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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.'"
Look, who has the clout in congress to get the patent mess cleaned up? Big companies. Thus, the fastest way to clean it up, have big companies get harassed with expensive lawsuits like this. A lot. If Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc., waste enough money fighting stupid patents (note - I know nothing about the Patriot patents, they may or may not be stupid), then you can bet that things will change.
Just a thought. Of course, laws would probably change in a way that makes it harder for anobody to sue big companies, but leave it just as easy for big companies to patent "one click instead of two to buy an item" type idiocy, but we can hope, can't we?
Had anyone else not heard about this company before today?
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.
Does any company actually have a business plan that isn't based around suing people any more?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Here is the official patent from the USPTO. It was originally filed in 1998, but IC's have been around much longer than that, so I'm sure there's some prior art somewhere. This next quote could almost have come from the depths of the SCO complex:
Kinda sounds like Rambus and look where they've gone.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Intel should outsource their legal team to a foreign country. Just imagine a team of high priced lawyers with heavy accents all using the wookie defense! They'd unstoppable!
Yes, they'll change so only big companies can file stupid patents. :-)
Patriot's provocative plan
Seller sues vendors for microprocessor patent infringement. Not news.
Seller wins lawsuit against vendors for microprocessor infringement. News.
Let me know how it turns out.
For big companies, the current patent system is great: big companies have big patent portfolios that they cross-license. So, they don't generally have to worry about each other. That arrangement keeps new competitors out of the market. And patent application and prosecution costs are high enough that the number of stupid patents filed and prosecuted by small companies are negligible in comparison. Occasionally, something like this slips through. But by and large, stupid patents are filed by the big companies themselves and then cross-licensed in an arrangement that helps big companies.
Because the manufacturers are more likely to settle. The producer of the OEM parts, whose entire business is based on the technology, is more or less obliged to put up a hell of fight.
These suits, although not legally, are basically extortionate. Nobody wants to actually go to trial, least of all the company bringing forth the claim. Said company just wants someone to mail money to their post office box in order that they be left alone.
Once one person buys a "license" they can then use this to spread FUD that said purchase "proves" their case. See SCO/Sun/Microsoft.
One possible defense approach is to argue that since the parts are purchased you are not the primary litigant at law. Plaintiff must first prove their case against the manufaturer of the part before you can be held liable for infringement. You may or may not be financially liable, but it isn't your job to defend the IP if you are not its genesis. If the argument is accepted by the judge this does not dismiss the case, but holds it in abeyance until the primary claim is settled.
Then the plaintiff must decide if they want to go up against the big gun or not. If they do not then the pending case will eventually be dismissed. If they do then at least the smaller fish has the big one as its ally, and if the big one prevails than the orginal suit may be dismissed as groundless.
If big fish loses then the settlement may be held to have sufficiently compensated the plaintiff and the suit against the smaller fish may be dismissed so long as they no longer infringe. Which they're not likely to do because the OEM source will have licensed the technology in order to continue to sell it.
While all of this is going on the legal issues become a bigger and bigger tarball encompassing more and more companies who are more and more likely to just settle and get it the bloody hell over with.
It's basically stealing the nerdy kid's lunch money.
KFG
Who's left to prosecute?
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?
if you make the losing party pay, you can pretty much guarantee that people like you or I will never, ever go up against a big corporation and their hordes of lawyers. If you lost, you'd be bankrupt.
I think it should go like this:
If you get sued by someone with a patent, and the patent is found to be invalid. The Patent Office should have to pay your legal fees, as well as other punitive damages.
The Patent Office currently makes a lot of money granting patents, and it doesn't cost them at all if they grant stupid patents. They should be forced to pay financially for granting invalid patents.
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.