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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."
Does anyone know which patent it actually was, just so we can look at it and see how idiotic it is?
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...
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
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).
The article says that Intergraph is suing HP et al. for selling products that contain a product that infringed upon the patent (Pentium Processors).
How about in other fields, such as food.
A farmer accidently grows patented/copywrited (GM?) corn in his field. Sells it to a cereal company that turns it into corn flakes. Can the corn seed patent owners sue the cereal company? How about the baker that is making stuff using the cereal company's product?
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.
HP is very reliable... look at their reputation for scientific instruments etc.
:> that's another matter. I would guess (INAL) that the arguement goes HP used Intel Pentiums. Intel Pentiums violated the patent. HP should have checked before using the Pentiums if any such violations etc existed - any if they did and intel said no then liability would pass to intel - if they didn't then they're liable for not carrying out due diligence.
As for how HP is LIABLE
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The short answer is yes (IANAL but I read groklaw :-))
... inventors don't need monopolies to exploit their ideas, monopolies are terrible for markets, and monopolies on ideas and invention any progress built upon those ideas or inventions) ... software users exist in almost every home, hence, like the new copyright extentions of the late 20th and early 21st century, patent lawsuits can be extended all the way down to a 12-year old using a program on her PC or Mac that violates some speculator's patent on [insert obvious idea here].
... until you look closer and realize that, on average, it costs $1 million dollars to overturn a single patent, an amount of money few mere mortals have, and most small businesses can ill afford. This cost makes even invalid patents effectively valid, as so few people and companies can afford the expense of correcting the patent offices negligence, and will be forced to pay the shakedown money (or cease using/making the software/device that allegedly infringes, or both) instead.
My understanding, from everything I've read, is that patent holders can sue ANYONE making unauthorized use of their patent, from the manufacturer down to the end user. Mostly they go after manufacturers and resellers (note that some of those who settled with the holder of this particularly noxious patent were Intel RESELLERS, not chip manufacturers).
This is one of the things that makes software patents even worse than most other patents (which are themselve a bad idea
Pro-patent lobbiest and apologists will argue that you can always go to court to overturn the patent with prior art if it is truly illegitamate (thereby neatly avoiding the entire point of how terrible patents are for anyone who cares about technological and human progress), and that's true as far as it goes
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Intergraph said in a release that it expects to pay $11 million in legal expenses."..."The company created an intellectual property division in 2002 to protect its intellectual capital. Intergraph said that, since then, its IP protection and enforcement efforts have generated about $860 million in pre-tax income."
I'm sure that "classic-style" racketeer division would've cost them quite a bit less.
How is it frivolous? Are we supposed to be against mechanical patents now too?
"We"??? speak for yourself. This is a discussion forum. Anyway.
For what it's worth, as a trained mechanical engineer, yes, I for one AM against ALL patents. NO-ONE should have the right to stop you altering your own physical property, and selling it on in altered form, if you want to. If you want to "reward invention", then give inventors grants, don't restrict everyone else with patent monopolies just to please the few!
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.
Our patent system is broken. Extortion by litigation has to stop. This is stifling innovation and crippling our economy. Absolutely, un-f'ing-believable.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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
Research costs money, in some cases lot's of money. Patents guarantee that this money can be regained over time as part of the product cost. This prevents a competitor from directly copying your idea and selling it for less (they didn't have R&D costs).
In other words, without patents companies have a lot less incentive to do any sort of expensive specific research since they have little chance of making money on it.
Individual inventors would also be screwed since they also have little chance of making money of their inventions: a larger company with more money will simply copy it and sell it for less. Or maybe one of the inventor's investors or prospective investors will do it before the product is even in production.
All I know is everytime you look around some company is suing some other company for some violation of ip or patent. Most of these suits seem to be aimed at stiffling innovation by competing companies and controlling progress until the original company is convinced it has milked the patent or ip for every single dollar the marketing department can acquire. Then, of course we see the company that has produced NOTHING during it's entire existence, save one thought scrawled on a napkin, and it thinks it should get millions (or billions) from companies that actually DID something with the same thought.
Meanwhile, who do you think is paying for all of these lawyers? Do you think the CEO takes a pay cut to pay for the lawsuits? I think the cost gets passed on to the consumer. So, why is it that I should be in favor of stopping frivolous personal lawsuits and not equally frivolous and costly corporate suits?
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
"oh lets change the color of this widget." after color change "Great, now that we spent $5 changing the color, we can sell this product at half the cost of the company that spent millions researching it....oh goody"
And if you don't think that could/would happen without patents, then you are sadly mistaken.
It's called competition.
What often happens is this:
Company A patents all their ideas and inventions, down to the most absurd.
Company B develops some similar technology with their own independent research (who can understand the text on patent-claims, or have the time to read the millions of bogus and unuseful claims? The directory of patents is only useful to lawyers.)
Company B becomes successful for having a superior product.
Company A sues company B for patent-infringement some years later. Company A is usually in a downturn at this point, with no good and proven products.
How are patents productive to society? Company A would develop the technology some time or later, it's usually incremental changes in existing technology which are mostly patent-free and public domain.
Software patents and litigations will kill an industry based on building and sharing on ideas. Where would programming languages be, or anything in this society, if everything was to be patented. Progress would slow down.
And the small guy who wants to produce products are squeezed out, because lawyers are expensive.
Compare this with that people will get ideas all the time, usually at different parts of the world at the same time. Patents will not make these ideas pop up any faster, only raise the barrier to implement these ideas.
Big companies never produce any ideas by themselves..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
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
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.
Intergraph knew very little about making CPUs. They used MIPS CPUs before moving to Intel. What they were good at, was making fast buses between memory, the CPU and peripherals. They made workstations that rendered 3D in real time, way before AGP came around. Intergraph partnered with Intel because they needed cheaper processors in their platform to compete. Intel needed better memory-cpu-peripheral buses. Intergaph was to help Intel if Intel would provided details about their processors so Intergraph could make high speed buses, primarily for 3D devices. Intel never provided access to their specifications, leaving Intergraph hanging, so they sued. Then Intel used technologies that Intergraph shared with them, so they sued on patent infringement as well.
One thing that most articles miss is that software patents really screw anyone who even uses a computer, not just developers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
They should have checked in advance, and then either not used the patented device, or demanded that their supplier indemnify them. Yes, it would be stupid to check for patents on a technology if you're just going to use it anyway.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.