It's time to start assembling your best print pieces for the exciting return of the Print Excellence Awards!  You know you have them - outstanding examples of ink on paper and other substrates, projects that wowed your customers that you are proud of, campaigns that differentiated you in the marketplace.

This year's Print Excellence competition is truly a regional competition with printers from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming all competing to be the best of the best.  Winners of WSPA's Print Excellence Awards are also automatically entered in PIA's Premier Print Awards Competition, the largest in the world.

By now you should have received a Call for Entries notice in the mail.  If you did not receive one, please contact June Crespo at jcrespo@wsprint and we will send you a fillable PDF version.  It can also be found on our website at www.wsprint.org. Deadline for entries is January 31, 2015.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has ruled in favor of the four petitions filed this May by Kodak/Agfa/Esko/Heidelberg challenging the patentability of CTP Innovations' patent claims. The PTAB found that there is a reasonable likelihood that the petitioners would prevail in PTAB trials on the non-patentability of the claims, with the exception of one claim that describes swapping low res images for high res images in Postscript files prior to making a PDF file. The trials (one for each petition) have been instituted and could last up to a year. Whether CTP Innovations can muster a strong defense during the trials, and/or will try to modify the claims remains to be seen. This is tremendous news and may spell the end of CTP Innovations' ability to prey on printers with these patents. Printing companies still in litigation can seek stays in their cases. Printing Industries of America supported the coalition by providing the prior art that we uncovered during months of research.  Some of this was critical to the success of the petitions. 

Printed publications are a wonderful holiday gift and there is no better time to take advantage of savings at the largest graphics arts online bookstore in the world - Printing Industries Press.  Click here to learn all about the savings and use the DISCOUNT CODE Pubs 14 at checkout. 

WSPA has partnered with Prudential Overall Supply to provide members with a new benefit - great prices on towels, mats and uniforms. Prudential's sole business is to provide environmentally based clean and reusable towels, uniforms and mats. Their cleaning system is designed to clean towels soiled with solvents (low and high VOC) and inks (petroleum and vegetable based).  Contact Ashley Carroll at (619) 787-1845 or AshleyC@pos-clean.com for more  information and pricing. Indicate you are a WSPA member.