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Health & Fitness

A Patent Troll, Coming to A Business Near You

I stopped in on a photographer friend the other day. In New England, this is considered the slow season for most photographers. During this season, we tend to let our desk pile up with notes, ideas and thoughts about the many things that may be coming down the pike. Upon entering his office, I couldn’t help but notice his desk was spotless, not a scrap of paper or any random photographs were scattered about. Knowing my own desk on any given day, I was taken aback.  After a brief conversation, I found out that his business was teetering on survival. He was being sued. 

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He was cleaning his desk because later in the day, a reporter from a local news station was coming to interview him. He was getting ready to put his best foot forward to show people that his business was the real deal, one that works with integrity as its pillar. His name is Michael Skelps, owner of Capstone Photography, located here in Middlefield, CT.  He is being sued by a patent holder who lives out in California. Michael’s business is different from mine. While I’ll work with a single client for hours, he’ll photograph up to thousand clients in an hour. If you enjoy running, you may recognize Michael or his crew from Capstone capturing the runners as they pass vantage points throughout a race course. There’s a ton of data and much organizing to be done before a cent is even earned by selling photos to the runners. Like many other sport photography companies,  they discovered intuitively, that the only way to identify subjects of their photos was through the race numbers pinned on their shirts. Michael went to work on a figuring a way to identify each runner through a computer model. Was it rocket science? No, but he still  had to figure it out on his own, creating a business model that could work.  The identification program was probably similar to what many of us consider a spread sheet program with searchable fields. He would set up a successful business traveling through out the country, photographing races. The job never promised success, because to become profitable, a certain number of athletes have to purchase photos. But the company slowly grew.   Years later, while celebrating the ringing in of the new year, he was served papers for patent violation. 

These were the three patents that had Capstone under fire:

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