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HP Pays Intergraph $141m to Settle Patent Dispute
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."
I'm a small OEM and have shipped a few intel processor based machines... Am I liable to pay a fine too?
Not had the bill yet, if so....
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Who the fuck cares? I'm sure there are better topics in submission queue. And BTW - it is daytime in Europe now. There's been no much stories since early morning here. Is /. only for Californians? Really - OSDN - implement a stories selection/voting public process like for comments and fire the "editors" like the one in subject. (Mod at will).
Im not trolling... But seriously, patents need to be banned. It's crippling the IT world.
In my country, there is a phone company called telkom. They make BILLIONS in profit every year. The reason for this is that our government has granted monopoly rights to the phone company. It sucks!
The reason they grant them monopolism is because 80% of the government has shares in the damn company, causing the rest of the country to be screwed as a result.
Patents are the same - the hurt local and global economies by enabling monopolism.
FTA: "Under the deal, HP has a license for all Intergraph patents for any use, while Intergraph has access to HP patents in specific fields in which it has products."
It seems that HP paid for more than just a dropped lawsuit. They also paid for the use of a lot of patents.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The answer is of course, yes, they can be sued. Patents, as others have said, protect not only the PRODUCTION of the patented idea, but the sale and use of it as well.
There's been lots of concern over patented crop varieties for just such issues. Farmers normally save seeds from one year to plant the next. Farmers that use patented varieties have to abide by the licenses, which always stipulate that saving seeds is not allowed. The next door neighbor farm does not buy the patented seed, but due to the prevailing winds his fields cross-pollinate with the plants that are of the patented variety. He saves his seeds for next year and then becomes liable when his cross-pollinated crops contain the patented genes.
I never said I agree, but that's the way it works in the United States.
Having now read them, albeit briefly, I *think* that Intergraph's novel idea is a neat way of merging the onboard cache and the MMU.
Hate to rush against the tide, but that's a really great idea, that no-one prior to Intergraph had managed to come up with. It's also an actual invention, rather than just an algorithm, or an algorithmic expression of well-known mathematics.
I can't see any great problem with these patents, and welcome our new cache-management overlords.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Intergraph Patents all relate from their own custom unix architecture that they abandoned in the early 90s (suckered into windows/intel). Their first cases involved their claim that Intel was trying to strong arm them to get their IP... and I thought their claim was very valid. Unfortunately now they seem to have made a business unit that's sole purpose is to chase suspected patent violators. Some of their other products are quite useful (mapping and GIS) though, if overpriced and underhyped.
check out http://www.intergraph.com/ip/cases.aspfor more info on the cases
and
http://www.intergraph.com/ip/tech.asp for info on how a software company ended up with all these hardware patents in the first place.
The obvious candidate is pharmaceuticals, where (quite reasonably) we impose a massive regulatory load and delay development for years, and so make it much harder for someone to exploit a discovery or invention before it just becomes common currency.
Obviously IT has no such problem.
At the very least I think that the protection against independent reinvention should be reduced to some small, standard licencing fee. That would remove the more or less unbounded risk we are all taking every day now from the fact that some obscure and possibly insane patent might, properly interpreted, give someone else ownership of our work. That would seem to be a small, bounded change to the law which could be done quickly and nail 90% of the acute problem.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
My first engineering job was at the research laboratory of SKF, so I know a thing or two about patents as they apply to mechanical engineering. Even then (this was in 1993) SKF was largely doing away with their patent section, on the grounds that you didn't actually patent what you were researching any longer, as that would just tell your competition what you were up to. This enables said competiton to lay a 'patent minefield' i.e. to get a few quick patents in to block your progress, while they gear up their own research to be able to follow (or even beat) you to market.
Hence the battle cry was: "Short time to market". Not patents. With a short time to market you'll make your investement back before your competition is out of the starting blocks. And whey they get going, you've already run ahead, refining your offer, and (more importantly) got a grip (not to say lock) on the market. It's much more difficult to switch supplier once you've got going, than it is to go with the competition in the first place.
I saw this happening before my very eyes as I was there. That was the period where SKF just made their CARB rolling bearing public after much secrecy. The CARB idea was not encumbered with any patents, in that case as the idea was from the thirties and the patents had already expired before the means of producing them were available. But the pundits said that it was still doubtful if they would have spent much effort in that area even if it hadn't.
Stefan Axelsson