Fort Wayne, Indiana, August 15, 2008 — GW Micro, Inc., a Fort Wayne, Indiana-based company dedicated to providing high quality adaptive technology solutions for blind and visually impaired individuals, announced today that it has received notice of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Freedom Scientific, Inc., the self-described “world leader in technology-based solutions for people with visual impairments.” The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court, Middle District of Florida, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,993,707 for a “Document Placemarker.” GW Micro has reviewed the claim and believes it is overreaching and not consistent with what Freedom Scientific told the Patent Office when obtaining its patent. GW Micro intends to defend itself vigorously and expects to prevail in court. “As many of our users know, our screen reader — Window-Eyes — has had the capability of returning to a specific line within a webpage since version 3.1, which was released over nine years ago, well before Freedom Scientific’s alleged invention,” said Dan Weirich, GW Micro’s Corporate President. Weirich went on to note that, “The implication in a recent Freedom Scientific press release that GW Micro is ‘benefiting from [Freedom Scientific’s] investment at no charge’ is simply not accurate nor in line with GW Micro’s tradition of success and fair play.” Finally, Weirich concluded, “We will aggressively defend both our legal position and our place in the assistive technology community.”
Daniel R. Weirich
GW Micro, Inc.
725 Airport North Office Park
Fort Wayne, IN 46825
ph 260-489-3671
www.gwmicro.com
I am a JAWS user, but must completely agree with GW’s response. JAWS’ place marker feature is simply a way to easily get to specific lines on specific web pages — nothing more nothing less. I have found that this feature as implemented in JAWS is of little practical application because web pages tend to change every time you load them so the content that you want is not always on the same line every time. From what I have read about the Window-eyes place marker feature, they really have done it the right way by allowing a text string to be specified. I wish JAWS would implement such a feature.
I agree with what the previous commenter said, and in addition, I am glad that GW has done everything to be able to make the official statement concerning what everyone, including Freedom Scientific, have known from the beginning has been true about this case! I am among those who believe these junk law suits that Freedom throws around just because they have the money to do it and they are afraid of their competition is nothing short of criminal behavior! I hope GW is able to counter with a law suit for the undue harrassment and unfair practices of Freedom in the industry. If Freedom’s only objective is to grab as much money as they can, whatever they have to do to get it, what are they doing in this industry! They prove no matter what they say that they are dishonest and that they are only interested in money whatever it takes to get it. There are plenty of other industries out there where there is more money to be made. Ridding ourselves of their unfair practices would gain far more than we would lose from what JAWS contributes. It is like having an employee that does valuable work for you all day long, but grabs money from the register every day on the way out that doesn’t belong to them! How long would they be considered of value to your business “for what they contribute”?
Howdy Accessibility Comrades!
I am quite puzzled by this lawsuit. Wafra rarely engaged in this behavior before purchasing Freedom Scientific, and my guess is that this is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. I’m reminded of the song by Janice Joplin that goes” Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose!”
Regards,
Chairman Mal
Power to the Peeps!
I find this puzzling that some other company would sue one of it’s competitors when gwmicro had a fairly good head start over freedom scientific. I’ve been a window eyes user since 2000, and gwmicro has done a wonderful job making the windows environment easy to use right out of the box! If Freedom Scientific just wants to make money, then why aren’t they just selling their products period! If I had to rate gwmicro on a scale from 0 to 10, I’d give them a 10 period! On the other hand, I’d give Freedom Scientific a 0 because of all this junk!