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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.'"
Had anyone else not heard about this company before today?
It says in the article that Patriot's patent was issued last summer.
Pentium chips have been around since the mid-90's.
Doesn't this make for a ridiculously clear case of prior art?
I think what would help more than patent reform though is tort reform. For one, making the losing party pay is a start. Also, finding a way to reduce lawsuits or using arbitration more often will contribute significantly. Reforming the patent system would be nice too though.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
The claims enumerated in patent 6,598,148 describe nothing more than an SMP system where the cache ram takes up at least 51% of the core and where the clock is variable. This is nothing unique and any idiot trained in the arts would have seen it as a trivial invention (SMP, variable clock, and large caches have all existed for quite some time) and therefore not worthy of a patent. Furthermore I don't see where Intel or their clients could be violating it except for the speed throttling overheat protection in the P4 and family processors. I know it's been said many times before but as far as the IT industry is concerned the USPTO needs to be scrapped or seriously funded because the way things work now are NOT acceptable, it's too easy for a bogus, stupid, or overbroad patent to slip through.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So, instead of having IP patents go through the same office as everything else, why don't we set up some kind of office that only deals with this type of patent? Obviously, it is very different from the types of patents the patent office is accustomed to dealing with. The people who approve or deny these patents really need to be knowledgable in IP rights as pertaining to computers. While there are definitely some patents that have somewhat of a point, some are just completely outrageous, and these should be caught before any patent is issued. Hell, for the cost of patenting something, I feel that there should be some checks put in place to protect others, as well as the potential patent holder.
No, there's a common law concept called "submarine patent" that does in fact exist. "Common law" means there's no formal law on the books, but it's something that judges accept as being there anyway.
When you are legally wronged, you do not have the right to just throw your hands in the air while the problem gets worse. You have a responsiblity to mitigate, or limit, the damages as best you can. Just because the other person started a fire, you can't let it burn the whole place down and blame it on them if you had the chance to stop it as a small fire.
So, a company that is being wronged by having their patent violated has an obligation to assert that they have a patent as soon as they realize what's going on. They can't just sit back and watch the other venture, then claim the profits if it suceeds and disavow involvement if it fails.
The penalty for not mitigating when you can is having your damaged knocked back to the point where you could have stopped them. Which, in the case of a submarined patent means "Yes, they did infringe... but you're not geting anything close to the damage award you thought you were geting."
Claim 1 does have some breadth. Arguably, though, this only covers systems with on-chip main memory (not cache) using more than half the real estate, some cache, and a variable-speed clock. Some microcontrollers fit those criteria, but they're not the most common ones. Bigger CPUs have off-chip memory, and low-end microcontrollers often have no cache system at all.
Why is it that they're suing Intel customers but not Intel itself... seems like they're afraid to go after somebody who might challenge them rather than settle...
Saying that Intel is an 800 pound gorilla is an understatement.
They don't want to fight Intel because they know that Intel's breadth of microproccessor technology is staggering. Probably enough to break the patent, if not rub out the company with legal entanglements.
This would be a good company for Intel to make an example of.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Patent No. 6,598,148,
appears to be a divisional patent from patent No. 5,982,231, filed in 1989. In summary, the invention describes a CPU using both stack and register-based instructions which interfaces directly to DRAM memory over 32 shared address and data lines. Memory accesses are minimized by using mainly stack-based instructions and accessing memory in fast page mode. The invention is designed to minimize cost, fitting just tens of thousands of transistors into a 44-pin package, while delivering approximately 20 MIPS performance. While none of the design elements by themselves are new or unique, the particular combination chosen seems to fit the definition of a real invention that was not in existence before 1989.
The features which seem to relate to its claims of variable speed are the use of an on-board ring oscillator to drive the system clock, and memory cycle timing which automatically adjusts to the loading seen from attached memory devices. Using an on-board ring oscillator means that the system clock can be driven by a device built with process parameters identical to other devices on the chip. If CPU transistors are a little slow on a batch of chips, the ring oscillator transistors will be similarly slow and the chips will continue to work at a slower but reliable speed.
It's just not clear to me how Patriot Scientific can claim that companies like Intel are infringing on their patent. Is it because Intel's products contain technology which also happens to appear in their invention, but which they themselves did not invent? None of the individual technologies used in the Patriot device originated with them, and it appears that only the specific combination of those technologies described in the patent application would have qualified it for approval. However, the patent claims are written in such a way as to seemingly describe a much broader range of CPU designs, many examples of which were certainly in existence before even the original patent application by Patriot was filed.
I've seen it stated that the claims are the only important part of a patent. That seems to be the big problem with this particular patent. What happens when a legitimate invention is granted a patent with overly broad claims? Some patents are written with claims that include a range of claims, some very specific and some very broad, on the assumption that it's better to aim for as much as possible and settle for what you can get. This particular patent seems to have only broad claims. Does that make it easier or harder to try and overturn?
This exampe shows how important it will be to create a more effcient patent system in the world.
Economists are very critical about the patent system at large, but I believe the quality of patents has to improved, the quantitiy has to be reduced. A way to do so it to set high standards,
But in the WIPO the lawyer community drafts extension to patentability. Patent law is not evil per se, but in dynamic industries it does not suit. Patents were never designed for services. In Europe FFII and many other organisations were able to build a mature counter-force to the lawyer's lobby groups. However they are in the international and governmental institutions as experts and design their own patent law.
How to get rid of bad patents? can therefore be translated to "How to create balance in patent legislation?". It makes little sense to hunt down trivial patents. The bugs are in the patent system and have to be fixed. Patent attorneys are not intrested in a working patent system.
What to do?
1. Get organized. there are several US organisation, but there is not real US movement.
There is a very low-traffic US mailing list of FFII, JOIN.
2. Support petitions such as http://www.noepatents.org
3. Help to defend the European directive in Brussels (there will be a FFII conference in April)
4. Provide content and opinion articles about patent inflation on the internet.
The main vulnerability to which they leave themselves open is small upstarts like this: companies that aren't really producing anything other than patent infringement lawsuits, and thus don't have any incentive to cross-license. The large company usually has little choice but to either license the patent (if it looks like the cheaper option), or slug it out in court, hoping to drag the proceedings on long enough that the small party runs out of cash and drops it. Take Eolas for example: Microsoft still have a half-billion dollar ruling against them with regards to Eolas, and there's no opportunity for a patent infringement countersuit. Even IBM is vulnerable to this kind of attack, so don't be too sure they're overjoyed with the status quo.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
The patent application is very specific about using a ring oscillator to control the processor clock. Most processors use PLL (phase locked loop) devices to control their clock frequency.
Typically only asynchronous CPUs are clocked by free-running ring oscillators. Almost all CPUs on the market, including embedded CPUs, are synchronous designs and they come in fixed speed grades, which makes PLL clocking very attractive.
Even with PLLs you can vary the clock speed, e.g. when you detect that the chip is too hot or when the work load is low the CPU clock can be scaled down in discrete steps.
A ring oscillator provides a non-discrete (continue) frequency range, but on the downside its clock frequency is very unstable compared to PLLs, which is bad for synchronous designs.
There is also prior art: the early MIPS processor implementations had a free running multiplier, which operated as fast as the silicon would allow, even though the rest of the CPU was clocked at a fixed frequency.
In summary: this patent is not worth a lot.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
At least, I assume they do, considering that IBM has ~25,000 active patents
Don't assume anything. Companys like IBM file "defensive" patents all the time just to keep from being sued by little guys.
About 75% of the patent nightmares we've seen lately are from the tech bubble where high end companys go down the toilet. The decades of defensive patents become the best hope for survival and a new wave of patent lawsutes washes over the landscape.
I'm sure the surviving tech giants are sick and tired of not only having to file new patents but also for being sued by former giants who couldn't survive.
I don't actually exist.
Not only is it not absurd but I know it can be done successfully. I'm award of at least 1 case where almost 2 *dozen* Japanese electronics firms were sued by a lone inventor and settled out of court for a significant amount of money. Google is your friend if you care to find these things.
What needs to happen is these "Patent" companies loose big in a few lawsuits and go under.. So when a company does go out and try to "Inforce IP rights" Thier stock value plummets.. So it would leave nothing but well founded IP claims and heaven forbid Notices to companies when they start selling technology that has potential IP right infringement and get it all sorted out before the product with potential of IP infringement goes mainstream.
Companies knowing that there is IP infringement taking place and not communicating with companies that are potentially infringing on thier IP should loose the ability to sue these companies for infringing. If a product is in the mainstream that does contain infringed IP there should be a grace period where time to remedy is given unless it can be demonstrated that the infringment was done with full or partial knowladge of its potential for infringment.
It just seems to be the easiest way to due business these days as you can file and obtain board patents and sit on your hands till its well into the mainstream then sue everyone(well people that make money on it anyways) without cost of actualy development or marketing and associated costs with possible product failure. So it would seem that is would be the best business practice for maximizing profit margins when you don't actually need to do anything but have a team of high priced lawyers and a good engineering teams that have a good feel for the marketplace and what technologies will hit the mainstream and how to capitilize on them trough broad sweeping patents that will cover the core essential mechanisms that these technologies will require to properly function.
There shuold be some legal mechanisms put in place to prevent the IP equivilant of "Cyber Squatters" to domain names... If companies file and obtains patents for technologies they have little or no interest in bringing to the market they have no right to prevent anyone else from doing so or taking legal action against companies that invest/develop/market these technologies.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt