Posts Tagged: "Honeywell"

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently announced the agency’s remotely-piloted Ikhana unmanned aircraft successfully completed its first flight within the National Airspace System (NAS) without the use of safety chase aircraft. This accomplishment is an important step towards the incorporation of unmanned aircraft within the NAS for various applications including the monitoring of forest fires, search and rescue operations and even general aviation.

Barcode reading solutions provider Code Corporation of Salt Lake City, UT, announced that it had filed antitrust actions against engineering conglomerate Honeywell International (NYSE:HON) at both the U.S. International Trade Commission and in the Eastern District of Texas. Code, which is seeking an injunction on the importation and sale of barcode readers marketed by Honeywell for the healthcare industry, alleges that Honeywell engaged in a campaign to mislead distributors about the legitimacy of Code’s barcode reader products as part of an effort to monopolize that market.

At the Federal Circuit, Honeywell argued that the Board erred in (1) finding a motivation to combine the references with a reasonable expectation of success, (2) rejecting Honeywell’s objective evidence of patentability, and (3) relying on a new ground of rejection (Omure), without giving Honeywell notice and opportunity to respond. The Court found that the Board improperly relied on inherency to find the claims obvious and in its analysis of motivation to combine. First, the Board’s analysis was internally inconsistent. While finding that “the claimed combination’s stability/miscibility is an inherent property of HFO-123yf and cannot confer patentability, the Board also acknowledged that inherent properties must be considered if they demonstrate unexpected and nonobvious results.

A $1 trillion a year industry not wanting to pay innovators less than a 1% royalty on the innovations they appropriate (i.e., steal) for their own profits seems like a terrible price to pay given the national security and economic consequences of forfeiting our world leadership to the Europeans and Chinese… Google and Uber are locked in a patent battle over self-driving automobiles, so does that make Google or Uber a patent troll? What about General Electric, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Whirlpool, Kraft Foods, Caterpillar, Seiko Epson, Amgen, Bayer, Genzyme, Sanofi-Aventis, and Honeywell, to name just a few?

According to Honeywell’s press release, the company is seeking to recover damages caused by the sale of infringing barcode readers marketed by Code, such as the Code Reader 2600. Honeywell is also seeking to prevent Code’s use of the technology in future barcode readers. “We welcome competition, but we have zero tolerance for those who infringe our intellectual property,” said Lisa London, president of the productivity products division at Honeywell, in the press release. “Protecting patents is critical to ensuring a level playing field for all market players… Fair competition means protecting the patent rights of others.”

Honeywell has its sights set squarely on airport innovation. For example, U.S. Patent Application No. 20150194060, titled Enhanced Awareness of Obstacle Proximity, would protect a method of determining the location of an obstacle relative to an aircraft and generating a graphical user interface based on the obstacle’s location which indicates the area associated with the obstacle. Much like the taxiway traffic alerting technology included in the patents above, this innovation is intended to improve upon current surveillance systems for ensuring that collisions don’t happen between aircraft and other objects on the ground.