Ok, for those of you wondering about the ongoing law suit, here is
some news, gotten from another list.
text of forwarded message follows:
Thought this might be of interest to the list, although hopefully it won't
generate a lot of extraneous comments:
Lawsuit Leads to Reconsideration of Patent
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has re-examined a patent
held by the maker of a screen reader for blind computer users in
connection with an infringement lawsuit filed against a competing
company. Reliable sources hailed the move as a significant
victory for the defendant.
The Document Placemarker patent, held by Freedom Scientific,
Inc., covers a specialized screen reading capability that allows
a blind person to save their position on a Web page and return to
the same place at a later time. The company's Job Access With
Speech (JAWS) screen reading software incorporates this feature.
In a July 15, 2008 complaint filed in the United States District
Court, Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, the
self-proclaimed "world's leading manufacturer of assistive
technology products for those who are vision impaired" accused GW
Micro, the maker of the competing Window-Eyes screen reader, of
deliberate patent infringement, claiming their placemarker
technology is the same as that described in the patent.
According to court documents, Freedom Scientific is seeking an
injunction requiring GW Micro to stop including the placemarker
feature in their product, asks for significant unspecified
financial compensation for the infringement and requests recovery
of legal fees.
"I believe that this technology shouldn't have been patented to
begin with," said Doug Geoffray, Vice President of Development
with GW Micro, Inc. "It obviously was around way before what
they've done. We have stated that our version, Window-Eyes 3.1
back in 1999, had previous position capability."
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agreed. In a
re-examination of Freedom Scientific's patent, at the request of
GW Micro's attorneys, the office rejected all claims to the
invention.
"A person shall be entitled to a patent unless the invention was
patented or described in a printed publication in this or a
foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more
than one year prior to the date of application for patent in the
United States," stated a published document describing the
re-examination as the basis for the patent's rejection on the
grounds that the technology had already been invented.
The document also cited two existing patents and the availability
of IBM's Home Page Reader, a product employing place marker
technology prior to the Freedom Scientific patent, in its
reasoning behind the decision.
"We take that as a positive sign," Geoffray said.
"It's a victory," said Dennis Karjala, Jack E. Brown Professor
of Law, Faculty Fellow, Center for the Study of Law, Science, &
Technology at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor
College of Law. "There's no question that, if the re-examination
decision is upheld, that's the end of it. There is no patent."
He said Freedom Scientific may still have some cards to play in
this case.
"The patent owner in a re-examination proceeding may appeal,"
Karjala said. "It goes to an appeals board within the Patent
Office and then they can later seek judicial review. This thing
could go on for awhile."
According to the re-examination document, the Patent Office must
receive a response from Freedom Scientific by Oct. 28 if it
wishes to appeal the decision.
Karjala said the legal trend points to a probable GW Micro
victory.
"Because the Supreme Court has been reviewing so many of their
cases with an obvious eye to overturning them, the Patent Office
is pretty sensitive now that they're being accused of being too
patent friendly," said Karjala. "My guess is once you got a
ruling by the examiner that the patent is invalid, I'd say the
chances are pretty good it will be upheld by the board in the
Patent Office. If it's upheld by the board, the chances that a
court would overturn it in this atmosphere are pretty slim."
Freedom Scientific representatives declined to comment, citing
the ongoing litigation.
Notes:
.The examiner cited Patent 6085161 describing the invention of
a system for assigning and playing specific sounds when a Web
page changes or the user encounters a specific Web page element
such as a header or list. All of the claims in Freedom
Scientific's patent were rejected based on the positioning
techniques described in this "sonification" system.
.The examiner also cited Patent 7058887 describing a means of
determining the position on a Web page according to user-defined
settings, including the page's domain. This IBM patent was
referenced in the re-examination as clarification for the
rejection of the sixth claim.
.The examiner also referred to the IBM Home Page Reader Version
2.5 Manual.
.Ex Parte Re-examination, Control Number 90/010,473, Central
Re-examination Unit, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Visit
the Patent Application Information Retrieval Web site and enter
the specified control number to obtain this document. The Patent
Office provides this document only in scanned image PDF, which is
inaccessible to blind readers. An accessible copy of this document has been
made available using Kurzweil K1000 Version
11.03 optical character recognition software.
.An accessible copy of Freedom Scientific's complaint was made
available in the July 24, 2008 article about the lawsuit.
Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
Steve
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text of forwarded message ends:
John
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