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Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out
chalker writes "Cognex Corporation, the world's leading supplier of machine vision systems,
announced today that the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas has ruled in favor of Cognex in its lawsuit against the Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation.
It held that the claims of 14 patents asserted by Lemelson are invalid and unenforceable , and not infringed by Cognex. Co-plantiffs included barcode reader manufacturers Symbol Technologies, Accu-sort Systems, and Zebra Technologies amongst others. These patents were classic "submarine" patents orginally applied for in 1954, but tied up in the patent office and changed over the next four decades to cover changes taking place in the machine vision field. Lemelson had threatened to sue numerous end-users, including Motorola and Ford, over the past two decades and had settled all of them out of court for over $1.5 billion in licensing fees. For once a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is."
Even foreign governments.
What? Patents are not an international thing. Each country has it's own patent laws, which differ quite a bit around the globe. There are some global agreements, but they are typically much more limited than regular patents.
Any government can ignore or enforce patents as it sees fit within its borders. Whether IBM will sell products to those countries is another issue...
Rob :)
The concept that any idea nowadays is uncopyable or un-emulateable is rediculous.
I'm sick of companys thinking that they have any unique ideas that someone else cannot make a cheap duplicate of.
I've yet to see a great, profitable idea go un-coppied, despite patents.
I blame the lawyers, what was the line in 'king lear', blank all the lawers? It'll come to me, but Shakespear has verry little advice that is not still valid.
Pardon the spelling, I'm in a hurry.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Something that people don't seem to realise (not just on /., but in the world in general) is that the patent system has been abused for centuries. Eli Whitney spent decades in the courts, trying to prevent people from making and selling ripoffs of his (patented) cotton gin, and by the time he won, the patent was only valid for one more year. Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.
The point is that the patent system has been open to abuse as long as it's been around, and it's not likely to change in the next two years or so, as most seem here seem to think. Even if the abuses are so flagrantly worse now than ever before that it really is going to collapse, there's a LOT of momentum, and it's going to take a decade or more.
So push it hard, but don't expect to see much movement for a while.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
.. especially considering that Lemelson is not a corporation.
Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.
We need laws against submarine patents and ridiculous IP enforcement but you lose a lot of credibility when you throw the "corporation" bogeyman on there.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Let's get this society back into the swing of things and open the floodgates of innovation once again before we stagnate into a purely legalistic quagmire. 1st lets change patent laws so that only individuals (real people) can own patents. This would force corporations to deal with human beings and support the really inventive ones. 2nd lets make short terms for patent protections without appeal. This would free up the the possibility for inventors to actually dream about inventing again without the immediate afterthought "but I will just get sued into bankrupcy if I dare attempt to actually do anything with my invention."
Very interesting.
Apparently (IANAL, IMBanal) the patents were thrown out because
(1) too much time was taken modifying the patent claims, and this seemed to be intentional (something called "latches");
(2) the patent(s) described a system in which the objects to be scanned were at a fixed position, while the supposedly offending systems found the objects (e.g., bar codes) anywhere in their field of view and scanned them there.
There were also differences in which the way the information was processed (patent: analog differencing, systems: computer processing).
I found it a very interesting read.
My compliments to the judge.
This is the Constitution.This is the Constitution under the Bush administration. Any questions?
My dad used to read a lot of Alvin Toffler (futurist) books when I was a kid. I picked up a couple of them and read parts, but don't really remember much detail (nor the names of the books.) One of the things I do remember was him talking about how we were going to move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. I suppose we were already in the transition at the time.
:) but being that it's the Information Age, information has become (and still is becoming) a commodity to be bought and sold. Companies are realizing this and focusing on how to capitalize on it. It's the Information Age. Unless you want to be stuck in the Industrial Age, this is what you have to do.
He talked about a triad of Power, Wealth, and Information. Any one or combination of the three could be used to aquire another. The interesting thing about information (and the information age) was that information could be expended, yet the provider of the information would still have it.
I'm not sure what my point is
Maybe that's the point. If it's software, audio, video, text, or whatever, it's still information. This is what Information Age companies will make their money from. Figure out how to own or control of as much of it as you can now, and as we continue into the Information Age you will reap the rewards later.
This is an interesting case, and should be of interest to SCO watchers too, not because of the patent implications (which are great for true innovation, and a wake-up call to the Patent Office), but spotlights companies who are not built around innovation, but rather litigation, and how this is a perversion of the patent system.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
This is true to a legal extent, but practically many foreign governments are too heavily dependent on trade with the U.S. to simply ignore its patents.
Like when a small company makes a deal with a corporation like Microsoft and later finds they got the short end of the stick (if any stick at all), most smaller countries simply find they have no choice but to play the game on U.S. terms.
According to the article, Lemelson managed to extort $1.5 Billion. Maybe the litigation-companies are onto something?
a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What a judge has seen is that this particular patent was unenforceable under the patent system.
What is ridiculous, is that it is often more cost effective to pay licensing fees for these kinds of patents, than to defeat them in the court system.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
for using spreadsheets to display PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers)data realtime...
This is a common practice, it would be like patenting the method of turning on a light by upward motion of a toggle device..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lemelson seems to have been on the right side of much of the patent battle, if you are willing to reject the idea of "patent=bad". From the bio, you'll notice that most of his fight has been to ensure that actual inventors get paid by the corporations that were using thier ideas.
It is easy to see how much of this gets turned upside down when the subject of the patents are algorithms and business models (neither of which, IMHO, should be patentable), but for much of our history, if you were to take an idea to a company to sell for manufacture, they would likely reject your offer, and then produce it on thier own without your permission.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this case, as the patents being discussed are rather old but they do seem to be an inobvious idea for the time (who in 1954 could envision a machine that "see, identify, and measure something", much less design one). By today, though it is a rather obvious idea and fifty years seems a bit too long for a patent to control a technology.
IANA Patent Lawyer, but I believe that situation could be called a "derivative work". I belive that the complaints that most people have with patents are the "overly broad", "obvious progression", and the "prior art" ones. To the best of my knowledge these are all incorporated into the patent law currently (at least in the U.S.). The problem is how the patent office handles the applications, and when they do make mistakes (which seems to be all the time) they give the legal force to what are truly outrageous claims. Due to the cost of litigation many companies find themselves "behind the 8-ball" when served with an infringement suit.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
From the comments I see here, it appears that no one ("no one" is a two-word phrase -- "Noone" was a member of Herman's Hermits) here has bothered to RTFMs (read the fine manuals). The patent laws, patent rules, and the Manual of Patent Examination Procedure (the bible used by patent examiners containing all the rules they have to follow for examining patent applications) are better documented than any Linux distribution. They are available at
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/guides.htm
If anyone ("anyone" is one word) had read these, you would have discovered that the techniques that Lemelson used to "game" the system into granting patents on 40-year-old applications that never published were abolished almost a decade ago.
Roughly speaking, any patents issuing on any application filed since about sometime in June, 1995 are valid for 20 years from the date of filing in the United States, or the date of filing of the earliest claimed priority application, give or take some adjustment for delays by the Patent and Trademark Office in examining the application. Furthermore, most applications are now published about 18 months after they are filed.
What you may not discover from reading the manuals is that Lemelson's practice of gaming the system was not held in high regard by many patent attorneys.