On January 26, in one of the quieter rooms in Las Vegas, one of the biggest all-time win- ners in the patent game finally lost to the house. Jerome Lemelson was the high-rolling inventor, holding more than 590 U.S. patents, including claims for camcorders, fax machines, cassette players, bar code scanners, and automatic teller machines. His inventions were often so far ahead of their time that, in many cases, the technology required to build them did not yet exist. Nonetheless, by tenaciously pursuing his rights as an individual inventor he was rewarded for his technological foresight to the tune of more than $1.5 billion in licensing royalties. According to many people who knew him, a big part of Lemelson's success was that he filed patent applications that remained pending for decades, and delay worked to his advantage. It was the delay that caused the federal judge in Las Vegas to void several Lemelson patents involving machine vision this year. And it is the delay that has made it possible for Lemelson, now seven years dead, to have numerous applications still working their way through the patent system. Some of them date as far back as the 1950s, but they cover technologies that industry relies on today.
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