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OmniPage Maker Nuance Loses Patent Trial Over OCR Tech
rtobyr writes "The Recorder is reporting that Nuance and partner Mofo (law firm Morrison Foerster) have lost a suit over patent infringement involving Optical Character Recognition against Russian competitor ABBYY Software House: 'Nuance had accused ABBYY Software House of infringing three of its patents and mirroring its packaging. Both companies market software that uses optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to convert scanned images of text so they can be searched and edited digitally. Represented by a team of lawyers from Morrison & Foerster and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Nuance argued that ABBYY's FineReader was little more than a copy of its signature product OmniPage. The Burlington, Mass.-based company also sued Lexmark International Inc. for its use of ABBYY's products and sought more than $100 million in total damages from the two companies. Nuance did not prevail on any claims in Nuance Communications v. ABBYY Software House, 08-0912. MoFo partner Michael Jacobs, who is co-lead counsel for Nuance with fellow MoFo partner James Bennett, declined to comment.'" Update: 08/27 18:43 GMT by T : Sorry for the paywalled link; here's a better one. Update: 08/28 16:02 GMT by T : rtobyr adds: “Sorry about the paywalled link. They must have paywalled it after I submitted the story. It was not paywalled at the time of submission.”
That Mofo didn't know what he was talking about . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
1. Article is behind a registration paywall, not that any of the editors bothered to proofread or click the link. ... I have heard that Beavis & Butthead is back on the air so I guess the Slashdot editors are trying to get back to that level of discourse.
2. The "editors" probably chose this submission for the sole reason that it says "MoFo"
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
So that says something. Not to say that you know every technology's owner because so many are invisible (or until you infringe on tthem), but when someone says one product everyone knows about infringes on a product no one knows about, the product no one knows about must not be all that hot afterall.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Mofo, huh? Certainly a bit more aggressively named that the local FAPlawfirm - I had to restrain myself from making a comment the first time one of their associates gave me his email address.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, I do know Omnipage. It's been on the market for decades, and was acquired by Scansoft and then by Nuance, who are most well-known for their speech recognition technology.
The software used to be highly rated but fell in popularity over the years.
I suppose a mushroom may not heard of Nuance. But they are pretty well known by humans who use software applications.
I do developer support for software company that specializes in SDKs that includes (among other things) a pluggable OCR module that has a few OCR engine options... (hence, replying anon) and it's been my experience that all OCR vendors are batshite insane when it comes to trying to protect their intellectual property.
We used to sell ABBYY as one of our engines, but it was such an unmitigated clusterfark to get the licensing working that we ended up dropping them... internally, we still refer to them as "the OCR engine that shall not be named".
One engine we currently have requires physical dongles for developers and will quite deliberately crash if you attempt to attach a debugger to the process (good luck troubleshooting stuff)
One or our engineers worked for a month back and forth trying to just get an evaluation license for one OCR engine and in the end, the process was deemed so egregious we stopped selling their product too.
I really like the Tesseract engine (a Google Code open source project) but it's slower and less accurate than several of the commercial offerings and is missing features that some folks just can't live without.
I've used OmniPage ... many many years ago, and their OCR engine wasn't bad back in the day - but couldn't comment nowadays.
I hadn't heard of Nuance, but OmniPage has been the cream of the OCR crop for over a decade. I thought it was owned by the Omni Group (who bring us OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, OmniPlan and OmniOutliner), but it appears that's not the case. So the issue appears to be that Nuance doesn't market the company well, not that the product itself is unknown.
Wikipedia says
That said, I fail to see how there could be a valid patent dispute... patents still last 20 years, right? 20 years ago was 1993, by which point OmniPage was already a very mature product (they'd been perfecting multilingual OCR on crappy fax-level document scans for 13 years by that point). Any actual novel inventions (software or otherwise) should have already been released to the public. In fact, I believe ABBYY moved from translation services into the OCR realm about the year 2000, when some of the original OCR patents had expired.
These guys have been squabbling for the past decade, as each encroaches further onto the other's turf.
We use Nuance overpriced server-side OCR solutions, it's shit, even our onboard Konica Minolta OCR solutions do a better job.
The software used to be highly rated but fell in popularity over the years.
That seems to be the usual point at which software companies turn into trolls.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The software used to be highly rated but fell in popularity over the years.
I use Omnipage almost daily, mostly for the batch document processing and it's the best OCR software I've run across. (If you know of something better I'd love to hear about it) I use it to batch process work instructions and manufacturing orders so that I can search for them more easily. All I have to do is put a pdf (or other file) in a particular folder and it takes care of the rest. It really does a surprisingly good job of it.
Was that so difficult?
http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202617111781&rss=rss_ca_civil
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So that says something. Not to say that you know every technology's owner because so many are invisible (or until you infringe on tthem), but when someone says one product everyone knows about infringes on a product no one knows about, the product no one knows about must not be all that hot afterall.
How about Apple's Siri, heard of that? Nuance powers the speech recognition. They don't have a ton of consumer-facing products, but they are in fact very well-known in the technology industry.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Well, I have heard of both, as has just about anybody who works with OCR at all.
They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Abbyy tends to have better accuracy overall. I think the biggest weaknesses on both of their parts is that they are not putting as much effort into the engines anymore and are putting more effort into ancillary crap that is best left to third party vendors that know what they are doing. In a lot of cases, they are marketing products that directly compete with companies who have licensed their OCR engines. That's gotta be a kick in the nuts to their customers.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
against Russian competitor
Well, there's your problem. Light up the torches and gather up the pitch forks. Time to really get this show on the road!
Can't tell but it seems this is not about the dancing bear of OCR but rather its use and package layout?
If so, of even less interest.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Abbyy tends to have better accuracy overall.
I use ABBYY FineReader on an occasional basis. Compared to other proprietary OCR software, one strength of Abbyy is that it is relatively lightweight and runs fast. It's absolutely not the bloated POS that Nuance Omnipage is. And it doesn't have that MS ribbon-style interface and other UI novelties that substantially deviate from what is "tried and true".
Patent Trial Ends in Total Loss for MoFo Client
By Julia Love Contact All Articles
The Recorder
August 26, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — After a two-week trial, Nuance Communications Inc. came up empty Monday when a jury found that a Russian competitor had not infringed any of its patents or trade dress.
Nuance had accused ABBYY Software House of infringing three of its patents and mirroring its packaging. Both companies market software that uses optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to convert scanned images of text so they can be searched and edited digitally.
Represented by a team of lawyers from Morrison & Foerster and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Nuance argued that ABBYY's FineReader was little more than a copy of its signature product OmniPage. The Burlington, Mass.-based company also sued Lexmark International Inc. for its use of ABBYY's products and sought more than $100 million in total damages from the two companies.
Nuance did not prevail on any claims in Nuance Communications v. ABBYY Software House, 08-0912. MoFo partner Michael Jacobs, who is co-lead counsel for Nuance with fellow MoFo partner James Bennett, declined to comment.
From his opening statement to his closing, ABBYY's lead lawyer, Gerald Ivey of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, urged the jury to honor the American spirit of competition.
"That's what [this verdict] does," he said in an interview Monday. "It allows ABBYY to continue to compete fairly and on equal footing with all the other companies that are interested in the OCR technology that ABBYY is a real leader in developing."
The trial before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White revolved around Nuance's U.S. Patent No. 6,038,342, which covers a "trainable template" that is updated during the process of converting scanned images into searchable text. The technology was roundly applauded when OmniPage debuted in 1988, Bennett said during his closing argument.
"It's not often in a patent case where you have the kind of widespread, third-party corroboration of the breakthrough, revolutionary... nature of an invention," Bennett told the jury. "And that's what we have here."
Bennett took ABBYY to task not only for infringing Nuance's patents but also for eroding the prices his client could charge for its products with deep discounting.
"OmniPage and Nuance, from the time that ABBYY entered this market, have been targeted," he said.
But Ivey insisted that the technology underlying ABBYY's products bears little resemblance to its competitor's. In contrast with Nuance's trainable template, ABBYY's program relies on a system of weighted guesses to determine word variance in context, he explained in an interview Monday.
"That is a very different philosophical and technological approach," he said.
Nuance also cried foul over ABBYY's packaging, which for a time made use of similar colors and images. During his closing argument, Ivey questioned the distinctiveness of Nuance's package design. He noted that there had been no documented cases of consumers mistaking the two companies' products. . And he took issue with the suggestion that his client was trying to masquerade as another company.
"ABBYY has proudly displayed its name on its packages since it entered the U.S.," he said in an interview.
During his closing argument, Ivey recounted ABBYY's beginnings as a startup, a story reminiscent of many Silicon Valley companies, though it unfolded in Moscow. The company's founder and CEO both testified in English, though it is their second language.
"Jurors had an opportunity to hear from them directly," he said. "I think that mattered."
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
How is ABBYY formed?
They don't have a ton of consumer-facing products, but they are in fact very well-known in the technology industry.
The text -to-speech on my Android is Nuance as well. Also, heard of Dragon Naturally Speaking? That's Nuance now.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Abbyy tends to have better accuracy overall.
I use ABBYY FineReader on an occasional basis. Compared to other proprietary OCR software, one strength of Abbyy is that it is relatively lightweight and runs fast. It's absolutely not the bloated POS that Nuance Omnipage is. And it doesn't have that MS ribbon-style interface and other UI novelties that substantially deviate from what is "tried and true".
I'll agree with that. The only things I care about are speed and accuracy. I just want an SDK to hit. I don't need a UI. I want this stuff to run lights out. If I need a UI for something, I will build it, thank you very much. Just concentrate on making your core product better.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They don't have a ton of consumer-facing products, but they are in fact very well-known in the technology industry.
The text -to-speech on my Android is Nuance as well. Also, heard of Dragon Naturally Speaking? That's Nuance now.
Most of the call centers with the annoying speech recognition are running off a Nuance engine, too. On the plus side, I have found that some companies will route you to to an agent quicker if you swear at it.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
If you know anything at all of the sordid history of this company, from its beginnings as a Xerox division, to its spinoff as ScanSoft, to its sneaky assimilation of former biggest competitors and continuing to sell multiple formerly competing products including OmniPage, to its current incarnation as Nuance, this lawsuit would not surprise you but the verdict might. Nuance has been getting its way far too often over much of the last decade, and no doubt expected getting its way with this lawsuit. Bazinga, bastards!
Isn't reproducing an entire news article inviting our own IP troll suit? IANAL, but reproducing (and not just linking, paraphrasing or quoting in part) an entire news article appears to go beyond the fair use doctrine. Or what's to prevent, say, a newspaper from simply copypasting another newspaper's lead story?
I just installed some Spanish front wheel bearing kits on my 300SD... the brand on the box is "FAG"
Is that the same FAG, a Schaeffler Group company, that makes the vibration measuring tool it calls the FAG Detector III?
They must have paywalled it after I submitted the story. It was not paywalled at the time of submission.