That's because the talk about it not being a patent case and that no patents were found to be infringed, with only a ruling by a 'non-technical' jury, yadayadaya is nonsense. Take a look of the site that Patti just pointed to, it contains a link
"Digests of Patent Opinions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit"
for recent years and of course includes 1997, which, of course, contains information on the Fonar VS GE case.
fr.com
(This being a copyrighted summary, I cannot copy it here.)
Jim, please read this in its entirety and tell us whether you think that all three decisions, (the initial jury trial, the district court decision and the federal circuit court) had a finding of infringment of a Fonar patent:
For example, here is the summary for the reinstatement of the patent for cancer detection at this third stage:"Lastly, reinstating the jury verdict of infringement of the second patent, the Federal Circuit held that infringement was established "at least equivalently by the insubstantial difference, if any, between standard values [of T1 and T2] required by the limitation and the [infringer's] compiled values [published in an article by its own scientists.]" You see, this patent was the ONLY one of the two patent infringments overturned by the district court and only "for the failure to establish the existence of standard T1 and T2 values" You might compare this with Spinshooter's story as why the district court was overturned on this matter.
At all three levels the patent for MAO was upheld and GE is consistently referred to as the "infringer". Apparently GE maintained that Fonar should not have been given this patent without revealing the detailed source code behind the algorithms but "The Federal Circuit affirmed as to validity, holding that the best mode requirement for the first patent was satisfied by a description of the functions of software, and that disclosure of the actual computer code was not necessary..."
Overturned by the district court and affirmed by the circuit court was the initial decision that "found inducement of infringement of the first patent".
In making these decisions both higher courts seem as technically adept as would be expected. And there is no indication at this site that Fonar went outside of normal channels in the defense of its intellectual property rights.
Regards,
Michael |
