A recent article in Information Week claimed the "nasty patent spat" alleged HP's violations of a number of RR Donnelley patents were "willful and deliberate" and sought costs and treble damages along with an order to prevent HP selling products that make use of the inventions.

The two companies are currently working on a joint venture using their combined technologies, initially to develop a Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) system, based on HP's inkjet technology and developed by RR Donnelley for transactional, transpromo and direct mail applications.

However, an RR Donnelley spokesman added that while the suit has been filed, it has not been served against HP, adding that "discussions with HP regarding our position on patents related to variable data printing technology predate the announced strategic Technology Alliance between our organisations.

"RR Donnelley and HP have an active, ongoing, important commercial relationship," he told PrintWeek. He said that while the patents in questions related to variable data technologies, the alliance was focussed on developing hardware.

The patents detailed in the suit, filed in federal court in Illinois, concern "Apparatus for Controlling an Electronic Press to Print Fixed and Variable Information," and a "Method of Reproducing Variable Graphics In a Variable Imaging System", and could impact products such as its Indigo range of digital presses.   

US patent expert Greg Aharonian described it as "a ballsy move" by RR Donnelley, whose patent portfolio numbers in the low hundreds, to go up against HP with library of 22,000, and fully expected a countersuit from the IT giant attacking those patents.

"Something went wrong," he said. "Lawsuits are a symptom of the disease, but they're not the disease."

Aharonian also questioned the robustness of the "fairly dubious" patents, saying of the idea that templates with fixed and variable fields to be printed are unlikely to have been 'invented' in 1995, and that a lot of the prior art cited was "irrelevant" as it was too recent.