Patent Spat Leaves DJI Owing Textron $279M

GoPro had no real advantage in the drone world; they made/make a cheap, good-enough quality camera for a pretty selective use-case. As a layperson it would look significantly easier to catch up in the optics vs autonomous & semi-auto vehicle platform. GoPro's drone was never more than a toy.

GoPro was never a serious contender for the drone game as much as any other player like Sony/Olympus/Nikon/Canon etc.

DJI was already making a name for themselves in the camera industry with their gimbals. they moved their stabilization tech into drones (often to support gopro or third party camera attachments) and only realized later that they could easily cannibalize the camera makers

One explanation I've heard is that this specific court already hears so many patent cases, so they have a well oiled machine for getting them through which makes it a bit cheaper to litigate in this court. So the moment that is already there breeds more momentum.

In a nutshell, yes, the judges of the Texas federal district courts financially benefit from the volume of patent cases heard before them.

One of the Texas federal judges' sons was a patent litigator and the judge did not recuse himself from his son's cases. Another judge owns a hotel and restaurant near the courthouse, and litigants would eat there in an attempt to curry favor. A third judge worked for a patent firm before becoming a judge and refused to recuse himself from cases involving his former firm.

There's a reason that patent trolls favor these Texas judges, and it's not because they're competent at the law.

Awe I like hackaday, but I'll copy and paste it in here for you.

>>Patents are the murky waters where technical jargon and legalese meet, and in this vast grey area of interpretation, DJI now owes Textron $279M.

At issue in the case were two patents issued to Textron (#8,014,909 and #9,162,752) regarding aircraft control systems for relative positioning to other vehicles and automatic hovering. The jury found that Textron’s intellectual property (IP) had been infringed and that damages amounted to $279M. DJI asserts that Textron’s patents are not valid and will appeal the decision. Appeals in patent trials are handled by the Federal Circuit and can be kicked up to the US Supreme Court, so don’t expect a final decision in the case anytime soon.

We’re not lawyers, so we won’t comment on the merits of the case, but, while it was a jury trial, it was one of many cases decided in the court of Judge Alan Albright, who has been the focus of scrutiny despite efforts to assign fewer cases to his docket amid wider efforts to stymie venue shopping in patent cases. Despite these efforts, the Western District of Texas is such a popular venue for patent cases that Berkeley offers a CEU on going to trial in Waco.

If you’re curious about more IP shenanigans, checkout the Honda mass takedown, the legality of making something similar, or why E3D patents some of their work.

TLdr, DJI (a Chinese drone manufacturer) infringed on some airplane system stuff by Textron (an American military industrial complex conglomerate) to the tune of $279mm.

There may or may not be some industrial espionage and government wrangling going on behind the scenes.

The actual information is in the two referenced patents:

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US8014909B2/en

- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9162752B2/en

I've had a brief look at the prior art and summary of the first. It seems that the innovation is that sensors are put on the reference vehicle (the patent seems to be intended to the area of aircrafts and carriers), so that the position/speed are computed in a relative fashion.

It seems that at the time, attempts to solve this problem were based on other means external to the reference vehicle (e.g. cameras on the controlled vehicle).

I guess that the idea behind the patent is that at the time this was, for example, expensive or counterintuitive, but it doesn't seem anything really worthy IMO. I'm not an engineer though. Regardless, I think this should not deserve to be renewed for more than a few years, as in the timespan 2004-2024, technology has changed considerably, and this doesn't seem to me anything innovative anymore, even in the last ten years.

Is a company which makes billions in revenue from making and selling stuff a patent troll?