Changing sides

This post is for those of you who have been following the Cognex-MVTec patent infringement dispute.

First, the story so far: Cognex have alleged that the Halcon machine vision software product infringes some of their patents. In their complaint, filed in Massachusetts last year (I’m working from memory here so forgive me if I don’t have the dates quite right,) Cognex named MVTec, the product developers, along with a number of other companies who use Halcon in products they sell in the US.

More recently, and probably because patent litigation grinds notoriously slowly, Cognex made a complaint to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) regarding the importation into the US of goods incorporating Halcon. The ITC tends to move faster than do the patent courts and has the power to block the importation of patent-infringing good, so presumably Cognex felt this would be an effective way to defend themselves.

Are you with me so far? Good, because here’s the interesting update. It’s reported in motioncontrol.com (September 08, 2009, also on the Cognex web site,) that one of the defendants in the ITC case, Multitest Elektronische Systeme GmbH, has settled with Cognex. No details of the settlement are given, except that Dr. Bob is quoted as saying, “… we look forward to working with Multitest to integrate Cognex software in its products in the future.”

In other words then, Multitest got themselves off the ITC “hook” by agreeing to drop Halcon for one of the Cognex software products, presumably VisionPro. Will any of the other companies named in the ITC complaint take the same route out? Watch this space!