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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."
Stop frivolous corporate lawsuits over patents and alleged "intellectual property."
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
If this thing has been independently invented five times, then it shouldn't be novel enough to warrant patent protection.
The short answer is yes (IANAL but I read groklaw :-))
Then stop pretending like you have any authority to offer legal advice or you're likely to get slapped with a UPL fine, dumbass.
Two points.
First, back in the day [before they were utterly screwed by Intel], Intergraph had some awesome hardware tech. More recently, they've evolved into something of a CAD/CAM software company, but maybe some of the /. old timers can chip in with tales of the glory years.
Second, Intergraph was screwed by Intel in much the way that SCO was screwed by IBM. In Intergraph's case, Intel engineers were up against a wall circa the late 486/early 586 timeframe, and came to Intergraph for help. Intergraph opened their IP portfolio to Intel, taught the Intel engineers how to design a modern CPU, and Intel proceeded to steal the entirety of that IP portfolio - hook, line, and sinker.
In SCO's case, IBM's AIX/PowerPC group was up against a wall when it came to porting something AIX-ish to x86 hardware, so SCO entered into a partnership with IBM to write a next-generation UNIX-ish operating system for x86 hardware, in what was dubbed "Project Monterey". SCO proceeded to pour the heart and soul of their company into Monterey [to include pretty much their entire R&D budget], whereas, just a short time before project completion, IBM discovered "free" software [i.e. Linux], and summarily announced to SCO that Project Monterey ceased to exist [effective immediately]. To this day, SCO doesn't know whether e.g. any Project Monterey code made its way into AIX, or any other IBM OSes.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that just because a small, innovative company [like the old Integraph, or the old SCO] doesn't take the politically correct stand in court doesn't mean that they don't have a legitimate grievance.