Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

On issues with ndas

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

In the Seagate/Convolve/MIT matter over hard drive technology, one has a court filing (affidavit of Paul Galloway) which suggests bad acts by Seagate:

**"According to Mr Galloway, Seagate widely disseminated Convolve's technology throughout Seagate's servo engineering community, but engineers like Mr Galloway, who were exposed to Convolve's technology, were not told that it was protected under an NDA."

**Galloway, who worked for Seagate until July as an engineer, also claimed that Seagate "withheld, if not destroyed, minutes of a server engineering group meetings used as a forum for disseminating Convolve's technology." [from ComputerWorld.

Also
http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/05/illusory-world-of-trade-secret.html

**Separately, on radio tomographic imaging:

Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is different and much less expensive than radar, in which radar or radio signals are bounced off targets and the returning echoes or reflections provide the target's location and speed. RTI instead measures "shadows" in radio waves created when they pass through a moving person or object.

RTI measures radio signal strengths on numerous paths as the radio waves pass through a person or other target. In that sense, it is quite similar to medical CT (computerized tomographic) scanning, which uses X-rays to make pictures of the human body, and seismic imaging, in which waves from earthquakes or explosions are used to look for oil, minerals and rock structures underground. In each method, measurements of the radio waves, X-rays or seismic waves are made along many different paths through the target, and those measurements are used to construct a computer image.

In their indoor, outdoor and through-the-wall experiments, Wilson and Patwari obtained radio signal strength measurements from all the transceivers - first when the rectangle was empty and then when a person walked through it. They developed math formulas and used them in a computer program to convert weaker or "attenuated" signals - which occur when someone creates "shadows" by walking through the radio signals - into a blob-like, bird's-eye-view image of that person walking.

keyword: Xandem Technology LLC in Salt Lake City

Full post as published by IPBiz on December 30, 2009 (boomark / email).