Viewing posts from September, 2017
Testifying defense expert representing Samsung in an action for patent infringement concerning optical storage, holographic optical elements, tracking servos, and signal integrity.
This was another fun one with a lot of reverse engineering. This time round I was working with the plaintiff, Industrial Technology Research Institute, which is a research lab owned by the Taiwanese government. It was an action for patent infringement in the focusing and tracking servos of optical disc drives, as well as in the arrangement of the laser sources. The patent claims at issue concerned the way the magnetic "voice coil" actuators simultaneously adjusted focus, tracking, and tilt, so I needed to take several of the accused products apart and run the head servos by themselves in my lab. I also had to cut apart some of the coils to show how they were wired, and decap the lasers to show that there were two chips side-by-side in the CD/DVD source and one in the BluRay source.
Testifying expert representing ThinkOptics in an action for patent infringement concerning video games, specifically the human interface of the Nintendo Wii.
February 15, 2015: Settled after an inter partes re-examination.
An interesting though brief patent interference case concerning flat-panel solar concentrators. The plaintiff (Morgan) had filed a continuation patent application, which is a means of getting additional claims out of a previously-filed specification. The new patent gets the same priority date as the old one, so you don't have to worry about later art (such as that of the competitor whom you want to pay you royalties), but you don't get the usual 20-year patent lifetime. Morgan then came after Banyan.