Cornell University Sues Hewlett Packard

bmc writes: "Haven't seen this on any of the big news sites, but the local paper is reporting that Cornell is suing HP for patent infringement. The alleged infringement covers HP processors manufactured from 1995 to the present. How common is it for big universities to get involved in lawsuits like this?"

Comments

Hmmm....

[NiftyNews]

The big question is: was student code involved? :)

heh

[Zephy]

IMHO, Academic institutions shouldn't get themselves involved in cases like these. If they lose then the students will end up paying the price with higher fees/less equipment. I hope they've got a strong case

Re:heh

[Speare]

So your[sic] saying that acdemic[sic] institutions shouldn't have any way of protecting their IP. Any hard work put in by the people there, the money donated by the institution, businesses and grants should count for nothing if a "company" wants to use the idea.

Yes, and especially for state-funded schools. It's not just one company who should benefit either, but any and all companies who want to benefit from the ideas generated through university research.

Salon has an article on just this sort of thing, where schools are turning their research into Big Business instead of Big Teaching.

My favorite quote: Larry Smarr, a professor of computer science at U.C. San Diego, said, "I don't think universities should be in the moneymaking business. They ought to be in the changing-the-world business, and open source is a great vehicle for changing the world."

The alumni donate money to the school, not to maximize their investment in profits, but to maximize the impact of learning and teaching. Pure Research is not Applied Research. Pure Research is setting out a roadmap where none existed before, and what good is a roadmap if the society which paid for it cannot use it?

Re:Raising Money

[aka-ed]

According to the article, Professor H.C. Torng, who taught at Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1960 to 1999, spent most of his career working on the concept. That means over twenty years. If you don't think usurping a guy's life work results in "damages," perhaps you should try to grow a soul. Then there's Cornell's expenses for underwriting his research, I think Cornell Profs are paid rather well. The value of an unenforced patent is zero, while an enforced one very well can be worth $100 million.

"Damages" doesn't necessarily mean Cornell lost funding in a visible manner, just that they lost value in the particular patent.

As for what they need to prove, they don't need to prove the patent was taken (as in a copyright case), only that it was violated, and that can be demonstrated from the code.

Re:this is gonna be fun

[yfarren]

OK, People, if you are going to talk about IP law, PLEASE LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT IT. NO, HP can't "claim that the work was done independently at HP research and this is a coincidence". Cornell is saying they have a patent on something. If I have a patent on something, YOU CANT DO IT. A patent is a limited government sponsored monopoly. I get a patent, EVEN IF YOU COME UP WITH THE SAME THING ON YOUR OWN, YOU CANT DO IT. This is to encourage people to publish their work early. Incidentally, if no-one else makes coffee the way you make it, or no-one else sets up their computer the way you do, OR if some other people do, but it is a big secret, then go ahead. Although you just screwed yourself by publicly disclosing what you do. Whoever modded this post up clearly knows as little about IP law as whoever posted it. Please people, dont Mod something you dont know anything about, and dont post anything you similarly know nothing about.

Not totally unprecedented

[ambclams]

How common is it for big universities to get involved in lawsuits like this?

Well, I don't know that I would necessarily say that large lawsuits like this one are common, but most research universities frequently patent their findings, and selling the licensing rights to corporations can be a not-insignificant source of revenue for them. So they've got a pretty serious incentive to enforce these patents.

Offhand, I can think of one instance of this happening. You may recall that back in August MIT filed a lawsuit against Sony for infringing on patents related to digital TV. It was also covered on slashdot, too.

That's the only other specific case that comes to mind at the moment, but I certainly have heard of others. Of course, I'm sure there are many other examples on a much smaller scale that don't get widely reported. And there are undoubtedly many cases that lead to a quiet settlement in which the corporations in question just pay the licensing fees -- which is, after all, presumably what the universities are after in the first place.

Though it's common practice for universities to patent their research, there's plenty of controversy involved, even neglecting the question of whether IP is a valid concept in general. For example, the students involved in actually doing the research usually don't wind up with more than a small fraction of the patent rights, if any at all. And then there's the issue of what kind of rights corporate sponsors get to the research; if the research is funded through government grants, then one also has to ask the question of whether the research then belongs to the taxpayers who are funding it. I see that other posts above have discussed these issues, and they've been discussed extensively here before, too.

Lawsuits like this may be rarely seen with such magnitude and scope -- though I'm sure the $100 million figure the article mentions is just inflated legal hyperbole -- but it's hardly something totally new and unexpected.

It doesn't matter if HP didn't know

[Cardinal Biggles]

Um, one thing that several posters here seem to misunderstand is that using a technique that is patented is an infringement, regardless of whether you knew about it.

A patent holder can block the use of a technology for 20 years, period. It's not like copyright protection where you can reverse engineer the functionality, because the function itself is monopolized and not just one single implementation of it.

That, by the way, is partly why allowing patents on software is such a big mistake.

No, more like grads snubbed when applying

[ackthpt]

With the growing shortsighted climate of University I.P. I can see HR departments (where your resume is first sent for screening) start keeping a checklist of universities which might sue over I.P. inadvertently employed. i.e. students discuss a technique with peers, like prof. Tong, then head out into the workforce like a carrier of a disease.

"Ah, went to Cornell, nope, can't hire them, we might get sued it they actually contribute to our product design."

So, where do they get students?

"Hello, Beijing University?"

Re:More lawsuits, Target: Microsoft

[Lonath]

I don't like MS business practices, but it's never good to see MS getting sued over software patents. Every time they get sued, lose or win, software patents become more entrenched. You can't legally code a nontrivial project without violating at least a few software patents, so why would you support actions that help make coding illegal for anyone outside of a giant corporation? Basically software patents are a way of blackmailing MS. Since those patents can be used to blackmail and destroy smaller projects such as OS/FS projects, I can't support those tactics used to attack MS.

So, I would ask that people never ever support MS getting sued over software patents. The only reason you're not in their position is that you aren't worth the trouble. But you could be. Remember that.

Yes, this is how it works

[dilute]

There is nothing in the slightest way unusual about this development.

Patent royalties are an important source of funding for universities with strong technological departments. The faculty people who are the inventors on the patents also get to participate very nicely in the revenue stream attributable to their patents. It is a good deal for them.
Universities license these patents all over the place, and sue when they have to in order to enforce them, such as where companies that need licenses (because they are practicing the patented technology) don't want to pay for them.

Stanford has been involved in quite a few of these suits, especially in the biotech area, where the patents are worth a lot because it's necessary to practice them in order to make a important drugs. There are plenty of other examples, including some computer-related ones, such as in the area of video compression.

We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties annually, which means a lot to these institutions. As a method of funding technological research, I think this system has a lot going for it.

A shift in the balance of power...

[mcrbids]

OK, So a university professor comes out with [neat idea], and patents it.

He then casually mentions [neat idea] to students... and they learn it, as they are PAYING to do!

Does that mean now that the University OWNS everything that the student can ever do with [neat idea]?

This violates the very founding principle of College education!

I just cannot see how this is right. University money should not be used for this kind of thing!