The security industry is no stranger to patent litigation, especially when it comes to video surveillance. However, a ruling by a federal appeals court earlier this month could have an impact on the biometrics market and specifically on foreign manufacturers looking to import fingerprint scanners into the U.S.

In 2010, Cross Match Technologies, a Florida-based manufacturer of biometric solutions, filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission alleging that South Korea-based manufacturer Suprema, Inc. and its reseller Mentalix, Inc. of Plano, Texas, had infringed upon three of the company’s patents. According to Kathryn Hutton, senior vice president and general counsel for Cross Match, these patents include: U.S. Patent No. 5,900,993 (“the ’993 patent”), which is a hardware patent that pertains to the optical configuration of their scanners, which use a series of lenses to generate the image on a fingerprint. The other two, U.S. Patent No. 7,203,344 (“the ’344 patent”) and U.S. Patent No. 7,277,562 (“the ’562 patent”) are software method patents that tell a user when a fingerprint image is good enough to be captured and processed.

Hutton said this case started near the end of 2009 when the U.S. General Services Administration was looking into purchasing several hundred fingerprint scanners for the Census Bureau in an effort to check the backgrounds of the incoming plethora of census workers. Mentalix was eventually awarded the bid, but to the surprise of Cross Match, they were not going to be using their hardware. […]