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HP Pays Intergraph $141m to Settle Patent Dispute

Posted by samzenpus on from the money-fixes-everything dept.

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."

4 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Intergraph's Patents by gowen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Intergraph's Patents by gowen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
  2. Re:Demand Tort Reform... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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!

  3. Intergraph IP if anyone is interested by billwie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.