Steve, great find. I nominate you to Brad for today's Wendell.
The link will provide you with the ability to read the district court opinion in favor of IDX as well as the briefs of DBII and IDX in the appellate court. I don't know how you can easily download any of them, but you can print them out, painfully, one page at a time.
Having had an advance warning by Steve, I have read over the briefs. It is obviously a major case for both companies. If DBII loses on its appeal, it remains a fringe player with a doubtful future. If it wins, it will have a stranglehold on all camera-related fingerprinting devices, IDX's foremost among them, and can expect tribute in the form of royalty payments from everybody in that business.
I'm not a patent lawyer, so the following is only semi-informed.
Basically, DBII has a patent which it interprets quite broadly and claims IDX is infringing. IDX claims that the DBII patent is limited, and not infringed. There are a couple of points at issue. First, and I think most important, is whether DBII has defined its invention as the use of a camera to take sequential fingerprint "slices" which it then turns into a composite by mathematical reconciliation of overlapping images. Second, whether DBII's invention is limited to a technique that ignores non-fingerprint "blue sky."
The semantic argument is over the meaning of the term "array" in DBII's patent. It has to be a term of art for purposes of the lawsuit, and not just any old dictionary definition. The DBII system uses a camera that records analog images which are then sent to a digitizer before being mathematically processed. The district court ruled that the digitizer created the array in memory and since IDX doesn't use a digitizer in its system, it did not create an "array" for purposes of patent infringement and was in the clear. DBII claims that an "array" was created by the video camera before it reached the digitizer.
To quote from some of the pleadings:
IDX: "DBI's arguments . . . merit a chutzpah award. DBI's argument essentially boils down to this: even though each and every instance of the term 'array' in the [patent] refers to digital pixel data stored in memory, the [patent] lacks an affirmative statement that frames of analog video signals cannot also be the claimed arrays. . . . A competitor reviewing the '976's patent's specification and prosecution theory [taken by DBI with the patent examiner to get the patent] would not find a single suggestion that an 'array' could refer to analog video signals. To the contrary, the drafter of the '976 patent was careful to use the term 'array' only when referring to a collection of digital data items stored in memory and the term 'frame' only when referring to analog video signals."
"The TP-600 and TP-900 devices do not form in memory arrays of digital pixel values representative of fingerprint images, as required by [DBI's patent]. Nor do they inspect incoming digital pixel data to distinguish between 'slice data' and blue sky data, as are required by [DBI's patent]."
DBI: "To be sure, the specification refers to the data in memory as an array. But that does not mean that an array of data is not generated before storage. The camera generates an array of data, analog data. . . . In the real world an array of data is not physically stored in a matrix."
DBI: The "essence of [DBI's] invention [is] generating data for successive fingerprint slices and mathematically reconciling the overlapping data. The claim does not recite that the data be stored . . . ."
DBI: "Identix's devices and [DBI's system] function in the same manner to continuously take photos of a rolling finger and then process the fingerprint from each photo array, one pixel at a time. . . . [T]he pixel information from each array is compared to the information in the composite for that address and mathematically reconciled to obtain the final rolled fingerprint image."
The upshot of DBII's argument is that any electronic fingerprint system that uses a camera would be covered according to its theory of the patent. Did DBII anticipate IDX's system? In the very general sense of camera-related machines, yes, but not in the sense of how the image gets processed. Who wins? So far, IDX, and that is probably the best predictor we have at the moment. If DBII gets an infringement ruling, aside from the financial consequences, I think we would have patent protections operating to squelch technological advances (non-minutiae systems, here) rather than promote them. |
