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In the latest in what seems an unstoppable march, DataTreasury Corp. settled its outstanding patent infringement litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas with NCR Corp., paying DataTreasury a fee and agreeing to license the Melville, L.I. company’s check imaging technology. DataTreasury said NCR had been infringing on DataTreasury’s patent rights. It’s the latest in a series of settlements stemming from a number of similar suits that DataTreasury filed in 2002.
DataTreasury, which has already settled its litigation against JP Morgan Chase & Co., Ingenico Group, and other firms that it says also infringed on its patent rights, is still suing several other big financial services firms-- including First Data Corp., Citigroup, SVPCO and Bank of America, among others—on the same grounds.
The case began in 1998, when DataTreasury founder Claudio Ballard approached what was still known as Chase Manhattan with his idea for imaging and exchanging checks electronically (see Electronic Payments Week, July 12, 2005).
Ballard and Chase executives had several meetings, but discussions went nowhere. Chase later got deeply involved in check imaging, and when Ballard couldn’t cut a deal with Chase, he sued in Texarkana federal court in 2002. Ballard’s settled with Morgan Chase last July. He had settled with Zions Bancorp a month earlier.
The likelihood that any of these financial giants will ever buy anything else from DataTreasury is pretty low, considering how delighted they must be to find themselves losing a case like this in what their high-powered attorneys must regard as a legal backwater; at a minimum, they must be finding fault with most of the local restaurants. But that’s probably of little moment to Ballard, who can look forward to a lifetime supply of royalty checks.
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