A US judge invalidated certain patents for machines that scan products for information including pricing codes. The patents have already cost companies that operate in the US more than US$1 billion in licensing fees.
US District Judge Philip Pro in Las Vegas said that the late Jerome Lemelson took too long to obtain his patents, sometimes as much as 39 years. The court's action is a victory for Cognex Corp, Symbol Technologies Inc and other scanner makers that sought to invalidate the Lemelson patents because their clients were being sued.
The for-profit Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation has successfully sued more than 800 businesses and has pending lawsuits against hundreds of other companies, including Intel Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc, that use machines made by Symbol, Cognex and others to scan products for pricing codes, defects or other information.
The delay in obtaining the patents was "unreasonable and unjustifiable," Pro said on Friday. "At a minimum, Lemelson's delay in securing the asserted claims amounts to culpable neglect as he ignored the duty to claim his invention promptly."
Symbol lawyer Jesse Jenner of Fish & Neave argued that Lemelson wrote descriptions for his inventions in the 1950s and 1960s and later amended them to cover emerging technology.
Lemelson's lawyer, Gerald Hosier, maintained that the inventor followed the rules that were in place before the US Patent and Trademark Office laws were changed.
Under old law, patents were valid for 17 years after they were issued, no matter how long the application process took. In part because of the controversy over the Lemelson patents, the law was changed in 1995 so patents are valid for 20 years from the date of application. Applications filed before 1995 are given the benefit of whichever term is longer.
The 14 patents involved in the dispute were issued to Lemelson between 1978 and 1994, from applications dating back to the mid-1950s. Lemelson died in 1997.
Of the 5 million US patents issued from 1914 to 2001, 13 of Lemelson's patents lead in length of time it took for an application to get through the system. At least one of the patents will expire in 2011, 55 years after the original application, Pro said.
"The evidence [cited] at trial is abundant that, during that period, machine vision and bar-code technology was developed by many who had never heard of the Lemelson patents," Pro wrote.
Pro said that, even if the patents were valid, Cognex and Symbol don't use the technology covered by the patents.
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