The Digital Workflow Is Changing Everything

As the commercial printing industry moves closer to an all-digital workflow, digital printing options continue to gain more popularity and wider acceptance.

Even for a traditional printer, a digital workflow can provide a number of attractive advantages. For example, digital files can be repurposed for different output media such as print, CD-ROM, or the Web; files can be transmitted and printed at separate and distant locations; digital prepress avoids the costs of making film and makeready; and digital printing permits affordable, on-demand, short-run color printing.

Just as the digital workflow changes the way we perceive color communication, it changes the way we perceive relationships and responsibilities within the color communication process. And the role of responsibility leads to the determination of liability.

In the past, the question as to who owned final film was easily answered, not debated: the print buyer, as he or she paid for the labor and materials involved in creating the final film. This person could insist on the return of the film prepared by printer A, for which the print buyer paid, and at a future date send it to printer B for reprints, assuming the film fit the imposition for printer B.

There was no mystery here, just a minor problem of imposition.

But the digital process has changed that relationship, and serves to create new issues currently being played out by parties in new roles.

When the print buyer sends to the printer a digital file that requires alterations in order to image properly, who owns the altered file? If the print buyer has paid for those alterations, it would seem that, like traditional film, he or she owns it.

But if the alterations were made by the printer at the printer's expense, the issue is less clear. Further, if the altered file is from the original because the printer did not make a copy (a risky practice) and thus is the only one available, does the buyer have the right to demand its return? If the altered file is a copy of the original received by the printer and altered at the printer's expense, who has the right of ownership here?

According to The Business of Digital Reproduction in the Graphic Arts, published recently by Alexandria, Va.-based Idealliance's Industry Policy and Direction Committee (IPDC), "The customer has the right to request and receive copies of files (which the customer in effect owns) which have been modified, composited, or altered at the customer's request or with the customer's approval, from their supplier for a fair and reasonable pick-up charge. This does not include files which were optimized for press conditions after final customer approval."

Idealliance is the publisher of GRACoL, the General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography.

Idealliance says it formed IPDC to create one voice for the graphic arts industry on digital production issues. The committee consists of executives and managers from printing companies, publishers, prepress services, and advertising agencies spanning the U.S.

Says committee member Ed Bascik, vice president and division manager for Perry Judds, Madison, Wis., "As we were writing The Business of Digital Production in the Graphic Arts, the contents of which show responsibility throughout the entire production process, the digital landscape in front of us was changing rapidly. All of our efforts were focused on what would happen before it did. In hindsight, we did a pretty good job in predicting where this was headed, and I think we clarified a significant number of potential workflow issues."