A PLAIN ENGLISH DESCRIPTION OF OUR CURRENT PATENT POSITION IN THE U.S.A. - PATENT ATTORNEY

The original UNITED STATES PATENT 6,418,004 - Titled: "A Safety System" - Dated 9/7/2002 - is concerned with a safety system for wood-chipping machines using PASSIVE SENSORS.

This Patent confers an exclusive right in the United States on the owners of the patent to import, manufacture, use or sell, offer to manufacture, use or sell or authorize others to do these things in relation to the wood-chipping machine as claimed.

Under the Doctrine of Equivalents, any competitor’s product will infringe the aforementioned claims if the competitor’s product does substantially the same functions in substantially the same way to accomplish the same result as the claimed invention, even though the competitor’s product does not encompass the literal language of the claims. This prevents competitors making insubstantial changes to the claimed invention to avoid infringement.

The second UNITED STATES PATENT 6853131 - Titled: "A MATERIAL PROCESSING MACHINE" - Dated: 8/2/2005 has a much wider application.

Claim 1 is directed to a MATERIAL PROCESSING MACHINE and therefore is not limited to wood-chipping machines.

• The machine has an operating region in which material is processed by one or more processing elements … motive means that drive the processing element(s) … and an access region through which material is passed to the operating region.
• The access region has one or more sensing coils … and control circuitry of the machine responds to a signal emitted by the sensing coil(s) … to control at least one aspect of the operation of the machine.
• The signal generated by the sensing coil(s) is generated when one or more PASSIVE SENSORS carried by a user of the machine is located in the access region of the machine.

Hence claim 1 of U.S.A. PATENT 6853131 covers a range of machines for processing materials.

• A user may carry the sensor(s) in any manner.
• The control circuitry controls at least one aspect of the operation of the machine … such as:

• Stopping the machine … or part thereof.
• Preventing the machine from starting.
• Blocking access to the operating region.
• Etc.

… As defined in the dependent claims. (See extract from our website indsafe.com below)

This US PATENT confers an exclusive right in the United States on the owners of the Patent to do the same acts as specified above in relation to the material processing machine as claimed.

U.S. PATENT 6,418,004 IS IN FORCE AND WILL REMAIN IN FORCE UNTIL 2 DECEMBER 2019.

U.S. PATENT 6853131 IS IN FORCE AND WILL REMAIN IN FORCE UNTIL 2 DECEMBER 2019.

The Patent Attorney adds the disclaimer that it cannot be guaranteed that a Court in the United States would reach the same interpretation of the aforementioned patent and patent application, in any proceedings relating thereto, as the writer's opinion.

This RF tag based technology basically creates a detection zone, to discriminate:

• Between what is allowed to proceed past a certain point e.g. selected materials to be processed (wood, metal, biological substance, etc.) or various objects in transit.
• And what is not e.g. a tagged human appendage, or other tagged objects and materials.
• Etc.

… Without a desired response being automatically generated.

This reponse may range from:

• Stopping the feed-system.
• To stopping the machine.
• To lockout of machine startup or automatic machine activation.
• To sounding of a warning klaxon.
• To initiating a different machine action.
• To recording and acting on the unique transmissions of active tags etc.

With regard to the last response … "recording and acting on the unique transmissions of ACTIVE SENSORS (TAGS)" … the use of ACTIVE TAGS confers an immense new range of potential applications on this technology. (See ACTIVE TAGS in Tag Technology under Technology in the Menu)

NB: A similar range of patents have been granted in AUSTRALIA.