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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...
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).
That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:
Note the word use in the text above.
Stefan Axelsson
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.
But surely if the customer bought the product for resale in good faith the law can't be applied any more than I can be done for handling stolen goods which have somehow been sold through an legitimate retail outlet.
Intent to break the patent must be part of the legal requirement in any sane system...oh, I see
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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 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
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.
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.
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
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.