OmniPage Maker Nuance Loses Patent Trial Over OCR Tech 56
rtobyr writes "The Recorder is reporting that Nuance and partner Mofo (law firm Morrison Foerster) have lost a suit over patent infringement involving Optical Character Recognition against Russian competitor ABBYY Software House: 'Nuance had accused ABBYY Software House of infringing three of its patents and mirroring its packaging. Both companies market software that uses optical character recognition technology, or OCR, to convert scanned images of text so they can be searched and edited digitally. Represented by a team of lawyers from Morrison & Foerster and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Nuance argued that ABBYY's FineReader was little more than a copy of its signature product OmniPage. The Burlington, Mass.-based company also sued Lexmark International Inc. for its use of ABBYY's products and sought more than $100 million in total damages from the two companies. Nuance did not prevail on any claims in Nuance Communications v. ABBYY Software House, 08-0912. MoFo partner Michael Jacobs, who is co-lead counsel for Nuance with fellow MoFo partner James Bennett, declined to comment.'" Update: 08/27 18:43 GMT by T : Sorry for the paywalled link; here's a better one. Update: 08/28 16:02 GMT by T : rtobyr adds: “Sorry about the paywalled link. They must have paywalled it after I submitted the story. It was not paywalled at the time of submission.”
Re:All OCR vendors are BATSHITE INSANE (Score:4, Interesting)
I've used OmniPage ... many many years ago, and their OCR engine wasn't bad back in the day - but couldn't comment nowadays.
It used to be a great seller back in the early 90's when I was working Mac tech support. The odd thing is, I tried it out a few years ago (c. 2008) on a modern Windows machine and it seemed to be just as accurate as when I used it on an SE/30 in '93.
Omnipage is a decent product (Score:5, Interesting)
The software used to be highly rated but fell in popularity over the years.
I use Omnipage almost daily, mostly for the batch document processing and it's the best OCR software I've run across. (If you know of something better I'd love to hear about it) I use it to batch process work instructions and manufacturing orders so that I can search for them more easily. All I have to do is put a pdf (or other file) in a particular folder and it takes care of the rest. It really does a surprisingly good job of it.
Re:Omnipage is a decent product (Score:3, Interesting)