[tabi] FW: Federal Circuit Court affirmed the US Patent Office Decision invalidating Freedom Scientific's patent and eliminating their claims against GW Micro
- From: "Chip Orange" <Corange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <tabi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:21:01 -0400
From: gw-news@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:gw-news@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 9:46 AM
To: gw-news@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Federal Circuit Court affirmed the US Patent Office Decision
invalidating Freedom Scientific's patent and eliminating their claims against
GW Micro
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 i t 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.
Other related posts:
- » [tabi] FW: Federal Circuit Court affirmed the US Patent Office Decision invalidating Freedom Scientific's patent and eliminating their claims against GW Micro - Chip Orange
