Intergraph Injunction Against Intel Suspended For Now

Kilbasar writes "News.com is reporting that the Itanic has hit another iceberg, with a District Court granting an injunction stopping Intel from making the chip. However, the injunction was immediately suspended to allow for another round of appeals, and I don't really see anything coming of this other than Intel paying Intergraph anywhere from $100M to $250M to use their patents."

Comments

I can picture it now....

[cyberise]

.....the AMD execs are probably all grinning and giggling like schoolgirls.

Too bad

[madsenj37]

Intel is not the only chip manufacturer out there. AMD with its clawhammer is looking to be a better option anyway. Its just too bad teh general public doesnt know this. The same goes for Microsoft. Other alternatives are availible but alas Joe consumer just uses what everyone else does.

Re:Too bad

[GuyMannDude]

Intel is not the only chip manufacturer out there. AMD with its clawhammer is looking to be a better option anyway. Its just too bad teh general public doesnt know this.

Yeah, if you're AMD you have to envy Intel's marketing campaign. Nothing says "massive computer power" like a bunch of bald idiots covered in blue bodypaint dancing around like jackasses.

GMD

Re:Too bad

[Kallahar]

Actually, most people buy and use what TV tells them to. Unfortunately, that leaks into corporate practice too. Every AMD I've used has been rock solid, but management won't let us use them anywhere because they have that concept that they Must Use Intel.

Travis

As I understand this...

[Bobulusman]

Intel is already out $150 million. If they win the appeal, no more lost money. If they lose, they lose another $100 million. Either way they get permission to use the patent. There's really no reason for them not to pursue this.

What does this mean?

[airrage]

In some ways I'm hoping that this doesn't affect me as both a corporate IT person, and an avid computer geek, but alas, I think it is not so. The chips adhere to the law of spoilage; that if not brought to the marketplace before a certain time, they will actually be sold for a loss. I like the plantiff's position in this, in that they simply just need to wait it out while the fruit rots on the loading dock. I'm not a legal scholar, but what is all this hedging in the suit: I appeal, but lose 100 million, I win, lose the 100 million, you win, the 100 million, plus appeal money, but possibly lose ... oh I can't keep up..

Not Suspended..

[mnmn]

Please note the injunction has been Suspened not Suspended. This new verb might not mean its closely sounding couterpart, so we cannot assume the injunction has been Suspended.

Here's dictionary.com's take on this new word, and Merriam-Webster's take on it is to blurt out "The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the Dictionary search box to the right."

As a side note, statistics say most new words are borne out of careless spelling mistakes.

Re:Not Suspended..

[br0ck]

I propose a new rule that if a misspelling has more than 2000 hits, then it should be officially declared good enough for Slashdot. ;)

I will never understand the court decisions

[jukal]

The companies further agreed that Intel would pay Intergraph an additional $100 million if it filed and lost an appeal... If Intel wins the appeal, it won't get the $150 million back, but it won't have to pay Intergraph any more fees and won't be barred from shipping Itanium chips.

Ok. So I get sued by someone for stealing his non-flushable-toilet idea (which is great concept), and he wins the first round in the court and I am ordered to pay him $42 million dollars. So, I make an appeal, which I win. They decide I did not do anything wrong after all. By this appeal I won't get anything back, but I won't have to pay anything more either. By suing me, the inventor got $42 million for nothing?

Re:I will never understand the court decisions

[Dun Malg]

If the companies believe they can make wiser decisions outside the court, why do they go inside the court?

Well, in order to get to the part of the process where they sit down and hammer out an agreement, they have to go through the legal system equivalent of a game of chicken.
Intergraph says "I'm better than you" (you used our IP without paying)
Intel says back "No you're not" (no we didn't).
Intergraph retorts "Oh yeah? I'll prove it--I challenge you to a game of chicken" (We'll see you in court)
Intel: "Fine!" (Fine!)
Then, as the cars speed towards each other head on (as the court case progresses), Intel thinks that Intergraph isn't going to swerve out of the way first (has evidence to back up its claim), so they jerk the steering wheel to the side and chicken out (agree to some sort of non-judicial arbitration).
Driving head-on at one another is an important part of the legal system. It is the most costly of all the various means of proving whose wiener is bigger, but could very well end up with both parties wrecking their cars or dying. But since it's the only means of redress Intergraph can force Intel to participate in, it was invoked as its last resort. Basically, Intel wasn't going to give Intergraph a dime voluntarily unless their other option was limited to giving it to them involuntarily.

Personally, I think the CEO's of each company should be forced to play an actual game of chicken to decide the case. It might be a bit arbitrary, but the entertainment value would make up for that.

November coming fire... Samhain grim

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

The appeal will mostly likely fall through and end in a huge out-of-court settlement for Intel as they did before with Integraph (for $300 million), as $150 million is nothing compared to the cost of Intel delaying their Itaniums when the Hammer hits the shelves.

I've hardly ever heard of Integraph outside of a few lousy graphics cards, or their workstation Clipper chips -- and just how much of Integraph's corporate income comes from suing Intel?

Re:November coming fire... Samhain grim

[ek_adam]

Intergraph has been around since about 1970. I worked at Intergraph from 1990-1996. They used to make their own CAD workstations; hardware & software. This was back when a high end CAD workstation would cost 50-75 thousand dollars. The hardware would often include it's own furniture with dual or triple monitors built in and a D-size digitizer.

They were never a consumer product company. They sold workstations to certain engineering and design niches. Their specialty is civil engineering and geographic infomation software. Have you ever looked at a topographic map? At one point all USCGS topographic maps were made on Intergraph workstations. They sell a lot of 911 systems, a spin-off of their other GIS stuff.

They sold some electronic design software, mostly a spin-off of the products they used in house to design their Clipper chip (not the encryption Clipper chip. Boy do I remember the furor when the govt started talking about that!).

They wrote their own publishing software based on a gencoding system similar to SGML. This was used for all of their in-house documentation. TV Guide used an enhanced version of this system for a few years.

I worked in their mechanical division. They were doing object oriented programming in the early 1980's, long before it became popular. Unfortunately, being one of the first, they made a lot of mistakes in the way they chose to implement it, which led to an enormous number of bugs and workarounds in the later products that were built on the same core technology. I could model anything in I/EMS. However, for anything beyond simple models, I'd spend about 40% of my time working around bugs. I/VDS (shipbuilding software) was built on top of I/EMS. They wone a $600 million contract with the Navy back in 1990-1991.

Shortly before the Pentium came out they were realizing that PC's were approaching serious CAD workstation levels. People were not going to pay $35k for a Clipper workstation when they could get a PC maybe half the speed, but one-tenth the cost. They made a couple of deals with Intel and sold their clipper chip unit to Sun. They were one of the first companies to ship a computer with a Pentium inside, and they were the first to ship a multi-processor Pentium machine. Back when a good $2k Pentium PC would ship with 16 or 32MB of RAM. They were shipping a $10k PC with 256MB of RAM, four processors, and a graphics card optimized for major vector graphics work. Note: vector graphics, not animation. Gamers were very disappointed when this $10k machine would do worse on Doom than their $2k machine at home. Still it had major horsepower. Bill Gates used an Intergraph workstation when he introduced Windows NT. When he said "This is the coolest machine in the world!", INGR stock rose about 30% the next day. Then one day as a couple of Intergraph's engineers were working with some Intel engineers to optimize Intergraph's next CAD workstation to work with the Pentium II the Intergraph engineer said "Hey, that looks an awful lot like one of our old Clipper designs." and the patent lawsuits and corporate warfare started.

Unfortunately, though they pioneered a lot of things, they kept getting passed by the new kid on the block. PTC's Pro/Engineer had all of the features of I/EMS with twice the speed, half the cost, and relatively no bugs. (That was back in 1995. Now Pro/E is in almost the same position relative to SolidWorks.) And in hardware, you can't keep selling $10k CAD workstations when 1GB of RAM is about $100. They've spunoff or shut down about 3/4 of their old operations and are concentrating on what they're good at. GIS and suing Intel.

I simply can't justify buying Intel anymore

[Trogre]

... not after they've confirmed their chips will be TCPA/DRM enabled.

We can only hope that AMD won't sell out in the same way.

Re:Suspened???

[unicron]

"It's an untruthatude!"

"Oh, is that like a falsisity?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Oh, now I understandify."

Closing Prices

[hopbine]

INTC 17.30 +0.31 +1.82% 77.26 Mil
AMD 6.14 -0.18 -2.85% 5.239 Mil
INGR 18.40 -0.64 -3.36% 1.151 Mil
So who is suffering ?

Re:Just curious...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

They used to. They used to make a range of workstations, using a chip called the Clipper (no relation to the encryption chip). It got killed in the volume economics of Intel. Intergraph then started with a range of Intel workstations, and that business crashed and died, which Intergraph states was due in large part to Intel refusing engineering support in order to coerce them to hand over patent rights. Then they started suing. Intergraph has a long history of litigation with Intel. Been going on and off since 1997, this is just another round of "been there, done that".

My thoughts

[sheddd]

Intergraph is doing wrong; this patent basically covers a crossbar to route instructions to their proper place. Not a super novel idea IMO...

BUT the means are justified. Intel's an immoral Juggernaut. Intergraph was their golden child for a couple years; Intel used INGR boxes to show off their new stuff...

Then INGR (perhaps wrongly) started to go after mobo mfg,'s over a patent they had on L2 cache (which is a stronger patent then the one above). Mobo mfg's shout 'help, Intel' and Intel proceeded to destroy INGR's Hardware division. At that time they were the only reasonable CPU to use for high end graphics (except SUN's stuff but there's no way SUN would sell to a compeditor).

So INGR stopps getting any engineering info and this puts them a year behind in their mobo design (a year is deadly).

This suit's been going on forever. Earlier this year INGR had the ability to stop Itanic production but caved for a piddly amount of money (the INGR CEO, Jim Taylor, basically got intimidated by The Intel CEO, Craig Barrett, into giving them patent rights for nothing). I would've loved to have INGR's say in that room. I would've shut them down out of despite the damn money.

Predatory corporations like Intel need to be taught a lesson occasionally.

Hammer, Hammer, Hammer!