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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.
I plan to trademark the "TM" trademark symbol, and then charge everyone else royalties to use it. Once that is successful, I will patent that as a new business method.
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
I have a patent on making comments about having a patent on patents, so all those of you who say "I'm going to patent getting patents" now owe me royalties...
Oh, no, I just got a cease & desist letter from someone who says he holds a patent on making comments about people making comments about patenting getting patents. I hope he'll accept my cross-licensing deal.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
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.
I didn't really know where the name came from until recently, so I'll comment on it (maybe it's ITFA, but I didn't RTFA). Apparently they're claled "submarine" patents because they only surface when necessary. Like when 3dfx sued nVidia and then nVidia countersued for trivial patents so that they could end up with a cross-licensing agreement.
If this is wrong, I've been misinformed, will apologize, and then hunt down whatever sick mind thought it could safely spread lies on the Internet (of all places!).
True story.
.. 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
This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere. But it will interesting to see if this is the beginning of a trend that eventually kills the major cash cow of the Lemelson foundation. The foundation's business model has been to sue everyone in sight (or at least everyone who makes image recognition systems) and then to offer a license on the patents for an amount less than the cost of defense. It's been a very effective strategy. But there are tons of other Lemelson lawsuits in the works, and I am sure the lawyers are all reading this decision very carefully tonight.
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
Apparently a patent only lasts about 17 years. So that's not as bad as a copyright, because if I recall a copyright lasts for around the life of the individual + ~20years(correct me if I'm wrong, one site said about 95 years).
In anycase, the US concept of the patent was used as a device to protect individual property rights during a time when the US needed technology bad (think back to when England had efficient factories, and the US wanted to know said secrets). Now with the concept of the corporation, it seems that the ideals of the patent have been corrupted. However, I can see the importance of protecting intellectual property rights, but at the same time, the US corporate world is beating every US citizen over the head with laws that should be corrected.
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
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
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
Am I the only one to consider it ironic that it took a patent about "Machine Vision" to make someone in the legal system see just how stupid some patents are.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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.
Nonsense. Where do you people get this crap?
Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.
Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.
So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.
Mmmm.. Donuts
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".
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-