What the heck?
A few days ago a Korean Time piece talked about a local firm suing Google for violating their search patents. I wanted to wait on commnenting on this until I saw the patents owned by the Korean company Park and Opc.According to the KT:
In the suit lodged with the Seoul District Court, Park & Opc Co. claimed that the U.S.-based search-engine giant infringed upon its technology used mainly in personalizing an individual's search results in the Internet.
The company said that it received a patent for the technology in 2003, but Google has been using the patent for its Internet search-engine service without its permission, Yonhap reported.
So I log into KIPO's database of patents and the only patent Park and Opc recived in 2003 is:
2020030011709 - Detachable Device for Transmitting Driving Force toRotational Axis of OPC Drum
Park and Opc's other patents are for simular printing technologies, not internet search.
What the heck is going on here?
posted by Dram Man @ 4:35 PM
2 Comments:
Hi,
Park & OPC is formerly Daewon SCN which spun off from a division of Samsung. Samsung does have patents issued to them such as:
RE39,302
Lanier , et al. September 19, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intelligent help system
Abstract
An intelligent help system which processes information specific to a user and a system state is described. The system incorporates a monitoring device to determine which events to store as data in an historical queue. These data, as well as non-historical data (e.g., system state), are stored in a knowledge base. An inference engine tests rules against the knowledge base data, thereby providing a help tag. A display engine links the help tag with an appropriate solution tag to provide help text for display.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inventors: Lanier; Charles D. (Southlake, TX), Wolf; Richard J. (Leander, TX), Butner; Leticia Villegas (Phoenix, AZ)
Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Suwon, KR)
Appl. No.: 09/375,867
Filed: August 17, 1999
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So perhaps the IP left Samsung with the spin-off and is now owned by Park & OPC.
Eric
First thanks for your comment, and your follow through. Its been a while. Also thanks for your research, it does close some mental loops.
The problem is if the assignee is Samsung, I do not think they have standing to sue in district court since the patent is not theirs. Normally speaking the assignee must be changed on the Korean Intellectual Property Office's register before a suit is filed. (not to mention the patent must be issued in Korea. PCT applications in the national phase, let alone US patents, do not count).
Second thought since I have some dialogue on this, why did Park and OPC file a normal civil suit in Seoul District Court? "Standard Operating Procedure", so to speak, is to file a criminal trial for a violation of Korean Patent Law.
Post a Comment
<< Home