Lectra, the world leader in integrated technology solutions dedicated to industries using soft materials´fabrics, leather, technical textiles and composite materials´has announced that a German competitor´s machine was declared as infringing a Lectra´s patent protecting a solution for cutting one-piece-woven (OPW) airbags in Germany. The July 2015 final court ruling stated that the competitor´s OPWairbag-cutting machine makes use of Lectra patent EP 1 321 839´s inventive technical teaching, thus legally acknowledging that the machine infringes the patent. The Lectra patent describes an OPW-airbag-cutting machine as integrating three elements: a cut-on-the-fly cutting system for cutting patterns in sheet material; a vision system for locating on-the-fly landmarks in sheet material; and a control system that allows a pattern to be cut at the same time as the vision system locates the next landmark, while the sheet material continues to progress along the cutting table.
The German Federal High Court confirmed Lectra´s patent as valid in September 2014. The patent runs until December, 2022 and covers Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Spain, South Korea and the US.