Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Company Press Release

SOURCE: GEOSPAN Corporate Offices

PATENT OFFICE GRANTS GEOSPAN’S REQUEST FOR REEXAMINATION OF PICTOMETRY’S PATENT

Minneapolis, MN (PRWEB) March 5, 2009 - GEOSPAN Corporation announced today that the U.S Patent Office has granted Geospan’s request for reexamination of Pictometry’s U.S. Patent Number 7,424,133, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Capturing, Geolocating and Measuring Oblique Images.”

In its request to the Patent Office, GEOSPAN submitted prior art that was not considered by the Patent Office when it examined the application that led to Pictometry’s patent. The Patent Office agreed that the prior art submitted by GEOSPAN warranted reexamination of several claims in the patent, and it subsequently issued a Non-Final Office Action rejecting those claims as unpatentable.

GEOSPAN’s patent infringement lawsuit against Pictometry International Corporation of Rochester, NY remains ongoing and is still on track for an early 2010 trial date. The lawsuit, filed in March 2008 in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, alleges that Pictometry has infringed and is continuing to infringe GEOSPAN’s U.S. Patent No. 5,633,946, which issued in 1997 and is entitled, “ Method and Apparatus for Collecting and Processing Visual and Spatial Position Information from a Moving Platform.”

For further information please visit http://www.geospan.com/   or call Ted Lachinski at 1-800-GEOSPAN. 

GEOSPAN® is the provider of spatially accurate GEOVISTA® Multi-Angle Imagery™ and GEOVISTA® 3D Spatial Imagery™ products. GEOSPAN’s patented technology offers fully integrated high-resolution 360ş oblique aerial and street-level GEOVISTA® imagery. GEOVISTA® panoramic imagery solutions support a variety of state and local government GIS applications including E9-1-1, emergency management, homeland security, law enforcement, planning, property assessing, infrastructure inventory, pavement analysis, and transportation. GEOVISTA® solutions also serve a variety of private sector markets including real estate buying and selling, visual mapping, insurance, mortgage lending and micro marketing. 
  

Download U.S. Patent Office Non-final Office Action

Despite recent public statements to the contrary made by Pictometry International Corp., the U.S. Patent Office has not "upheld the validity" of several claims in its U.S. Patent No. 7,424,133. Each and every patent claim that was the subject of a reexamination request filed by Geospan Corp. on November 11, 2008 has been rejected as invalid over the prior art in a Non-Final Office Action issued by the U.S. Patent Office on February 2, 2009.