St. Clair Reaches Settlement with Pantech in Patent Litigation

Minneapolis (April 23, 2010) - St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, Inc. (St. Clair) announces that Pantech Co., Ltd. has agreed to take a license under St. Clair's digital camera patents.  The patents cover digital camera technology that is incorporated in many popular cameras, camcorders and camera phones to allow images to be saved in different file formats, such as JPEG and MPEG.

St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, Inc. is based in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. St. Clair is engaged in technology development and licensing.  St. Clair was an early investor in Personal Camera Computers, the company formed by the inventors to commercialize their patents and technology.  PCC's technology proved to be ahead of its time, and in 1995, St. Clair acquired the patents from PCC in return for sharing the net proceeds with PCC of royalties obtained from licensing the patents.

St. Clair has filed several lawsuits over the patents in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware.  In a suit filed against Sony, a jury ruled in February 2003 that Sony had infringed all of the asserted claims of the patents and awarded St. Clair $25 million.  Sony has since licensed the patents.  In October 2004, a jury awarded St. Clair $34.7 million after finding Canon Inc. infringed the patents.  Canon later settled the case for an undisclosed amount.  Later in October, a jury ruled that Fuji Photo Film Co., infringed the same patents. 

St. Clair's other licensees include Sony Corporation, Nikon Corporation, Olympus Optical Co., Ltd., Minolta Co., Ltd., Seiko Epson Corporation, Casio Computer Co., Ltd., Kyocera Corporation, Pentax Corporation,  Samsung Techwin Co., Ltd., Motorola, Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. The licensed patents are United States patents 5,138,459 (the "'459 patent"), 5,576,757 (the "'757 patent"), 6,094,219 (the "'219 patent"), 6,233,010 (the "'010 patent"), 6,323,899 (the "'899 patent"), and 6,496,222 (the "'222 patent"). 

St. Clair is represented by Ronald J. Schutz, Chair of the Intellectual Property Litigation Group at the national law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P., which, in 2009, was included on the National Law Journal's "The Midsize Hotlist" and described as "a powerful force in litigation" by Chambers USA.  In 2008, The National Law Journal named Mr. Schutz to its annual list of the nation's Top 10 Winning Attorneys.