Hey guys. Has anyone read the article here : http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2.../emw186804.htm Someone else above me also posted it & that's where I got it. But the first sentence is:

" Frank Weyer, a patent attorney and inventor of U.S. Patent No. 5,975,728 issued on Nov. 2, 1999 announced today that he has sued Ford Motor Company for patent infringement."

He is also a patent attorney. So at 1st I was with the majority of you who think ths will all blow over by New Years. But now I am not so sure. I can say that if he actually has something here he is going to have alot of mad people on his hands. Myself included. Anyway. Let's just hope for the best.

Laters.

 

Well all I care about if FORD loses is that if something happens to the MY Color in my car they can still fix it.

 

It won't end in a court loss for Ford. At worst, they'll settle with him and keep on selling MyColor.

 

I don't think this will be a problem since: the Delphi patent seems to be about backlighting, this is how the Mycolor cluster is lit. Mr. Weyer's patent seems to be about having the lighting shine down onto the cluster face.

 

This is things we don't have to worry about. Now own a Durango or Dakota and you got worries , with the ball joints breaking prematurely and wheels flying off. Chrysler is going to have until Monday to deside if they will do a recall at $1200 a vehicle. Now thats worries not some legal battle that Ford will win. Besides I've got mine and I paid for it. Its mine all mine!!!

 

I have two pens that do essentially the exact same thing as the MyColor feature does, it's just blending of LED lights at different intensity levels into a light pipe, quite common on many devices.

 

I don't believe it is the technology which is under patent in this case, it is the delivery system implemented. This guy Frank's patent specifically talks about use as backlighting for an automobile instrument gauge cluser.

 

I don't know if anyone remembers the lawsuit about intermitent wipers. Basically, the same kind of thing happened. Check out this link, he eventually won, but it took 30 years.

http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2003/...ns_invent.shtml

 

I still haven't had a chance to analyze the patents at issue, but I did a martindale search on this guy and came up with:

http://www.techcoastlaw.com/


Now, if I truly think I have a strong case of patent infringement against Ford, I would retain at least a decent sized law firm. He's a one man show. Something tells me Mr. Weyer appreciates all of the press he is generating with this suit.

Again, just my opinion and not legal advice, blah, blah, blah.

 

Chill out guys, suing a company for patent infringment is something that happends everyday, and it happends to all the companies in all fields. The company I work for owns a bunch of patents for CD/DVD's and we survive by getting money for infringment, and sometimes we have to sue, we have gotten money from Sony, Panasonic, Lite-on, Samsung,.......................................... ...

My point is, every company try to get away with it, but at the end they have to pay, after reading the patent I see it hard for Ford to get away with it, most likely they will settle.

I think this guy is dumb, he sued Ford way to early, now Ford has the option of not offering the "Mycolor" option and Ford will have to pay only for the few 05 Mustang that were sold with it, what he should have done is wait until Ford had many thousands of Stangs with that feature on the road (around 2006 or 2007), that would have make a really big chuck of money for him, if Ford decides to drop that feature this guy is going to make very little money, dumb attorney.

The way I see it is, we as Mustang buyers really don't need that feature, droping it is not going to increase or decrease sales of the new Mustang, and by dropping it Ford would save a good chunk of money by not paying (or paying only an small amout of money) to this attorney.

I also remember the "GT40" name lawsuit, those guy sued Ford way to early, Ford had the option of dropping the name for just "GT", they did and the guys that sued Ford got crap, that is way you have to sue when the product has being selling for years already so the company has no other option than paying for all the products that has been sold already, and if they agree to be licensed, then to pay for the future product to be sold.

I'm not an attorney, I just work for this company and I try to know how things work.

 

A new patent can be made of the combination fo another two previus patents, if somebody has a patent for a shoe, and somebody else has the patent for a red LED that blinks when you shake it, then you can make a new patent where you combine the shoe and the red LED that blinks and make some money.

In this case, they are combining the automobile instrument pannel with a changing color LED technology, that should be valid.

 

Uhh, look up 4 posts and read what I wrote. Weyer's patent specifically talks about using an instrument panel with changing LED colors...