In re Cole Patent Litigation
| Decision Date | 12 January 1983 |
| Docket Number | MDL No. 401. Civ. A. No. 78-198,79-243 and 79-491. |
| Parties | In re COLE PATENT LITIGATION. RCA CORPORATION, Plaintiff, v. APPLIED DIGITAL DATA SYSTEMS, INC., Defendant. RCA CORPORATION, Plaintiff, v. HAZELTINE CORPORATION, Defendant. LEAR SIEGLER, INC., Plaintiff, v. RCA CORPORATION, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Delaware |
Rodney M. Layton, William J. Wade, Richards, Layton & Finger, Wilmington, Del., John Farley, William J. Gilbreth, Robert C. Morgan, Thomas L. Giannetti, Norman H. Beamer, Richard A. Inz, Fish & Neave, New York City, George P. Williams, III, James A. Drobile, Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis, Philadelphia, Pa., A. Russinoff, Princeton, N.J., for RCA Corp.
James L. Holzman, Richard I.G. Jones, Prickett, Jones, Elliott, Kristol & Schnee, Wilmington, Del., Edwin L. Hartz, Leo J. Young, Christie, Parker & Hale, Pasadena, Cal., Stephen D. Natcher, Santa Monica, Cal., Charles W. Bradley, Steven D. Glazer, Davis, Hoxie, Faithfull & Hapgood, New York City, J.T. Cavender, Dayton, Ohio, for Lear Siegler, Inc. and Applied Digital Data Systems, Inc.
Daniel F. Wolcott, Jr., Potter, Anderson & Corroon, Wilmington, Del., Dana M. Raymond, James J. Maune, Brumbaugh, Graves, Donohue & Raymond, New York City, for Hazeltine Corp.
In these consolidated actions, RCA charges Hazeltine, Lear Siegler and ADDS1 (collectively "HLA") with willful and deliberate infringement of the Cole, et al U.S. Patent No. 3,345,458 ("the Cole patent"). There is no dispute that RCA owns the Cole patent, including the right to recover for past infringement, and there is no dispute as to subject matter jurisdiction, personal jurisdiction or venue. This opinion constitutes the Court's findings of fact and conclusions of law following trial of the issues of validity, unenforceability and infringement.
The Cole patent issued October 3, 1967, on an application filed October 16, 1963. Its specifications describe a system for decoding digital computer symbol codes representing a message and directly converting them into digital video control signals. These video signals are then used to turn an electron beam on and off to display the message as the beam scans a television raster scan pattern on the cathode ray tube ("CRT") of a standard television set.
In order to understand the Cole patent, it is necessary preliminarily to have an understanding of the formation of a picture on the CRT of a television set. A picture is formed by an electron beam which illuminates various points on the phosphor coating of the screen as it scans the area in which the image is to be displayed. Normally, the beam scans across one horizontal line at a time, starting at the top of the screen and moving sequentially down the screen to the bottom. This pattern of scan in which the beam proceeds across the entire width of the visible CRT screen before scanning a second horizontal line is referred to as a television raster scan pattern. By using a digital video control signal to appropriately control the points at which the beam illuminates the screen during its scan, the beam can be used to form a recognizable message or image. Because of its speed, the beam's movement is not detectable to the eye.
The Cole specifications suggest that each character of the message can be represented by the dots in a rectangular dot matrix having fixed dimensions (e.g., 5 dots wide by 7 scan lines high). A character is displayed on the television screen within a character space which includes the dot matrix of the character and additional blank space to separate the characters on the screen (e.g., 8 dots wide by 8 scan lines high). Two such adjacent character spaces are shown in Figure 4 of the Cole patent reproduced below.
As the beam tracing the television raster moves across the screen in a scan line, the computer codes for each of the characters to be written in a row across the screen are sequentially provided from a memory to a decoder or "character generator". As shown in the figure below, a simplified portion of Cole patent Figure 1, timing and control circuitry produce count signals which represent the scan line of the raster and the dot positions along the scan line. The character-code information, the scanline count signal, and the dot position count signal are applied to the character generator, labeled "Digital-To-Video Generator," which converts these signals into a two-level, serial digital output. This output is applied to the television monitor circuitry as a video signal.2 One digital level of the signal corresponds to a dot and turns on the electron beam to write a dot on the television screen. The other digital level corresponds to the absence of a dot, and leaves the electron beam turned off so that no dot is written. The dots thus produced as the electron beam moves along a scan line correspond to the dots in the appropriate horizontal slice of each of the characters to be displayed in the character row. Thus, in Figure 4 above, dots 103 through 105 (for the character "A") and dots 106 through 109 (for the character "B") will be illuminated sequentially as the electron beam moves along the top scan line.
The timing and control circuitry also provide horizontal and vertical drive pulses to the monitor to synchronize the scanning motion of the beam with the video signal generated as described above.
After completing one scan line, the electron beam flies back to the starting side of the screen, and down one position, to start the next scan line. The sequential application of character codes, scan line count and dot position counts is then repeated, this time generating the video signals for the next dot slice of each of the characters in the row.
After the appropriate number of scan lines (e.g., 8 in the 8 × 8 character space format) have been "written" onto the screen, a full row of characters is complete. The entire row has been written onto the screen, one scan line at a time, from top to bottom.
In a like manner, the additional rows of characters making up the message are written on the screen. After the entire screen has been scanned — a process taking 1/60th of a second—the procedure is repeated so as to "refresh" the screen and create a display which the human eye perceives as a persistent, non-flickering image.
The system described in the Cole specifications is said to provide an important advantage over most prior art devices because it can utilize a standard television receiver for the display without storing video signal output of the character generator. Most prior art systems write each character in its entirety on a CRT screen before going on to the next character to be displayed. The beam in these systems utilized what is referred to as a miniature (or "mini") raster scan pattern; the beam scanned horizontally back and forth through only one character space at a time, writing the first slice of a character, then the second of that character, then the third, etc. to completion of the character, before going on to the next character space. This had two disadvantages. First, special circuits were needed to cause the electron beam to deflect in this pattern. Second, if the ultimate display in such systems was to be on a standard television receiver, a "scan conversion" step had to be added in which the message, written in character-by-character order, was stored in some sort of memory and then read out an entire scan line at a time so as to be compatible with a beam scanning in a TV raster scan pattern.
The Cole system eliminated the need for special deflection circuitry and had no "intermediate storage" between the character generator and the CRT. Its character generator produced the video signal in a sequence and with timing compatible with a beam scanning in a TV raster scan pattern at the speed utilized by a standard television receiver. This "real time" or "on the fly" operation eliminated the need for an expensive intermediate memory for the video information.
In addition, RCA urged before the Patent Office, and here urges, that the system described in the Cole specifications with its digital approach to character generation represented a substantial improvement over those prior art devices which employed analog techniques. Analog character generators had problems of accuracy and component tolerances which resulted from variations in temperature, component age, background noise and other impairments inherent in analog systems. The entirely digital Cole system avoided these problems.
Claims 1 through 3 of the Cole patent, the claims in suit, claim the concept for a system and not the particular implementation provided in the specifications as an example. In particular, they claim:
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