Huge congratulations to you guys, keep up the good work. Shame on you,
Freedom Science Fiction! Ha ha ha!
Christopher Hallsworth
On 29/10/2012 13:45, [email protected] wrote:
In July of 2008 on my first day back in the office after the Sight Village
conference, someone entered our office and handed me a summons and notification
of a lawsuit brought on by Freedom Scientific against GW Micro. They received a
patent for certain screen reader features and our response was that Window-Eyes
had those same basic features several years prior to their patent. This was the
beginning of a long waste of time and money, which finally came to a close last
week. GW Micro is vindicated - it's over - the court decided in our favor!
I won't provide all the details but in general, the Patent Office reexamined
their patent at our request and found it to be invalid in view of prior art.
Both the patent examiner and the Board of Appeals in the Patent Office came to
the same conclusion - the patent is invalid. Despite those results, they asked
for a federal court to review the decision and again they came to the same
conclusion as everyone else. You may listen to this final argument by going to
http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/oral-argument-recordings/search/audio.html search
for Appeal 2012-1145, listen to the MP3 file and you will easily come to the
same conclusion as everyone else. Their original patent should not have been
granted in the first place and without the patent, there are no grounds for
their lawsuit against GW Micro. If you decide to listen to that file, you
should be aware that it is a large file, which will take some time to download.
We want to thank you all for the many words of encouragement, support and
prayers that we've received over these past 4 years. Not one person ever
suggested that we should do anything other than fight and defend ourselves.
However, the sad fact is that actions like this hurt all of us. This caused a
waste of dollars and time for both our companies, which could have been spent
improving existing products and developing new ones.
GW Micro chooses to take the path of creating new products, features and
innovations and our recent release of our Window-Eyes 8 public beta illustrates
that perfectly. If you haven't done so already, I hope you will give it a try.
Simply doing that will show your support of GW Micro. We promise to continue to
work hard and conduct business in an honest and proper fashion. The reputation
of GW Micro will never be litigation instead of innovation.
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