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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...
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.