Slashdot Mirror
Intel Sued for Patent Infringement
mfh writes "All Computers Inc. has filed suit against Intel for infringing on US Patent (5,506,981). Apparently Intel utilized patent-conflicting circuitry to determine the frequency of the input signal to the microprocessor, including Pentium processors. All Computers is asking for the tidy sum of $500 million USD."
We need one. Please!
You know what I miss? Leeches.
How can you patent the idea of determining a clock rate using circuitry? This is redickulous. Patents have gotten way of out hand and need to be reigned in NOW!
Hopefully Intel will now see the light and start to throw their weight behind those of us who have seen this all along.
Because someone will own a piece of every idea.
And people will wonder why the US falls behind in tech.
A sues B, B sues C, C sues A, ad nausium. When is all this going to stop? It seems like it's getting to the point where everyone has something that (intentionally or not) impacts someone else. I say enough already and let the best product win.
> As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive. Copyrights can encourage creativity, patents just encourage people to make a product then rape and pillage their industry.
I agree with both of these sentiments. The universe has existed far longer than humanity, and therefore it is totally impossible for us to invent anything beyond method, and all methods are available to us since the dawn of time. While I may be Christian, I am a science-based one; ie: the Bible is a good reference for parable and theories for understanding, and I believe that is the purpose of the tome.
That said, the patents seem to go against the scientific flow of time, by blocking inventions that build on the history of human science and discovery.
Why we have to reinvent the wheel every time we want to build a useful product or service is why we are evolving slower than we could. Darwin said that impediments in evolution, or road blocks, must be removed for a species to adapt and overcome. Are we going to adapt? To me, patents infringe on life and our chances of survival as a species.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I think this is symptomatic of having every rich kid's parents pay for them to do law, and many of them not ending up in law... but business.
So what you have is alot of "legally aware" a-holes who love to try and push every "business advantage".
They are the other side of capitalism. On one side of capitalism you have inefficient state intervention. On the other you have vested interests who don't want to have to face dynamic markets, they want everything to be wrapped up, safe and secure, for them.
It's funny that the same people outsource, and yet they are afraid to compete on price with other companies. They are the high priests of globalisation, and it's about time they were recognised as anti-capitalist. These people don't believe in the free markets, they are just on whatever bandwagon it takes to make a profit. The minute someone starts doing something more efficiently than they do, they have a huge cry and resort to the law.
That isn't capitalism, that's just greed.
I for one would like to see more economists speaking out against these people as anti-capitalist anti-innovation leeches. We all get to where we are in science because we stand on the shoulders to giants who contributed their work for free to the public domain. Now these leeches make minor alterations and claim they should have a monopoly on the one logical solution to a problem for scores of years. Fuck that.
That's not innnovation and that's not capitalism. That's the logic of daddy's little little lawyer, who got their job through family connections, corruption through fraternities or a degree from one of the "elite" institutions which allows these smacktards to identify each other.
There needs to be a capitalist revolution whereby all these people and their anti-capitalist practices are smashed. Because if you aren't a well meaning socialist and if you aren't a well meaning capitalist, I can only thing of one more catergory: criminal.
What people want is a section like Apache, Apple, Games, etc. for legal items. That way, if the talk of lawyers, lawsuits, etc. nauseates them, they can block that section.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
You can view it as greed if you like, but the language of business is money.
That aside, not all lawyers come from rich families or go to Yale because their Dad's a senator. Some are working class schmoes that had to take out $100,00 loans to go to school and end up working in the county DA's office pulling in only $30k (guess how long those loans will take to pay off) because they want to keep the drug dealers off the streets.
Not all lawyers are bad, not even all IP lawyers are. What are your opinions on Lessig and the EFF's law team?
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
I have read many comments which supports patents because patents defend the little guy. However, this argument is completely false.
First, as I read in a comment a few days ago, if the little guy has a patent on something, then most probably the big guy has several patents on things which the little guy uses. Cross licensing comes into effect, so the big guy is the winner here.
Second, this little guy vs. big guy is only happening because the entry to the market is not free. And it is not free because patents and other IP laws restrict entry to the market. Without them entry to the market would be much easier, so there would be much more firms on the market competing with each other than now.
Third, patents create a kind of slavery. You have an idea, you patent it, then tell about it to somebody. However, that somebody cannot use your idea because it is patented. It can be said that person thoughts is owned by you. We can call this situation 'Metal Slavery'.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
IANAL but..
From reading the patent, It appears to Me that this patent was on a method of installing CPU upgrades to a computer. For example those cards that took a 386 to a 486 or allowed you to exchange the CPU for a faster one and increase the clock speed. These types of cards are about useless anymore! Besides, this patent was applied for in 1993 - I am VERY sure there is prior art. I can remember these types of upgrades as early as 1986. Hell, NEC was offering upgrades as early as 1981, albeit not this type, but it DID upgrade the CPU and increase the clock speed. It was that old V20 CPU and a clock crystal to upgrade your 8088 PC and increase the clock from 4.77mhz to 8mhz. (Hmm.... I* wonder who else on here actually used one of those besides Me?)
It'll be interesting to see how this playes out, but seems to me that this is a poor attempt by a company that has no market anymore to get a few quick bucks. --- Hey, I wonder if any SCO people are thier relatives ?!?
Does it benefit society to allow people to restrict who can build on their ideas?
If you add "for a limited time" to your question, then yes, it does. It gives a reason for people to create and, more importantly, to publish. If there is a fear the effort put into creation will come to nothing but the financial enrichment of somebody else better able to exploit an idea, the idea may never be published, but kept secret. Don't forget that patents contain (or are supposed to anyway) full documentation of how to reproduce an invention, and that document becomes public domain at the end of the term. Would people publish their ideas as frequently if it weren't for patents?
Please don't take my comments as a defence of the current US patent system, but of the patent concept in general. It's a good idea, but a flawed implementation. If I were to change it, along with improving the review process I'd try to work in compulsory licenses and shorter terms...
Is this patent overly broad. I mentioned in another post it appears to be a patent on a PLL circuit. However, since all chips need to sync to another signal, and CPUs / GPUs in particular use a multiple of the host signal, every processor produced by everyone in the PC industry is potentially infringing.
The USPTO basically allowed someone to patent the synchronous computer. Read the text of the patent, it reads like a 7th graders description of how a PC works.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Only via mega victims/abuse will there be patent law reform.
It was a real pity BT didn't succeed with it's hyperlink patent suit - the mega-economies would've reformed their patent laws quick smart if BT had succeeded.
Really the more outrageous the suit & the bigger the defendents, the better off we all are in the long run.
Fact is law reform virtually only occures if the big end of town are victims of bad laws.
Uh... Bell had to wait for the patent on one kind of transistor (the FET) to expire before they could (inadvertently) invent another kind of transistor (the BJT). Given that the transistor apparently already existed (since it was patented) there was no "5 year wait for the transistor" before we could have a computer. Perhaps there was a "5 year wait for the royalty-free transistor", but that wouldn't prevent people from building computers from transistors if they'd been willing to pay the fees. More importantly, Bell Labs could presumably freely experiment with FET fabrication (and thus inadvertently develop the BJT), they just wouldn't be allowed to freely sell the fruits of that labor before the patent expired.
Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing power
Or perhaps not. This kind of speculation is useless. Curing cancer isn't like brute-forcing an encryption scheme - it's not a matter of pure computational power.
One of the big things that is being pushed by the WTO is global acknowledgement of patents. You can guess who that'll benefit, and who that'll screw over.
-Vendal Thornheart