canonical job‑rerouting function of any spooling print service; US 5,564,109 (selection among multiple document production peripherals) and US 5,467,434 (capability matching) together supply both the "which printer can take it" logic and the "user picks among them" interface. Where a plurality of queues is centrally managed (US 5,323,393), queue‑to‑queue migration is a predictable mechanical step, and the design incentive — not losing a long job to a single point of failure — is self‑evident. This family is obvious.

Combination F (family F7 — detailed job status and per‑user job history queries)

Mapping. US 5,323,393 discloses, as a core feature: a log file with record types including start‑of‑job, end‑of‑job (with Application, User, Job, file server, queue, form), error records, warning records, initialization/power‑on/re‑boot records, plus daily/cumulative/average statistics and per‑job page counts — retrievable from the network for display and storage. It also discloses a network administrator console (CPCONSOL) that displays job statistics, per‑printer job/page counts, and printer status.

• "Printer/spooler control server manages a detailed status of each print job (print waiting, during printing, error occurrence, detailed error info) and responds to a query" — the combination of US 5,323,393's log file + status query/response protocol with the admitted spooler art (which by definition knows waiting/printing state) yields this element directly.
• "Manages the history of the print job with respect to each user and responds to a per‑user query" — US 5,323,393's log records expressly identify the User for each job entry; aggregating those records per user is a routine data‑organization step.

Motivation. The patent's stated benefit is merely that "the user … can know the detailed status of the print job … which cannot be inquired from the terminal equipment hitherto." That is precisely the capability US 5,323,393's Background asserts was previously unavailable and its invention supplies.

Conclusion (F7): Obvious over US 5,323,393 + admitted spooler art; the per‑user history feature is obvious over US 5,323,393 alone given its User‑identified log records.

Combination G (family F8 — printer specification acquisition)

Mapping. The claim requires: printer stores its own specification information; a query command is issued to the specified printer/print server; the printer transmits its specification information; the recipient stores it.

JP‑A‑2‑67168 (admitted prior art, and described in the patent's own Background) discloses: the printer holds a printer sort/ID code in its memory; the host requests it; the printer transmits the code; the host recognizes maker name, code system, and apparatus name for that code; and the printer sort information is switchable by hardware. The patent explicitly characterizes this as "a system for obtaining the printer specifications by the host computer."

The only differences are (a) transmitting the specification data itself rather than a code that indexes a host‑resident table, and (b) distributing the query/response through a print server / distributed printing management server rather than a direct host‑to‑printer link. Difference (a) is a classic design trade‑off: code‑plus‑host‑table requires the host to be updated for every new printer model (the patent itself notes the host "possesses the printer specification information of all of the printers which can be connected"), whereas device‑resident specification data is self‑describing and scalable — a motivation the reference's own architecture makes apparent. Difference (b) is supplied by US 5,323,393, which already interrogates a peripheral through an intermediary network board and returns the results over the LAN. Where the intermediary already relays requests and responses, having it relay a specification query is a predictable extension.

Conclusion (F8): Obvious over JP‑A‑2‑67168 in view of US 5,323,393; and, for the networked variant, in further view of the admitted JP print‑server/spooler art.

4. Where the patent is strongest (what I would not call clearly obvious)

To be balanced, and to be useful to a challenger deciding what to brief:

1. F4c — reprint from print data "refuged" in the printer, with no retransmission by the server. The art I retrieved assigns the authoritative job copy to the server spool (admitted JP art; US 5,323,393's board buffers data but is not shown to hold the job for reprint after a fault). I found no reference teaching printer‑resident job storage for post‑error reprint. This is the single element where non‑obviousness is most defensible.
2. F4a/F4b — the page‑extracting edition (server builds a new job containing only post‑error pages) is closer to the line. The concept (don't reprint printed pages) is strongly suggested by the admitted serial‑page‑number protocol plus the patent's own stated motivation, but the specific allocation of the "extract/edit vs. reprint‑start‑page" function between server and printer, and the mechanism of doing it, is where a challenger needs an express teaching or a strong "predictable variation" showing.
3. The F1 two‑condition interlock (release requires both error‑release detection and a terminal recovery instruction). US 5,323,393 makes operator‑gated state change natural, so I regard this as obvious — but it is the element with the most claim‑limiting bite, and it should be briefed as the second point of attack, not the first.
4. Family F7's per‑user job history is only weakly claimed if the claims are read to cover any per‑user aggregation; US 5,323,393's log entries already carry the user field.

5. Secondary considerations

The record supplied contains no evidence of unexpected results, long‑felt unmet need met only by the patent, industry praise, licensing, or copying. The advantages the specification recites — reduced user burden, less paperwork waste, faster recovery, better use efficiency — are the ordinary, expected consequences of the disclosed combinations and are therefore weak secondary considerations absent a demonstrated nexus to a specific claim limitation. (Note also: the patent is expired as of 2014‑12‑21, and the prior litigation search found no litigation involving it, so there is no adjudicated validity record to weigh either way.)

6. Bottom line

• Family F1 (core networked print server with status watching, error notification, and gated error recovery): obvious — US 5,323,393 in view of the print‑server/spooler art the patent itself admits.
• Families F2, F3 (cancel/retransmit; error‑page reporting and reprint‑start selection): obvious — the same combination plus the applicant's own admitted serial‑page‑number and stop/cancel/restart protocol disclosures.
• Family F5 and F6 (logical specifications, distributed printing management server, alternative‑printer rerouting): obvious — US 5,467,434 (printer option availability/conflict resolution) + US 5,323,393 (network‑wide status/discovery) + US 5,564,109 (remote selection among plural peripherals), further in view of JP‑A‑2‑67168.
• Family F7 (detailed job status / per‑user history): obvious — US 5,323,393's log file, job/user/error record types, and status‑query protocol plus the admitted spooler art.
• Family F8 (printer‑resident specification acquisition): obvious — JP‑A‑2‑67168 in view of US 5,323,393.
• Family F4: mixed. F4a/F4b are close to the obviousness line and defensible only with an express teaching or a convincing predictable‑variation showing; F4c (printer‑resident refuged data reprint) is the most likely surviving subject matter on this record.

7. Verification gaps (stated explicitly, per the operating rules)

1. I could not verify US 5,625,757's own front‑page "References Cited" list. The "Patent Citations (18)" table I retrieved belongs to US 6,817,792 B2. If US 5,625,757's actual front page cites different references, the combinations above should be re‑anchored accordingly. The references I rely on are those the specification itself cites plus US 5,323,393 / US 5,467,434 / US 5,027,154 / US 5,564,109.
2. US 5,564,109's exact filing date (1991‑09‑12 per a third‑party portal) and its § 102(e) availability are medium‑confidence; confirm against the patent's own face.
3. JP H07‑175685 A (Ricoh) appears on the family page but published after this patent's filing date; I treated it as unavailable art. If a U.S. counterpart was filed before 1993‑12‑24, it would need separate evaluation.
4. US 5,620,264 and the Hitachi US 5,802,260 are post‑priority and were excluded.
5. Claim numbering: secondary sources disagree on which number attaches to the "method of obtaining specification information" claim versus the alternative‑printer claim, and one source's claim 8 text does not match another's claim 8 text. My analysis is by subject matter, not by number. Confirm against the granted claim set at https://patents.google.com/patent/US5625757/en before relying on any specific claim number.

Identifiers are reproduced literally as found; no patent or publication number has been auto‑corrected.