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

trademarks and patents

[aNonMooseCowherd]

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.

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.

Not the end of the road, but a start

[Nakito]

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.

Where to put the burden ...

[gradji]

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.

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 ... hence the ongoing debate ...