Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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
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.
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
Lemelson built his empire on what are called submarine patents - applications which are prosecuted for many many years before issuing. Once issued, the owner then goes after the big companies who have dominated the market in the meantime. That's how he made his billions.
I used to work in the patent office. My supervisor once brought in a Lemelson application he was working on - it's original filing date was 35 years earlier. From what he said, the original application was for a memory chip, but over the years Lemelson added bits of information here and there, and by the time my supervisor got the case, it was for a microprocessor of some kind. Basically, he played the patent system pretty close to the edge, but pretty much legally, I guess.
For those who find this shocking - the current patent system measures length of patent term from the date of application, so submarine patents of the extreme nature of Lemelson's are pretty much not possible any more (except if the application is classified - a few years ago a patent came out which had been classified some 67? years previously IIRC).
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.
This is completely false. Obviously you've never applied for a patent.
When you apply for a U.S. patent, what you get (if anything) is a patent enforcable for things which are made or sold in the USA. That's it.
In order to apply for any other patents, you have to first file a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application (about $5000 extra) with the USPTO. This gives you the RIGHT to file additional international patents within the next 36 months.
If you DO want to file international patents you have to file EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY in the country you want it filed. Each one has to be translated into that country's language and must be put into their particular format.
If you decide to file in every country, it will end up costing perhaps $200K or so more (depending on the length of the patent and therefore translation fees). But some countries (notably Taiwan) are not signers to the PCT, and have to be filed entirely separately.
The U.S. does not rule the world yet, and U.S. patents are not valid everywhere.