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."

Comments

Small OEMs

[iamthemoog]

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....

Intergraph's Patents

[gowen]

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...

Re:Intergraph's Patents

[gowen]

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.

Re:Intergraph's Patents

[gowen]

computer chip design isn't notable enough in their list of products to actually be included in such a short little blurb. So they patented an idea outside their main field... for what reason?

Because they used to design chips, but stopped in the mid-1990s. These patents date from 1992, when Intergraph were a chip designing company.

Problem is that Intel and company did not license and probably did not dig through the patent library to find this idea and benefit directly from Intergraph's research/think tank.

Actually, they did (or at least it's likely that they did). Intel and Intergraph worked very closely in the 1990s, and both shared IP under NDAs. Shortly after they stopped co-operating (1997) Intergraph sued Intel, and although Intel dragged it out for 6 years, Intergraph absolutely creamed them in court.

Re:What is the legal basis for this?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Did HP have anything to do with the design of the cache in the Pentium? If not, why are they paying anything? Surely it's up to Intel to pay royalties on patents they breached, not their customers. I particularly can't see any way Gateway could have been liable for this.

That's not how patents work I'm afraid. In the words of the USPTO:

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

Note the word use in the text above.

Short answer: YES

[FreeUser]

The short answer is yes (IANAL but I read groklaw :-))

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 ... 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].

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 ... 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.

Re:Does this extend to other fields?

[JCMay]

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.

Re:Demand Tort Reform...

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 IP if anyone is interested

[billwie]

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.

= $4 million USD in litigation to kill a patent

[SgtChaireBourne]

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 ... 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.

The figures mentioned at the FFII Software Patent Conference, Brussels 9-10 Nov 2004 were more in the ballpark of 4 million USD to shoot down an illegitimate patent. I'm not sure what the real figures are, but 1 million USD sounds cheap. However, whatever the cost, it will be neither cheap nor affordable for small or medium sized businesses. Unfortunately, in Europe, the large majority of revenue is generated from small and medium businesses.

One thing that most articles miss is that software patents really screw anyone who even uses a computer, not just developers.