Digitech patents wiped out in California
A Californian judge has invalidated patent claims held by a US non-practising entity that targeted 45 companies either making or selling digital cameras.
Judge Otis Wright at the US District Court for the Central District of California granted summary judgment in favour of four of those companies on July 31, including Japanese camera firm Fujifilm.
Digitech Image Technologies, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation, had accused the defendants of infringing the ‘415 patent, entitled “Device profiles for use in a digital image processing system”.
A device profile describes the colour and spatial properties of a device so that a processed image can be more accurately captured or transformed.
Four months after the suit was filed in July 2012, Judge Wright split up the defendants based on “joinder” changes under the American Invents Act, which aim to restrict the number multi-defendant patent suits where there were few or no common questions of fact among defendants.
Four of those companies, Fujifilm, Konica Minolta Holdings, Pentax Ricoh Imaging and Sigma Corp, filed together for summary judgment, while others including Panasonic subsequently settled with Digitech under licensing deals.
In a ruling on July 31, Wright found that Digitech’s asserted claims do not fall under any of the four categories of patentable subject matter – processes, machines, manufactures and compositions – and that they are abstract ideas.
“While an application of an abstract idea, such as a mathematical formula, to a known structure may qualify for patent protection”, Wright said, the rejected claims were “nothing more than an abstract idea”.
The ruling directly affects the four plaintiffs that filed for summary judgment, but is expected to apply to the remaining defendants including Nikon, Canon, Olympus and LG Electronics.
Steve Routh, partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, which represented the four plaintiffs, said he expects the judge to make a final ruling next week, at which point he will dismiss the remaining suits and put an end to the litigation.
Analysing the ruling, he said: “This was a very thoughtful decision on section 101 – what is patentable subject matter. This has been an issue in a lot of discussion, including an en banc ruling in the CLS case, which had about five or six decisions.”
In a ruling in May this year, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit failed to agree on the patentability of computerised business methods in a dispute between CLS Bank and Alice Corp.
Routh continued: “This ruling shows you cannot patent an abstract idea ... There is still a good understanding of the core principles of section 101.”
Attorneys for Digitech did not respond to a request for comment.
