U.S. Court Finds WesternGeco Patents Valid
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently affirmed the 2014 judgment that ION Geophysical Corp. infringed four seminal WesternGeco LLP patents covering streamer steering technology for marine seismic surveys, and that WesternGeco is the rightful owner of the pioneering technology. In 2009, WesternGeco filed suit for patent infringement against ION's DigiFIN streamer steering system in U.S. federal court in Houston, Texas. ION was found to infringe one patent on summary judgment, and a 2012 jury found that ION infringed three more WesternGeco patents and rejected all of ION's invalidity arguments. The trial court affirmed the jury's verdict, awarded WesternGeco supplemental damages and permanently enjoined ION from continuing to infringe with the DigiFIN system.
StatoilHydro Awards Seismic Contracts
The contracts, covering surveys on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, the Faroes and , has been awarded to PGS Geophysical, CGG Veritas and Wavefield Inseis. The award to PGS Geophysical also includes use of new technology for three dimentional surveys. This technology makes the seismic operations less dependent on benign weather and improves the production of seismic data. StatoilHydro will also pioneer the use of an alternative streamer steering technology. This will facilitate the shooting of seismic to be compared with former seismic surveys and thus provide more reliable results for four-dimentional studies. Four vessels from PGS Geophysical…
