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HP Pays Intergraph $141m to Settle Patent Dispute

Posted by samzenpus on from the money-fixes-everything dept.

foxed writes "HP has settled a patent dispute with Intergraph. Intergraph claim the caching in Intel's Pentium processors violates their patent. Intel, AMD, Dell and Gateway made similar settlements last year."

4 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Intergraph's Patents by gowen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intergraph's patents are numbers 4,899,275, 4,933,835 and 5,091,846.

    Just don't ask me what any of that means...

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:Intergraph's Patents by gowen · · Score: 4, Informative
      computer chip design isn't notable enough in their list of products to actually be included in such a short little blurb. So they patented an idea outside their main field... for what reason?
      Because they used to design chips, but stopped in the mid-1990s. These patents date from 1992, when Intergraph were a chip designing company.
      Problem is that Intel and company did not license and probably did not dig through the patent library to find this idea and benefit directly from Intergraph's research/think tank.
      Actually, they did (or at least it's likely that they did). Intel and Intergraph worked very closely in the 1990s, and both shared IP under NDAs. Shortly after they stopped co-operating (1997) Intergraph sued Intel, and although Intel dragged it out for 6 years, Intergraph absolutely creamed them in court.
      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    2. Re:Intergraph's Patents by rfreynol · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, Intergraph has a long history of chip and hardware design. They started out as a contractor on the Apollo program and by the 1980's were producing their own VERY power Unix workstations and servers running on their CLIPPER chip.

      They did their own Chip design and even did some work on the SPARC for Sun.

      Unfortunately, they were also run by a bunch of geeks that didn't know squat about business. That, coupled with them giving up on the Unix market for Windows NT back in 1993 (about 2 years too early) caused them to take quite a fall.

      In the process of moving to a Wintel platform, they worked closely with Intel and that is where they got entangled. Intergraph needed Pentiums (and lots of them) to power their workstations and Intel tried to strong arm them into turning over some of their technology. I can assure you that the cache/MMU in the current Intel chip line did in fact come from Intergraph.

  2. Re:What is the legal basis for this? by lars_stefan_axelsson · · Score: 4, Informative
    Did HP have anything to do with the design of the cache in the Pentium? If not, why are they paying anything? Surely it's up to Intel to pay royalties on patents they breached, not their customers. I particularly can't see any way Gateway could have been liable for this.

    That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:

    The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

    Note the word use in the text above.

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    Stefan Axelsson