US District Court Judge Philip Pro in Reno, Nev., denied three motions of the Lemelson Medical, Education and Research Foundation LP related to a lawsuit filed against it in September 1998 by Cognex Corp. of Natick, Mass. Cognex seeks to have the foundation's patents on machine vision technologies declared invalid and unenforceable.

Judge Pro rejected Lemelson's motions to dismiss the suit; to postpone the case pending the outcome of its two suits against Intel Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc. and other parties; and to transfer the case from Massachusetts to Phoenix. He also consolidated Cognex's suit with a similar one filed by seven manufacturers of bar-code scanning and printing equipment.