http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/01/27/02222...&tid=155&tid=99



Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out

Posted by timothy on Monday January 26, @09:31PM
from the opens-fine-with-abiword dept.
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."

thats crazy

this si the case I quoted 4 months ago,
hooray!

Patentwise, the machine vision stuff doesn't really deal with the same stuff as Acacia... But, the more that get thrown out, the harder judges will be looking at the ones that get in front of them and the more questions they will ask...imho....

As far as the 1.5 billion... Remember, the same guys that are Acacia were Gemstar and they did multi multi billions of dollars in licensing fees before their patents were found to have NOT been infringed upon.

The more folks that sign, the more money coming in to Acacia and the longer Acacia will want to string it out. I don't think that they actually want their stuff anywhere near a courtroom. They want to string it out as long as possible collecting whatever licensing fees thay can get.




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