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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."
..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.
Intellectual property in all of its various forms is being abused by the corporate world - both friends and foes of Linux and otherwise. The madness is the laws supporting this behavior continue to pass, bypassing the individual and wholeheartedly supporting the corporation.
Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds? There is a balance to be maintained, and our rights are not unlimited, but more and more across the entire globe the individual is lost.
Not to be funny but has anyone considered the implications of all these recent intellectual property rights and how it seems more and more that we're being pushed into the draconian future of Johnny Mnemonic and Shadowrun? The only way you get information is to steal it. The only way for another corporation to get information is to hire you to steal it.
I grow more and more distressed at the world my son will grow up in, the conditions he will consider normal, the laws he will break just by trying to think.
if something is a truly unique invention, or a truly unique work of art, it deserves a patent or a copyright.
The problem here is that the patent office doesn't have the resources to investigate patents for legitimacy. Anyone can then patent anything and get away with exthorting license fees out of other, unrelated, businesses.
The patent system should be modified such that any significant improvement upon an existing patent negates a new invention from being covered by the previous patent. Then technology is advanced, rather than hindered, by the patent system.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Currently in both academic and policy discussions, there is some debate as to whether it is better to put the "burden of proof" for patents in the application process or the infringement/interference litigation process.
... hence the ongoing debate ...
The current U.S. system is arguably set toward "easier" application and "harder" enforcement - with the idea being that a court room has more flexibility and resources to tackle difficult intellectual property rights issues than the patent office. Moreover, this type of system avoids a bias against inventors: a more "front-loaded" system that applies burden at the application process would delay the patent and perhaps even shorten the patent life significantly (similar to the argument pharmaceuticals make regarding how rigorous FDA testing effectively halves the patent life of new drugs)
So it's nice to see cases like Machine Vision. Of course, for every successful court ruling against a harmful/irrational patent, there are several more that survive the litigation process
IANAL (god I hate these kinds of aconymns), but can copanies that paid on these patents get their money back?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Well, I will tentatively say you're wrong, at least in this instance. The issue with the patents here isn't that they are trivial or "portfolio" blanks that are only used as leverage. A "submarine" parent is a patent that is delayed intentionally by the applicant so that they can revise it over the approval span as technology progresses, even if they didn't necessarily invent the revised technology. This allows them, 40 years later, to say "hey look, we have a patent on this, and we filed for the patent 40 years ago". One could infer that it is a "submarine" patent because it is kept submerged by the applicant intentionally for their gain.
They spent so much time and energy defending their patents on "wing warping" that they fell behind in other areas. For what it's worth, they actually changed the shape of the entire wing by yanking on cables which bent the trailing edge up or down, Curtis (among others) use hinged sections of wing (now known as ailerons). I guess there was some argument about whether that itself was changing the shape of the wing, even tho the Wrights never used hinged ailerons. So somebody put ailerons between the biplane wings, and moved just them, so no wing changed shape, it was an entirely separate wing which moved by itself. And then Curtis sold his airplanes overseas without any ailerons or wing warping at all, but shipped the ailerons separately from a Canadian factory directly overseas, and since Canada didn't recognize the Wrights' patent, no violation.
Meanwhile, the Wrights had locked themselves into their position, couldn't change their designs without compromising their lawsuits, so got stuck with old fashioned tech, and lost market share as everyone else came up with new ideas.
In other words, better to keep innovating than to defend the old ways.
IANAH so take with many grains of salt.
Infuriate left and right
- So push it hard, but don't expect to see much movement for a while.
It's not really clear what the average person can do to promote change in the patent system. Do you have any suggestions?I'm completely serious. I like many others are unhappy with the current situation, but I honestly don't see a way to change it. What can the average person do to promote constructive change in the US patent system?
US Law:
Patent = 20 years
Corporate held Copyright = 95 years
Individual held Copyright = life + 70 years.
Keep in mind the original Length of copyright was 14 years (I think, I did a quick search.) and has been extended several times to reach the current lenght which is absurd.
Also note that the true purpose of the Patent system is to encourage inventors to share their idea. The protection that a patent provides is just the insentive for people to file patents.
Similarly, the purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to enrich our culture by publishing their works, and to protect them from businesses who would sell their books without permission. But the whole idea was to add more works to the public domain, which may never happen again thanks to Disney[tm].
Nobody died when Nixon lied.
I'm meeting you half way you stupid hippies!
As somebody else mentioned, write your congressman and senator about the situation and push for legislation that would make a difference.
One significant and fairly easy change to make is that once a patent is submitted for registration it may not be altered. It either passes or fails in its current state. If it fails, you have to submit an entirely new patent application. This means make sure you get it right the first time or cough up more money (giving more resources to the patent office to adequately check things) It also means you don't get to say that a patent you submitted in 1954 but have been changing every 3 years to match current technology counts as being patented since 1954.
Another simple change would be to make it so that people who have their patents thrown out in a court of law have to repay any liscence fees previously collected, plus a penalty fine of up to 50% of those total fees to be paid to the court system, (thus reducing the burden on the taxpayer that the "patent to sue" practice places on us by over-use of the courts)
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
s/is/was/
Granted, the patent system still has issues, but it is getting better. The PTO has implemented a system like the EU where patent apps are published at 18 months regardless of their status. This was done in direct response to abuses like "submarine" patents. It's getting better. It's just going to take time.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
settled all of them out of court for over $1.5 billion in licensing fees
First, if there had been an out of court settlement, there would have been no ruling.
Second, the press release quoted the CEO as saying "we won't receive a single cent from Lemelson".
Data is a jumble of facts. Information is the stuff that ties all those facts together into a useful representation of the world.
Those who simply collect and warehouse data have nothing. It's like the folks who fill their house with useless junk, and then start dumping garbage on their lawn.
Now, compare that to a museum. They have a lot of what would be otherwise useless junk. But they track where it came from. They track who owned it. They track what part the thingy played in history. They also package it, preserve it, and display it in a way that can be found again.
And I work at one. Museums throw things out all the time. It is the process of filtering, filing, and preservation that turns data into information. Much the same way a brick house is not the same as a pile of dirt, despite the fact that chemically they are the same.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
Completely agreed with both points. But it's not for the first time: patent judges often find bad patents invalid, and it's not even the first time that undue delay has been cited as a reason for unenforceability. On the other hand, the cost of getting the court system to reach the point of making a useful decision is out of the reach of many, there is a big unsolved problem of access to justice.
The District court opinion in the Lemelson case is online here. (Beware of size, it's a 33-page image-scan pdf.) The defendants won on three independent bases -- the asserted patent claims were "unenforceable under the doctrine of prosecution laches" [undue delay, amounting to decades], the asserted claims were not infringed because use of the accused products did not satisfy one or more of the limitations of each asserted patent claim, and the claims were invalid for lack of written description and enablement. Personally I hope it's got enough supporting fact-finding in it to survive an appeal.
-wb-