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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?"
I was a student in one of Thorng's EE classes,
EE231.. and AFAIK.. He mentioned this in 1997,
when i took his class.
Thorng invented/pioneered OOOE ( out of order
execution)... He mentioned that he had found out about certain infrindgement by a company, when
a student of his came to visit him, and casually mentioned that they were using this in their processors.
Funny how the world goes... 'Tis a small world after all'
PS: Thorng is a brilliant man.. but IMHO.. he is
not such a great professor, at least for EE231
I think it is wonderful that Cornell is suing for damages in excess of 100 million based on the effort of one of it's professors that is no longer there.
At issue is a patent awarded in 1989 for a computer instruction processing technique created by Professor Emeritus H.C. Torng, who taught at Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1960 to 1999.
"Professor Torng devoted much of his professional life to developing this highly innovative approach to high-speed processing," he said in a statement. "We cannot stand by while Hewlett-Packard profits from Professor Torng's contributions in this field in violation of Cornell's patent."
Is the patent-owner at all involved, is he even still at Cornell?
Sounds like another case of the lawyers being the ones to truely benefit.
Very true, however, if he created it without intention of granting/giving the university sole rights, it still is his. I do not have access to the actual patent, so I will take claim for my ignorance. Like I said however, it does seem as though it should be an action taken by the professor, unless of course this was part of an E.C. assignment or some university funded research, in that case...
// TRiPTMiND \\
Things to note are:
Torng was named Intel's first Intel Academic Research Fellow. Not a big deal really. Cept maybe Intel has some back-door deals cooking or cooked with this patent.
This was patented in 1995...but the patent appears to cover every x86 CPU on the market.
The _Abstract is as follows:
"An instruction issuing mechanism for boosting throughput of processors with multiple functional units. A Dispatch Stack (DS) and a Precedence Count Memory (PCM) are employed which allow multiple instructions to be issued per machine cycle. Additionally, instructions do no have to be issued according to their order in the instruction stream, so that non-sequential instruction issuance occurs. In this system, multiple instruction issuance and non-sequential instruction issuance policies enhance the throughput of processors with multiple functional units."
Sounds like someone is trying to stave off future patent disputes...the like of which we have seen between Centaur/IDT and VIA...
Out of Order execution...
:-P
And yes, it's a patent that affects most cpu's
And the reason that it does? well, it's because
most cpu designers read his published works
( i think he published the findings in 89,
and the first intel cpu to use it was the pentium )
The patent appears to be valid in that Dr Torng while working for Cornell invented the technique for reordering instructions for multiple processing units. He did this in 1989 and assigned the IP rights to the university.
The university has been pursuing HP about licencing since HP came out with a processor using the algorithms/techniques he described.
Intel awarded Dr Torng a prize for advances in CPU design and acknowledged his leadership in this particular area.
Have Intel paid a licencing fee to Cornell? Intels latest processors also use this technique. If they have then HP will lose.
The original question still stands: How many universities pursue licencing patents like this? How much of the universities revenues come from this type of IP? Will this become the new standard for achademic success?
- AndrewN
What about the IBM 360/91 from the late 60's? It used Tomasulo ( register renaming) for out of order execution...
As for multiple issue processors, how about the AP-120B ( floating point processor ) from the early 1980's...
I'm sure the above satisfies prior art, unless Cornell has some exotic twist on the implementation that they have received the patent for.
I keep reading: "Why did they wait 7 years?" "Why do they need to get x amount of dollars for this?"
Did you stop to think about it? I'm going to play the devils advocate here and propose a different scenario.. It's already been stated that the university was talking to HP prior to this lawsuit. Maybe your forgetting how long and drawn out legal processes can be. Specially considering the position of a company knowing it uses patented technology illegally.
Also, we don't even know how long they waiting. You all assume that because the lawsuit claims damages from 95 that they've known since then. Who says they didn't find out about all of this until later, as indicated by another poster previous to this one? I'd say if they found out in 1997 and began contact with HP to fix the situation that a few years of talking with them before running to the courts to solve the problem doesn't sound out of this world.
And the sum of money clearly comes from the earnings they would have received from HP if the technology had been properly licensed. Had they been granted a share of the profits for the past 7 years as deserved who knows how much that would really be worth.
Anyway, I don't know that this is the truth any more than the other situations presented, but I'm certainly not jumping to conclusions just yet as I see a lot of self righteous people doing.
of course not to this scale perhaps but HP _had_ a patent infringement problem with univ of rochester. click here for the link.
in general however the size of a company like hp [and its associated hpLabs research] the number of patents churned out is ENORMOUS . i interned in hpL palo alto last summer and the patent figures overall for the previous year was many hundreds..... dont have exact figures sorry. i guess this is due to a) the scale of operations involved b) it pays to patent things *just in case* / *making sure* you have the cat in the bag if you know what i mean.
vv
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
h nology/134387111_mit05.html
n t05.shtml
MIT alleges patent violation; Microsoft, Photoworks named in suit
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstec
Microsoft accused of violating patents
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/53365_pate
Okay, that last one wasn't so on-topic, no universities were involved, but hey, we all love to see Microsoft in deep shit, so what the hell..
man I would just copy and paste.
:-P
All good. Sorry to rail at you like that.
Its just you are modded at three. Which is silly. And it happens a lot. People, get moderator points, and just go off and moderate whatever. Cause they can. Without knowing diddly about it. And I feel it brings down the quality of slashdot, and that annoys me. I wish people would pay more attention to what they say, preview before they post, and think for a minute before they mod. Anyhow...
...is that we don't see this kind of thing everyday. I mean, who develops a great amount of new technology? Universities. I would say that they spend much more money on research than companies (granted: many companies pays big dollars to universities to do the research for them, in exchange of the patents). And who is always suing because of patent infringements? Companies.
There is something wrong here. It is the case that there are many more university patents out there, but they don't have the money to sue those who ingringe them, or it's the case that there are more company patents out there, in this case we should ask ourselves why universities are patenting so little. (Ok, one answer is that universities don't patent trivial stuff, while companies do it in order to obtain revenue from licensing and lawsuits instead of really developing products).
In any one of the two cases, there is something fundamentally wrong with this system, and it's not necessary to argue if our patent system is really fair to notice this.
MY question is, and perhaps you can answer this, why did he wait almost 7 YEARS before filing a lawsuit like this? The cynic in me suggests that they waiting until HP used the chip in enough products to warrent a settlement... that's assuming HP violated a patent at all.
Humorless sig goes here.
"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."
Wrong. Universities should be in the TEACHING business, not the "change the world" business.
This is one thing that has gone VERY wrong with academia in the past 30 years. Instead of teaching facts, and critical thinking skills, schools, colleges, universities by and large teach WHAT to think.
If a university sets out to "change the world", who's ideas and what world is the blueprint? I think you see my point.
I believe that taxpayer funded educational institutions should be required to release ALL their research into the public domain. After all, as taxpayers, we're ALL helping to subsidize it in some way.
There should be no restriction on who can use their research, be it fortune 500 or mom and pop shop. The purpose of a university is to educate students, and to improve knowledge through research. That knowledge should be public domain.
Otherwise, universities are taxpayer funded and subsidized R&D departments producing proprietary, corporate only IP.
In the corporate world, IP is owned by that which funds the institution (the business), not the inventor. The same principle should apply to public universities. I don't feel that a university has any more right to exclusive rights to profit from it's IP than the Joe Schmo who invents something in an IBM lab does.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I'm just thinking big-picture here. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but what flashed into my head as I read the precis for this story was worrisome scenario:
A student learns a technique from a professor. He goes out into the world, uses it for his employer, and then... a year or two on... the employer gets a letter with the two ugliest words in the business ("patent infringement")...
Isn't it a kind of conflict of interest for university professors to be patenting IP that may overlap with their course material? Isn't it an exceptionally likely trap to fall into? We generally assume that what we learn in class is "paid for" by our tuition, but that might not be the case...
We're on the road to Tycho.
With the RCA patent on field emission expiring, and practical long-life field emitters being debugged, we might have the potential for a vacuum tube rennisance.
Vacuum tubes are inherently fast. Electrons travel much faster than holes during conduction, and when traveling across the gap (where the switching takes place) they are making a single free-path hop - similar to the fast N-type FETs (gate shorter than mean-free-path) that are currently being researched.
Use a field-emission cathode and shorten the gap to something comparable to that of a transistor in an integrated circuit and you can use voltages comparable to those of an IC also - but you can also scale up voltage and power arbitrarily at the I/O "pins" without substrate breakover. Meanwhile, at the lower voltages of the internal circuitry you don't have the tip-erosion problem from ion-bombardment.
So there's potential for vacuum integrated circuits on about the same size scale as semiconductor integrated circuits, but made of glass, metal, and diamond. They could run faster than semiconductors, and do a number of other useful tricks to electrons in flight (like "bunching" for microwave amplification) that are impractical in a semiconductor. Vacuum electronics can do many things in one step that can take hundreds or thousands of steps in semiconductors.
Downside is that you don't have complimentary charge conductors, so you don't get a CMOS equivalent. (Unless you use positrons. Maybe that's what Asimov's robot brains were up to. B-) ) So you'll still drop power in resistors (or use inductors to pair up two electron tubes when you don't need the low-frequency/DC end of a signal). But you can let the whole IC get cherry-red with waste heat so that's not a problem in many applications where the power is available.
Vacuum tubes - even low-voltage vacuum ICs - are inherently immune to many harsh environmental factors (like heat and radiation) which give semiconductors heartburn.
Field emission could also give a new lease on life to many conventional vacuum-tube applications. (Tubes are still used in high-power applications at high frequencies - like radio and radar.) It's a drop-in substitute for a heated cathode.
But embed a vacuum-electronic integrated circuit to do the detail work within a cold-emission vacuum power device and you have a bunch of "killer apps". Multiple "tubes" in one vacuum bottle, and even some embedded integrated driver circuitry, had been experimented with. But now we're talking a single vacuum "tube" with a very long life (no burnout - fadeout after many years if ever) with an entere application built in.
Think a wafer-sized cellphone, a bottle-sized cellular base station or broadcast TV transmitter, or putting the whole set of electronics for an airport radar INSIDE the magnetron. Then think "one device with a guaranteed minimum life of decades" rather than "keep replacing burned-out tubes".
Now think about putting these in space probes. (Heck - once it's up you don't even need the vacuum envelope. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Suing HP: $8,000,000 if they win.
Suing other people: Another $4,000,000.
Being known by every prospective student as an organization that sues: Priceless. (Do you want to come from a university that prospective employers know might sue? This is a cost to the university whether or not they win.)
I thought the whole point of a university was to collect people who know more than the average person, for the benefit of the society as a whole. But now, if the university discovers that they may have benefited us, they sue?
The patent claims seem overly broad to me. If you have experience doing assembly language programming, you are certainly aware of the possibilities of out-of-order execution. I was doing what the patent claims long before 1989 -- manually. That is certainly prior art.
When you hand-optimize assembly code, you develop lots of appreciation for cases where re-ordered execution might not function correctly. The claims basically say, "Execute instructions out of their normal order, except where that wouldn't work." So, Columbia has a patent on hard-wiring a processor to run an obvious kind of program.
From the story: Dullea acknowledged that the university is involved in patent litigation with Carl Zeiss Optical, Inc., maker of eyeglass frames, but said the case is "not of this size." Translation: "We are not really an organization that likes to litigate, except..."
From a previous post: The average Cornell prof salary is below corresponding salaries at "peer" institutions and definitely below private industry equivalents. The faculty has been complaining about that for at least twenty years without effect. - son of Cornell professor. The university is NOT planning on sharing any money with students or faculty if they win.
The suit seems to me to be an example of a habitually adversarial kind of thinking that is becoming quite common in the U.S. culture. Remember Adobe and Skylarov, and Adobe's attack on the writer of the Killustrator program? People and societies sometimes arrive at a habitual frame of mind in which they are unable to find creative ways to live in the world without conflict.
The recent terrorism is also an example of this. According to major news sources; the U.S. government caused many of the problems to which the terrorists were reacting: What should be the response to violence?
Bush's education improvements were
There was something in the area of a 4.x% tuition hike for those of us (un)fortunate enough to be a part of Cornell University. Part of this money went to professors, who, despite making less than peers at other instuttions, still make more than anyone else in the area. The cost of living in Ithaca, NY is prohibitively low, such that they can get away with paying people with masters degrees in CS and IT $30-$40 for senior positions. The professors make a bundle, but the staff/employees do not; I've worked with them for 4 years now (I am a student) and the one thing I've heard from professors is 'We get paid plenty' and the one thing I've heard from Employees is 'I am going somewhere where they will pay me.'
Not that professors don't deserve a hefty salary, considering how difficult it is to land a real teaching (not just lecturing) post at a place like that.