Rick Nelson

Back-to-back for Cognex
September 26, 2005

Cognex has scored back-to-back wins against the patent trolls. In a case decided September 9 by the United States Court of Appeals, Cognex won its second victory against the Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation. The Court affirmed an earlier lower court decision that 14 machine-vision patents claimed by Lemelson are unenforceable. The patents relate machine-vision and automatic bar-code-identification technologies.

In an earlier post, I noted that the patent process is prone to abuse from people--the patent trolls--who simply look for technical trends, submit overstuffed claims that baffle patent examiners, and wait for profitable products to emerge to attempt to assert their patents. That was in part the situation in which Cognex had to take on Lemelson in the first place, a case that was decided in favor of the good guys--Cognex and its co-plaintiffs--in January 2004. Specifically, the courts held that Lemelson's 18- to 39-year delays in prosecuting its claims for the patents-in-suit were "unreasonable and unjustified, leading to "the adverse effect on businesses that were unable to determine what was patented from what was not patented."

Now I'm all for the little guy getting a fair shake, if he's truly innovative, and it's certainly too easy for large organizations to bully worthy inventors. But that's not the situation here. The Lemelson claims in this case are dubious. The Appeals Court did not affirm aspects of the case such as obviousness, holding that the delay alone was sufficient to decide for the plaintiffs. But the patent snippets presented in the court decision--scanning an image field, generating electrical signals based on variations in the field, analyzing these signals and comparing them with a stored version, and generating electrical signals indicative of the presence of a specific image field--would seem to have been obvious even 39 years ago.

The true innovations were from the Cognex and its co-plaintiffs, who devised the means to do this quickly, accurately, and economically.

Dr. Robert J. Shillman, chairman and CEO of Cognex, said, "The Lemelson Partnership can appeal this most recent ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court...and we hope they do, because it would give us a reason for another victory celebration!"

If it comes to that, the victory celebration will be well earned.

You can find a copy of the court finding on the Cognex Website.

Posted by Rick Nelson on September 26, 2005 | Comments (0)