No sooner had I finished reporting on a new wave of patent infringement lawsuits filed in March 2013 against retailers such as Ditto Technologies–the innovative leader in “virtual try-on” technology for eyewear–than I learned about a second lawsuit aimed specifically at Ditto that had been filed a month earlier, in February. Unlike the series of[...]
Double Whammy – Augmented Retailer Ditto Hit With Second Patent Lawsuit
Monday, April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Augmented Reality Patent Troll At It Again
Friday, April 26, 2013 By 4 Comments
Last year I reported on a six nearly identical lawsuits that Lennon Image Technologies LLC filed alleging patent infringement against online retailers using webcam-based augmented reality user interfaces. Each complaint was based on the same patent: US 6,624,843 B2, issued Sep. 23, 2003 and titled “Customer Image Capture and Use Thereof in a Retailing System.” Three of those lawsuits–the[...]
Zugara Obtains Patent for Augmented Reality “Social Shopper”
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 By 2 Comments
For the past year, I have been advising my readers in the augmented reality industry to obtain patents on their inventions for quite some time now, and I’ve been warning that patent battles over this technology were just around the corner. Both that advice and that prediction were vindicated on September 25, 2012 with the[...]
Tomita v. Nintendo: the First Augmented Reality Patent Infringement Case
Thursday, July 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Back in January of this year, I made five predictions regarding the development of augmented reality law in 2012. One of those was that we’d see the first AR-related patent infringement litigation. And I further predicted it would involve “physical eyewear with AR capabilities.” Turns out I was mostly right. On June 26, a judge[...]
5 Predictions for Augmented Reality Law in 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 By 2 Comments
This could finally be the year that the public begins to see augmented reality as a serious, important technology. Lance Ulanoff, the editor-in-chief at Mashable, certainly thinks so. He listed AR as the first of “5 Tech Trends to Watch in 2012.” “Trust me,” he wrote, “by 2013, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who[...]
AR & the Law – My Presentation at the Mobile AR Event
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
On October 11, I had the great honor of presenting at the Mobile AR Event, held in San Diego during the CTIA Enterprise & Applications Conference. It was a privilege to share the stage with representatives from such AR pioneers as daqri, Layar, GoldRun, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Metaio, Second Site, and others. My subject, appropriately enough,[...]
(Updated) Think There’s No Hurry to Patent Your AR Inventions?
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
**Updated on Dec. 10, 2011 with patent numbers, hyperlinks, and more excerpts.** Think again. For one thing, the United States recently changed its approach to determining patent priority. It used to be that even if someone else beat you to the punch in applying to register an invention, you could undo their patent by proving[...]
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