Barco and Kanex Pro have settled their patent infringement dispute, which began in February of this year.
A Dutch court authorised Barco to seize KanexPro’s MyTurn Wireless Presentation System during ISE 2017 in Amsterdam. Barco subsequently filed a lawsuit against KanexPro in the patent court of The Hague, alleging that the product infringed on its intellectual property with respect to its ClickShare wireless presentation product range (ClickShare button pictured).
Under the newly announced agreement, KanexPro has agreed to cease the distribution and sale of MyTurn in Europe and the USA.
Kanex Pro had not responded to a request for comment when this story was published.
Last week, ahead of this announcement, Installation spoke to Lieven Bertier, ClickShare global marketing manager. He told us that Barco believed that the Kanex Pro product infringed functional aspects of one of Barco’s patents relating to ClickShare: this was identified in the Barco statement as European Patent EP 2756668, Electronic tool and methods for meetings. The statement also alleged infringement of Barco’s registered European Community Design registration number 001312101-0001, also relating to ClickShare.
Bertier emphasised that there was a lot of innovation within ClickShare: it was developed by an internal ‘incubator’ group within the company for a period of two to three years before the product was announced in April 2012. The company holds over 400 patents, and keeping an eye on the competition is an ongoing process, he said.
He went on to say that wePresent, which Barco acquired in 2013 with its purchase of AWIND, is now a Barco-branded product. He sees ClickShare and wePresent as two “distinct yet complementary” offerings. “We don’t want to get into a spec conversation about ClickShare – it’s an experience,” he said, referring to the product’s out-of-the-box plug-and-play functionality. wePresent, by contrast, offers more features but needs to be configured before use. “Most users want a subset of the available functions,” he added.
Earlier this year, Barco commissioned research into the ‘digital skills gap’ between generations in the workplace, as well as users’ difficulties with presentation technology.
