Raymarine nearly sold(?) & Honeywell’s holiday surprise

Mason says:

Intellectual Property suits are almost always a form of extortion. It takes forever to find people who can even adjudicate the matter, so the sued usually pay the litigator to go away. Everyone loses but the consumer most of all.

Dan Corcoran (b393capt) says:

Ho Ho Ho for Honeywell, or Ha Ha Ha !!!
My analysis, based on seeing companies harassed or harassing others over IP and investigating the costs of protecting my own IP, is that this isn�t going to net Honeywell much at all.
I have not pulled the entire text of the patents, but the relatively young age and summaries for all of them look very problematic.
In the case of the autopilot, it�s clearly for aircraft. I am not a historian on auto pilot technology for boats, but quite possibly the autopilot capability in our boats pre-dates this patent making it a pointless. Is this just sloppy or attempting to add weight to some other weak patent in this mix? Also boat autopilots that I am aware of don�t technically use GPS to pilot unless thru integration with a chartplotter and even then they certainly can�t be described as functioning as follows �Maneuvers which were initiated and completed by the pilot during the rehearsal mission are then repeated during the automatic flight from the flight information stored in the memory.�
The above is an example of a patent Garmin may already have encountered with Honeywell, given the aircraft side of their business, and if so has already dealt with it either as a nuisance or by paying royalties if it is legitimate. Many of the other patents, based again on the summaries, are either aircraft or automobile related, and Garmin again would probably be already past this.
In the case of true north patent, is this a joke? GPS adds something incrementally, but otherwise other technologies have established true north utilizing inertial sensor systems since world war II. Not to mention, the products I am familiar with don’t use inertial sensor systems but rather flux gate to show heading, and when the GPS Course over ground (COG) value is shown for a boat that is not moving, it isn’t corrected by that flux gate value anyhow. Now that I see this patent, I wonder if that correction wasn’t done because the designers of charplotters are aware of this patent and so didn’t add the functionality to correct the COG with SOG=0? Even then, isn�t the use of another heading source to correct a GPS COG value an obvious thing to do as opposed to a new work of art?
Lets just say for the moment the body of the patent I didn’t read covers all the bases, then what about all those iPhone�s out there that can determine true north, how much is Honeywell getting in royalties there? What would be a reasonable royalty per unit expectation for what Navaco, Raymarine, and Furuno should then pay? For that matter, why isn’t this suit aimed at Apple? Apple actually has an interial sensor in their latest iPhone and a volume of product that dwarfs the marine industry.
I could go on, but I think I made the point. It would be interesting if a Panbo reader in the industry could answer these questions:
– This can�t be the first time these companies have been harassed by patent holders. What has been the result of similar patent cases when aircraft patents are attempted to be applied in the marine environment? Or how about patents over how GPS and other technologies are incrementally applied to old technologies ?
– How much money is at stake? Any royalties can only be applied to that portion of the product revenue Navico, Raymarine, and Furuno derive from the technology. On the surface these patents would seem to amount to 0.01% or less of the revenue of their product line. Even if they had to pay a 5% fee on the use of the technologies, the final numbers are really small (0.0005% of revenue or less).
On the surface this seems more of an April�s Fools Joke than a nasty Christmas present. So instead of Ho Ho Ho for Honeywell, I am thinking Ha Ha Ha.

Labozza says:

We’re forgetting about the impending sale of Raymarine, and the news that Garmin is no longer in the running. Remember, that unholy marriage would have been catastrophic. That includes both companies involved, as well as the consumer and end user. We saw what happened when Navico consolidated, no need to even go there. This means that whoever purchases the company will stick with what Raymarine knows, which is making product the way they’ve been doing since the Raytheon days. The prospect of a Garmin takeover would have given that conglomeration an instant 60% market share, and not being a fan of Olathe’s corn fed machinery, I can now swallow my vomit and breathe easy now that both said entities will continue to be independent competitors which will in turn promote the introduction of better technology to the market end of run on sentence.

George says:

I am really sick of patent lawsuits — they are one of the biggest wastes of time and money in our modern civilization.
Years ago I started work at a new computer company. One of my jobs involved working with code that was modified daily by a large(ish) number of programmers. It never compiled without major effort since one of the programmers was guarenteed to have broken something. That was frustrating so I came up with a way of splitting up the programmer’s work so if one person’s code failed you could work with their previous day’s output.
It was a pretty obvious computer science solution to the problem and took me about two nights to implement. There was even a feature in the operating system designed to do exactly this sort of thing, and what I was implementing was pretty similiar to how we had done it at my previous company. No big deal and I forgot about what I had done.
Years later one of those programmers won a patent for our company. The title of the patent was fancy but it was basically what I had done years ago. By then a manager, it fell upon me to review the patent documents. Inside the packet sent off to the patent office was the heart of the code to prove the patent. It looked extremely familiar! In fact the coding style was a bit of a “blast from the past” since it was in a style that I had once had to go to great effort to unlearn.
So it ended up that my company now held a patent on an idea that was blindingly obvious to any competent programmer, and an implementation that had taken me at most two days to write. (Most real work that I do takes months or years.)
I read the patents too and can’t add much to Arnie’s excellent analysis except to note that it seems as if Honeywell is trying to assert that they own a patent on as basic an idea as using an external device to correct a GPS heading. I suppose if you check your GPS course with a magnetic compass mounted on your dash you will have to pay Honeywell a small, reasonable fee.
Perhaps some legal drone in Honewell has a quota to meet.

Russ says:

Peter – If you’re buying an integrated system (radar / plotter), evaluate the charts available today (not the charts promised to be available very soon…) first and foremost. And consider the charts in all the areas in which you might operate in the next three years. If the charts are lousy, the rest of the system is irrelevant.

RK says:

Honeywell’s “Learning Autopilot” patent in 1998 is a joke!!!!
I worked on Anshuetz Adaptive Autopilots that were installed on Oil Tankers in the early 1980s…
Furuno also had their “Advanced Auto”, Simrad copied it and calls it “No Drift”, mode on the FAP330/300 series in the early 1990s before the Honeywell patent as well. This is a GPS Line Of Position correction mode.
The claims are all total BS and will be dismissed after the Honeywell Scumsucker Attorneys try to extract as much blood as possible from our cottage industry.
RK

Anonymous says:

Dam should have bought some when they were 2p!
I can only assume they have had someone value the business and is offering that amount for it.