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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?"
The big question is: was student code involved? :)
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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
Here's Cornell's press release about it.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
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.
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
The patent number for this is: 4,807,115
Surf on over to US patent and Trademark Office and do a search with the patent number here:
Search uspto.gov by patent number
Or read it here if I don't bung up the the HTML.
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.
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.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
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.
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.
Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
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..
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.
"I must, and yet I cannot. How do you calculate that? Where do 'must' and 'cannot' meet on the graph?"
At the liquor store.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
"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?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...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.
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.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec97/Torng.b s.html
b s.html
For the Lazy.. http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec97/Torng.
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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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