An "infringer" cannot "just buy the rights" to a patent. The patent owner may do with the patent as they wish; they may license it to some but not to others, they may not do anything with it or they may ask for a cease and desist. It is their property.

I'm aware of that. What I was trying to point out, is that often someone just "uses" the idea without even attempting to secure legal use of the patent (through buying or licensing it) because it often is preferrable to "settle" the issue after revenues are in hand. It is often considered a "business" decision, but personally, I think it's unethical.

Looks like we have a sequel to this one!

CommTest strikes back:
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-tnedce/case_no-3...00248/case_id-51040/

Anyone has a PACER account? Maybe someone can tell what it's all about.

Any other news?

Here's TEC's patent (issued 1985) on a portable data collector capable of FFT processing, loaded with a stored route consisting of vibration parameters tailored to each machine to be downloaded to and from a PC.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/4520674/fulltext.html

Note the inventors are Canada, Piety, Pardue and Simpson (!)
And that "Preferably the interface includes three keys, and by using the up-arrow, down-arrow and "enter" keys and by following the meter's prompts, a nontechnical operator can consistently obtain accurate and repeatable predictive maintenance data."


Jump to the 1993 lawsuit naming Canada/CSI defendant
http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/1312829
CSI was in full wiggle mode.
"oh TEC waited too long"
"Oh, we don't use a selectively energized high speed math processor"
"oh, we don't selectively apply an anti-aliasing means"
"oh, Billy f*rted in my chair"

I believe one of IRD's big reasons for buying TEC was to "get" the ingenious PC based/low-memory-use-single-value-parameter-route/data collector patent.

For a while the Vibroport Schenck sold in the US was stripped of the features that violated the TEC patent, but the European model had 'em.

No I didn't....

quote:

I tried to use a Commtest meter once, and I was not overly impressed. And I downloaded and tried to setup Ascent once and was immediately lost. Seemed much more cumbersome than MasterTrend to me. Things may have changed, but the only 'advantage' that I could see was that Commtest was cheap compared to CSI.

The 'advantage' of Commtest being cheaper may be that it may make it affordable. This worksite has a small profit margin. The owners refused to pay CSI's price, but did agree to buy Commtest's stuff, plus infrared, ultrasound, laser alignment, electrical test equipment, strobe lights, and accessories for all the above, plus training. This seemed to make economic sense to us.

From rumor's I heard from a CSI insider (always dubious at best), Commtest was formed by ex-CSI employees. They created their equipment/software using technology they learned at CSI, without getting permission or a license to do so.

Dubious my rear. I have known Commtest for about 10 years and neither the hardware (so far I seen Commtest use a 8051, stereo audio A/D and not Z80 with muxed A/D quite different) and certainly not the software have anything in common with something from the US since Ascent is Delphi based using a SQL database engine and not a mix mash of Fortran, C, assembler and a homebrew "flat"(/wrinkly) file database. I know the guy that developed the Ascent PC software from start and he has a NZ passport. John C. has some connection to California but it´s a bit from Knoxville... Can you se the obvious similarity in user interface btw. the systems? I sure can´t. Nowadays things are different on the sales side, there are quite a few that still work in a office in Knoxville that is not native NZ and work for a NZ company but that has nothing to do with basic technology. There was some input on the first version VB1 from around here and a much larger part I guess from TA of Charlotte and certainly from more places that made a modern system. Maybe the business model will look more like a US one now due to the influence but that is another story and that may be the most similar feature currently since it´s the same guys. I know for a fact some guys a long time ago that was bought over from one company to another, implementing the same hardware that they patented in the first company and lost the court case so the company they worked for had to pay thru the nose. Was that the story told? It was then the case of being sort of the other way around. Olov

A rumor from a "CSI Insider"? I would consider the source! That's like a Rumor about the Republicans made by the Democrats or vice-versa!

Walt

I have to agree with OLI. I've used both, and there is no similiarity as far as I can see. Commtest is intuitive and easy to use. I think they have some to go on a few of their screens (I'm just used to a different look is all). I'm not so sure it is as powerful as either of the two company's IRD or CSI, but then again I'm a believer that 99.9% of the work doesn't require all of that "power" anyway.

Dave

Go back in history and CSI was formed from former TEC employees and the boxes were very similar.

quote:

Originally posted by Ron Stiemsma:
Go back in history and CSI was formed from former TEC employees and the boxes were very similar.

I think you'll find ex IRD in the mix there too.
Hey two Dogs, who was it?

Dave

It seems like one continuous lawsuit for about 25 years or so.

"Can't we all just get along?" Rodney King