Pay Up! HP Loses Against Intergraph in Germany

After Intergraph won law suits against Intel for using Intergraph's CPU technology without compensataion, Intergraph filed similar suits against other hardware vendors, such as Dell, TI, AMD, and Gateway. Most settled; HP did not.

Instead, HP decided to launch a series of countersuits in the USA and Germany, claiming Intergraph software infringed on HP's patents, some of which related to CAD.

(It's a puzzle, because HP no longer has any CAD software. It had developed its 2D ME10 and 3D ME30 packages in-house, but years ago it spun off its Germany-based CoCreate CAD software division as an independent corporation. Here's another puzzle: CoCreate claims to own many patents, but searches of European and American patent offices shows that HP is still the owner. It was non-CAD-software-owner HP bringing the lawsuit, not CAD-software-owner CoCreate. Perhaps one reason was that HP has deeper pockets, and could survive the expensive law suit process better than could CoCreate.)

Now word comes that HP has lost in Germany.The court in Manheim dismissed HP's claims against Intergraph on January 7, and charged all court costs to the plaintif (HP).

This patent involved "automated relayout method with dimensional associativity". I won't go into the details of the patent claims; they can be read at www.intergraph.com/ip. But here is why the German court turned down HP's claim:

In HP's patent, the 2D representations of 3D models are stored when the 3D model is changed; in Intergraph's SmartPlant software, the 2D representations are erased, and regenerated after the 3D model is changed. The court asked HP to prove that Intergraph's explanation was incorrect; HP failed to do so.

An amusing note on page 18 of the court's decision: "On the other hand, Plaintiff [HP] argued that a recall from memory of the stored 2D geometry must happen because there were [sic] no other way to detect which parts of the geometry had changed. The court is not able to follow this thought."

In the USA, the HP v Intergraph law suits continue, portaions of which includes the same patents as in Germany.

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