Flat-Screen Makers Face Patent Lawsuits in U.S.

Elitist_Phoenix writes "Reuters reports two industrial manufacturers, Guardian Industries Corp. and Honeywell International Inc., have sued dozens of companies in the global PC and video display businesses in a U.S. federal court to try to recoup royalties on liquid-crystal technology.Guardian Industries, a maker of industrial glass, and Honeywell, known for making weapons systems, assert in filings in the U.S. District Court in Delaware that their intellectual property for liquid crystal displays, used in notebook computers, TVs, and cellular phones, have been infringed."

Comments

Honeywell

[duffbeer703]

Honeywell is also known for making thermostats & furnace/boiler controllers.

What is the weapons systems reference there for? (Other than to slant the article against "evil" Honeywell?

Re:Honeywell

[bluGill]

Honeywell has a long history in weapons systems. Their thermostats and furnace/boiler controllers have always paid the bills, allowing management to spend time on interesting military projects.

In Minnesota (where I live, I don't know about other areas where Honeywell has offices) Honeywell is known as a boom-bust place. They are always either hiring lots of engineers for some secret weapons system, or laying them off because the contract is up.

Re:Honeywell

[GCP]

Thanks for pointing that out. It's clearly a Slashdotism for Evil Big Corporation. See, they are suing to protect their patents, so they must be evil, and we can prove it: they are known as a Weapons Manufacturer!

People who know of Honeywell either recognize the name from all of those thermostat covers, or they remember Honeywell, the computer company from back in the mainframe era. And all of the mainframe era computer companies (worldwide, not just US) did weapons systems work, built supermarket scanners, built CRT displays, manufactured chips, wrote OSes, and countless other things.

Honeywell they got involved in a three-continent joint venture/merger/acquisition deal (it evolved thru those stages) with Japan's NEC and France's Bull, and their computer business (and most of the company) went away. The deal didn't work out very well, and Bull ended up buying out the other partners.