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Bright LCD Patent Dispute
pcp_ip writes "Honeywell filed suit Wednesday against 34 companies (including, Apple, Dell, Sony, Kodak, Fuji et al.) for infringment of patent 5,280,371. The patent for "a directional diffuser for a liquid crystal display" was filed on January 1994 and enables "a display to produce a brighter image without requiring additional power." Honeywell is looking for an injunction to prevent the defendants from continuing to infringe its patent, and for "damages adequate to compensate them for Defendants infringement." So much for LCD prices coming down! Where's OLED when you need it?"
From reading the patent it looks like Honeywell actually had a decent and possibly novel invention. I say possibly because the solution they propose is obvious to anyone trying to solve their particular problem, however no one before had tried to solve their problem hence its originality. Now... as to exactly what Honeywell's problem is...
They decided that in displays used in situations like fighter jets, air traffic control towers and commercial airlines, having displays "bleed" out of the angle of view is not desirable. For instance, you don't want a reflection of your cockpit display in the corner of your eye from the canopy. They designed a "system of lenses" to reduce this out-of-angle light and redirect it to viewing angles.
The problem seems to come when they filed for the patent on the system. Instead of describing the system as a way to limit/redirect unused/undesired light they wrote it as a system to increase the amount of desired light. My guess as to why is because it's much easier to sue someone trying to make their displays brighter than it is to find someone trying to make their displays darker.
The reason I say that they intended to sue/collect royalties from every manufacturer was because they went ahead and sued every single manufacturer. They did not attempt to license their technology (but of course they wouldn't... Because Honeywell also manufacturers LCD's. They'd love to put their competitors out of business.) This is all just an abuse of the patent/court system to try and get ahead... too bad it works so well.
Oh, and I have some prior art. You see, I'm sure someone had an LCD with some backlights about 10 years ago, and wanted it to be brighter in the area they were viewing... so they put a MIRROR behind it. What a novel idea! They should have patented it.
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"...why werent they producing them?
They do produce them. They are used in their APEX integrated cockpit. Besides, if you google for "Honeywell" and "LCD" you'll see that most of the hits are for companies licensing LCD technology from Honeywell, like Samsung, NEC, and Toshiba.
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