IBM Patents Printer That Doesn't Copy Infringing Content

Every week hundreds of million of people copy and print documents, even though they officially don’t always have the rights to do so.

This unauthorized printing can be problematic for copyright holders, such as book authors, IBM says, and this week the company filed a patent application for a technology that aims to counter the problem.

Simply titled “Copyright Infringement Prevention,” the patent’s main goal is to ‘restrict’ the functionality of printers, so they only process jobs when the person who’s printing them has permission to do so.