Owen Brunette

Scott Shaffer has nicely written up a decision by the US Patent Office to reject 95 patents in the area of visual / bar code recognition. There are a large number of dubious patents in the field that have been successfully blocking a number of ventures (By causing liability concerns for funders), including one venture of mine, in the area of visual code recognition. Many things in the field have been too obvious for too long but not quite implementable outside the lab, due to other technical availability limitations, so companies have spent their time filing patents around the subject.

The decision is one less hurdle for the project which got as far as a prototype before we realized what the patent situation was. It seems that several other related patents should fall for the same reason which is going to allow progress in the field once more. The immediate beneficiaries are OEMs using UPC and other bar code scanning solutions and users of QR Codes which are a direct rival of a proprietary NeoMedia code pattern which has sold partly on the patent liability fears NeoMedia and others were able to point out.

IP