BBurrows: on rewriting history?
Actually I am sure you would be surprised how very much non-GE I
am, and how pro-Damadian I always have been. Also my own income
is 75% from my own consulting business, some of it in patent work; I am not a "medical" person as you suppose. However, you agree
with me that restoring the jury award was NOT determined
by the Supreme Court. If what you say is true, that the suit was
truly about Patent Infringement, and you are as intimately acquainted
as you indicate, then you can easily prove that I am being dishonest in what I wrote: simply tell us the Patent numbers
in question, and write which specific Claim numbers within them GE was found guilty of infringing? One infringes particular invention/patent claims, not actually an entire patent document.
Neither the patent cover page itself, when I looked it up the other day, nor the summary HTML in the IBM-Database listings gave any assignment of the patent rights to FONAR. When one looks at other MR related patents of the era, up to modern times, e.g., Garroway ... Mansfield, or Abe, Tanaka, Inoue, Ima, or Ernst, Kumar, et al, or any
large number of Ian Young MRI patents, the assignement of the patent rights to some company to some grantor institution is always prominently stated in the database record. I am sorry, but for the
Damadian patents in question here there are no assignments listed.
Perhaps there was an informal, non Patent Office, civil assignement done in Melville LI? Maybe the Cancer Detection patent already
had expired. That might be true, I suppose.
So I am still asking whether the FONAR suit was brought
in Patent Court, before a PTO Judge, or was it a suit for damages
taken before a jury of civilians in civil court. Which of those
or something else altogether? I said "most" because I read that the two awards were 60mil and 120mil, and the latter was originally
disallowed by the trial judge. I think that was in "current news"
on the ISMR (International Society of Magnetic Resonace) internet site in 1997 sometime.
You are simply wrong about patent cases being determined only in a
court by "jury of our peers". What you mean "our"? The 1980s
case taken by FONAR (highly unsuccessfully) against Johnson&Johnson was NOT a jury trial, for example. I note with interest that you fail to mention that previous case. But, again, these pick up only
on points of historical interest. Why would anyone actually care
at this late date? FONAR does have cash on the books, and we all
want to know what they plan to do with "where it is going in '98"
When did FONAR first become incorporated? When did they abandon
the FONAR-scanner technology in favor of gradient Fourier encoded
MRI sytems? I see it so strongly in their best corporate interests
to distance themselves as far from the events and technology of
the 1970's as they can, if they want to head into the 2000's with
any chance of success. There is something else "going on in '98",
to explain this obsessive need to justify an old, dead, 1970s patent document.
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