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."

Comments

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[automatix]

..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

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 :)

mmm....

[doublebackslash]

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.

Way too much history behind this

[swordgeek]

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.

Nice Troll

[donutello]

.. 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.

Re:Nice Troll

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.

But corporations do possibly reach a point where they become the sort of "faceless" entities that they are. The reason why many people get upset at corporations and the things that they do is that they quite frequently assume a sort of "mob mentality" where many people backing a certain interest seems to validate that interest (though the largest interest we discuss is greed). The problem with these sorts of things is that most frequently it ends up very much in one person's interest and moderately (if that) in anybody else's.

Corporations benefit strongly the executives and the investors (especially large "bankish" ones, how much more faceless can you get?) and they use the "we're worth billions of dollars, employ thousands of people, make useful products" basis to ruin the environment/take advantage of third world labor/commit corporate scandals. Simply because a corporation employs thousands of people and pays tehm and everything does not mean that they have everybody's interests in mind. They likely don't. Hell, it doesn't even mean that they necessarily have the employees' interests in mind (as we've seen). Corporations are not iron-clad.

Hell look at the "corporation" of Communism in China and Russia.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[S.Lemmon]

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.

Re:For once...

[Capsaicin]

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.

Re:Who is this Lemelson guy anyway?

[Ancil]

who in 1954 could envision a machine that "see, identify, and measure something", much less design one?

Certainly not this asshole. The nature of a submarine patent is to "invent" something by describing it. Like this: "Wouldn't it be cool if machines could see!!" *PATENT PENDING*

You then "refine" your patent application as real inventors do the actual work of teaching machines to see. Once someone else has put in the long hours making your "vision" a reality, you hit them up for ten million bucks.

Getting back to your original question -- it's actually two questions. Who in 1954 could envision a machine that could see? Plenty of people. Really, anyone who spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future. Who could actually design a machine that sees? Very few people, and it took them a long time. It was a lot of work, and the people who did it were the ones getting extorted by these pricks.