Frank
Cunningham must pay £1,500 in costs to Nokia, having lost a review
hearing related to an earlier ruling by a hearing officer of the
Intellectual Property Office (IPO). That opinion, and the review
hearing that supported it, said that Cunningham's patent was not
infringed by Nokia and that one of the claims he made for his
patent was invalid.
Cunningham invented a system which connected a house's door
entry system to a mobile telephone. His brief application,
accompanied by a page of hand-drawn illustrations, was granted.
According to his patent, Cunningham's system comprised a camera
built into a house door with a motion detector attached.
When motion is detected or the doorbell pressed, the system
connects the camera in the system to the house owner's mobile
phone, allowing the owner to see who is at the door.
Nokia has a system called the PT-6 which is a remote camera and
motion sensor that sends the owner of a property a photograph of
what it sees when it detects motion.
Cunningham alleged that Nokia's technology infringed his patent
and asked the IPO to issue an opinion. That opinion was issued last
year and turned on the scope of Cunningham's patent. It said that
Nokia did not infringe that patent.
Cunningham asked for a review of the opinion, which has
only a small number of specific grounds on which it can overturn an
original opinion. Opinions are not legally binding and Cunningham
can sue Nokia for infringement in the courts.
Hearing Officer Phil Thorpe said that the original opinion had
not been an error, and that Nokia has not infringed Cunningham's
patent. He found that there was enough difference between the two
systems, principally that Nokia's cannot be activated by a
doorbell, for there to have been no infringement.
Cunningham represented himself in the case. Thorpe said that his
arguments were passionate but not always relevant.
"[Cunningham] has represented himself with no little conviction
and has clearly thrown himself into the legal aspects of the case,"
said Thorpe's ruling. "Unfortunately much of his argument was based
on misunderstandings.
"In particular he based his arguments mainly on a false
assumption that the scope of his patent extended well beyond the
words that he had actually used in his claims, even when read in
the light of the description and drawings, to cover aspects of his
invention that he seems to have thought of yet not specified or
else specified in a way that was clear only to him," he said.
There is a scale on which costs are awarded in IPO hearings, and
Nokia applied to have greater costs awarded to them than were
allowed on the scale. Thorpe declined, and ordered £1,500 in costs
to be paid to Nokia.
Thorpe also ruled that the original opinion was correct when it
said that one of the patent's claims, related to a security system
for vehicles, was invalid because a previous patent had covered
similar ground.
Cunningham has lodged an appeal with the Patents Court.
