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Five PC Vendors Face Patent Lawsuit
Combuchan writes "This article from internetnews.com caught my attention: While Linux lawsuits gobble up the IT community's mindshare, a lesser-known legal action is being fought seeking billions of dollars from five PC vendors. Patriot Scientific, a small, San Diego-based seller of embedded microprocessors for automotive and scientific applications, is suing Sony, Fujitu, Matsushita, Toshiba, and NEC, alleging infringement of a Patriot patent for what it calls 'fundamental microprocessor technology.'"
these guys are idiots. Here's the patent:
San Diego, CA - August 7, 2003 - - Patriot Scientific Corporation (OTCBB:PTSC) developer of key microprocessor technologies and scalable Java solutions for mobile products, today announced that it has received an additional patent for fundamental microprocessor technology currently in widespread use. United States Patent #6,598,148 B1 has been granted for PTSC's variable speed clock acceleration technology for RISC and CISC processors. The patented technology not only bolsters PTSC's licensable microprocessor IP portfolio, but further strengthens the company's patent rights.
Future patent grants are expected that will further expand PTSC's rights within these fundamental technologies.
Jim Turley, editor of Silicon-Insider and previous editor of Microprocessor Report and a member of the company's Scientific Advisory Board, said, "After analyzing PTSC's patent, I'm certainly impressed with its range of coverage, basically representing the dominant means of accelerating internal microprocessor clock speeds."
Jeff Wallin, president and CEO of PTSC stated, "This is an important patent grant as it further validates our early innovation of key processing technologies that are ensconced in our IP portfolio. It not only gives our customers an extra measure of certainty in terms of our virginity and the technology but it substantially strengthens the validity and scope of our patent enforcement efforts."
Because of the breadth of the company's patent portfolio coupled with the size of the market benefiting from the company's protected technologies, the company is pursuing an intellectual property compliance program targeted at hundreds of companies using microprocessors with internal capabilities greater than 120 KHz. This is estimated to be in excess of a $200 billion market. Beatie and Osborn LLP, one of America's most prestigious law firms, represents the company's licensing and enforcement objectives.
When the patent is approved is not as important as when it was filed, which in this case appears to be 1998. Moves the date-to-beat back a little, but I don't think it's enough to save this joke of a patent.
Considering that even all the huge companies have business models based around patents. At least, I assume they do, considering that IBM has ~25,000 active patents (Including a record of about 3,400 awarded in 2001), and numbers I've heard for other huge companies are also astronomical.
To these companies, owning lots of patents on lots of sometimes crazy things is a way of protecting their turf and a good way of putting potential competitors out of business. If they try to tighten up U.S. patent law, they'll only be making their job harder. Besides, I imagine that the amount of money they lose off most these lawsuits is chicken-scratch compared to their coffers.
no patent numbers were given. Here is a list of microprocessor related patents assigned to Patriot Scientific:
6,598,148 High performance microprocessor having variable speed system clock
5,809,336 High performance microprocessor having variable speed system clock
5,784,584 High performance microprocessor using instructions that operate within instruction groups
5,659,703 Microprocessor system with hierarchical stack and method of operation
All of these patents appear to be divisional patents of another patent:
5,440,749 High performance, low cost microprocessor architecture
which was filed in August of 1989 (for the most part, this date should be taken to be the effective priority date of all the above applications) and assigned to Nanotronics Corporation.
Please remember that titles, abstracts, and descriptions from the patent mean nothing legally. The only section which has any legal weight is the claims, so please don't start complaining about old microprocessors as "prior art" unless they actually do the same thing as is stated in the claims.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Patriot's provocative plan
Actually, no, they don't. That's trademarks and trade secrets. Someone needs to learn a little more about IP law before posting as if they were authoritative.
Note that the obvious requirement (as interpretted by the courts) has nothing to do with whether one thinks that the invention would have been obvious, but rather whether the prior art of record shows that it would have been obvious.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Let him know how you feel.
Yahoo
Yeah well, Intel did the right thing at the right time. They giggled at the patent for about 8 seconds then filed for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement. As soon as they can get this they can sit back, wave it and say "bogus!" whenever anybody mentions this silly patent.
This should be non-news by, say, tuesday.
IANAL. IAAP.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I don't know when the first Pentium came out with an on-chip clock, but that's probably not important anyway. I doubt if the patent is on the idea of an on-chip clock -- they can hardly claim to be the first people to have invented the concept of component integration! More likely they're claiming to have invented a design or manufacturing technique... oh well, might as well go look it up.
Yup, here's the 1995 patent application. It's too complicated for me, but they seem be claiming that their design manages to produce a steady clock signal even as temperature fluctuations play holy hell with the oscillations that produce the clock signal. Assuming I haven't totally mangled the concept, and that they really did think of this first, that's a pretty significant invention. It's certainly not on the same level as these business-process and software patents that we all love to hate.
reading claim 1 of the patent -
any single chip static microcontroller that incorporates a substantial amount of RAM on chip, has bufferred memory access, and can run at multiple clock speeds fits the description in this claim. I think some versions of Mitsubishi M16 Hitachi H8 had enough RAM to cover more than half the chip and existed as early as 1996. This patent probably is bogus.
Claim 1:
1. A microprocessor integrated circuit comprising:
a program-controlled processing unit operative in accordance with a sequence of program instructions;
a memory coupled to said processing unit and capable of storing information provided by said processing unit;
a plurality of column latches coupled to the processing unit and the memory, wherein, during a read operation, a row of bits are read from the memory and stored in the column latch; and
a variable speed system clock having an output coupled to said processing unit;
said processing unit, said variable speed system clock, said plurality of column latches, and said memory fabricated on a single substrate, said memory using a greater area of said single substrate than said processing unit, said memory further using a majority of a total area of said single substrate.
It is also important to note that dependent claims (for example, a claim that starts like "The apparatus of claim 1") contain every limitation of the claims that they depend on.
Techincally, for something to be prior art, the only requirement is that it have existed prior to the filing of the application. For something to be considered good prior art, then it will have to read on the claims in some way.
Good prior art can read on all, or some of the features of a single claim depending on which statute it is being used under. For prior art under 35 USC 102, the prior art must have (at least) every feature of the claims. For prior art under 35 USC 103 a single prior art reference does not have to have every feature of the claims, however it must be combined with additional references which have the missing features and give motivation to add the missing features into the first reference to acheive the system (method, apparatus, etc..) of a single claim.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
That explains it all. Translation: All we do is sue people.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
but they cleaned up the submarine and lacheys patents about 99-2000. That was when the US patentents went from 3 years to file/17 years to 20 years total with 1 to file...the pentium & pentium 2 & 3 were all in sample production by the filing date...Even the athlon was sampleing to internal customers at that point...
The simple solution is to make the payment an optional part of the judge's ruling.
In Norway, an unfounded lawsuit (or an unfounded denial of a valid suit) would typically be saddled with all expences of the winning part, while in a case where the judg(es) decide that both had genuine reason for going to court they will each be covering their own expences.
Wasn't it said of Al Capone - "Patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel".
No cookie for you: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- Samuel Johnson. It's not known who he was referring to, but it couldn't have been Al Capone; Capone was not born until 115 years after Johnson's death.
I tried submitting this last week when I saw the article in the Union Tribune because the rhetoric coming from Patriot sounds disgustingly like the crap spewing from SCO.
Here are some choice quotes from the article:
"It would suggest that every PC manufactured after 1994 or 1995 is benefiting from this technology," Wallin said. As the company put it in a recent news release, "It is now time for Patriot Scientific and its shareholders to be properly remunerated."
Wallin added, "This sounds terrible, but we intend to get around to everybody."
Intel is taking action already. They have filed suit against Patriot to prevent Patriot from threatening them.
no..but I'm partial to these two:
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
--Bertrand Russell
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it
--George Bernard Shaw
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Sticking two existing things together and calling it something new has a long history. The guy who first stuck an erasor on the end of a pencil (named Hymen Lipman -- I'm not making this up!) got a U.S. patent on it! It was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because a pencil manufacturer decided to fight it.