Escort Inc. vs. Cobra Electronics Corporation

Over the past several months there has been quite a bit of debate regarding the enforcement of patents in the radar detector and laser jamming industry on RadarDetector.net

Wikipdedia states that the elements of patent infringement includes any party that manufactures, uses, sells, or offers for sale patented technology during the term of the patent and within the country that issued the patent, is considered to infringe the patent.

As the operator of RadarDetector.net, I have come under fire from radar detector enthusiasts for censoring messages relating to devices that I suspect violate patents and by manufactures for not censoring enough of these messages because they feel the messages themselves encourage the illegal importation and use of these products within the USA.

Today while searching the net for cases involving the speed countermeasure industry, I was surprised to find a recent filing by Escort Inc. against Cobra Electronics for patent infringement regarding Escort’s new 9500i radar detector.

In December of 2003, Escort Inc. filed patent number 6,670,905 (905 patent) for a GPS enabled radar detector that aids in the management of unrelated or otherwise unimportant sources (false alerts) and also maintains a list of the known stationary sources in nonvolatile memory. After the patent was grated to Escort, I would suspect that they used it in the development of their new 9500i radar detector.

I was aware of Escort’s patent and was one of the select few that had an opportunity to test and review the Escort 9500i’s before its release at the 2007 CES Show in Las Vegas. Therefore it was somewhat of a surprise to me (and several others in the radar detector industry) that several weeks prior to the CES show, Cobra Electronics issued a press release of having the first GPS enabled radar detector, the XRS R9G. 

It was then that I asked contacts that I had inside Escort if they had any comment about Cobra’s infringement on their patent. Then the official “off the record comment” was that they needed to look at Cobra’s new detector and their patent and let the attorney decide. After ten months of not hearing any follow-up I figured that the topic was dead, how wrong I was.

Today I located Escort’s complaint 1:07-cv-852 filed October 12, 2007 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio against Cobra Electronics alleging that Cobra had violated Escort’s  905 patent with Cobra’s manufacture and sale of the XRS R9G.

On November 11th, Cobra Electronics filed their response to the court disputing Escort’s claim of infringement and filed a counter claim against Escort alleging that Escort violated their “279 patent” entitled “Electronic Signal Detector with Mute Feature” in development of the 9500i.

As both sides are now locked in litigation, it is doubtful that I can get either an official or unofficial response from either side. So we will keep watch for any new legal briefs or filings in this court until the case settles.