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? :)

Cornell's press release

[marnanel]

Here's Cornell's press release about it.

I knew this was coming...

[keepper]

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 :-D

Did Intel licence this patent as well?

[arn@lesto]

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?

The Patent Itself

[Konster]

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.

Why is everyone so down on the school?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

What amazes me...

[Karpe]

...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.

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?

Link

[keepper]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec97/Torng.b s.html

For the Lazy.. http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Dec97/Torng.b s.html

Re:heh

[mikethegeek]

"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.

Vacuum tube rennisance?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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-) )