Just over a year ago, we reported on a lawsuit filed by Nikon against Zeiss and ASML. They accused the two companies of using Nikon’s patented lithography tech without permission or licenses. Now, a court has ruled that Zeiss and ASML did not infringe upon Nikon’s patent, and has ordered Nikon to pay €475,000 in court fees.
ED reports that the court in The Hague which deals intellectual property has ruled that neither ASML nor Zeiss have violated any Nikon patents. ASML and Zeiss presented older patents of their own on which their products are based. As a result, not only did the court find that they hadn’t broken Nikon’s patent, but that Nikon’s patent wasn’t even valid. The court annulled Nikon’s patent and all claims.
Nikon says that they disagre with the ruling of the court, and that they will “appeal the decision and continue to pursue fair competition through the enforcement of its intellectual property rights in all legal proceedings it has filed against ASML and Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH in the Netherlands, Germany and Japan” (Google translated).
So, while this battle may have been lost by Nikon, it seems that the war wages on.
More information on the ruling can be found here.
[via Nikon Rumors]
