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SGI Sues ATI for Patent Infringement
Ynsats writes "The Register is reporting that SGI is filing suit against ATI for patent infringement. The suit alleges that ATI violated patent number 6,650,327, "Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering", which was filed in 1998 and granted in 2003, in its Radeon graphics cards. This is coming fast on the heels of AMD's announcement of the intention to buy ATI for $4.2B and it doesn't seem to be swaying AMD's intentions. AMD hopes to finish the takeover by the end of this year. SGI has also issued an ominous statement stating that they have plenty of intellectual property left and there will be more litigation to come."
When I read about stuff like this, it makes me annoyed. Not because any sense of fairness or ethics (companies don't have morals), but because of the wasted resources. Litigation is money spent without any production at the end. You pay a bunch of bloodsuckers to fight another bunch of bloodsuckers and either you take money from the other guy or the other guy takes money from you, but the only people guaranteed to get paid are the bloodsuckers.
Imagine if the money spent on spurious litigation went into actual R&D, capital investment for fabrication centers, engineer salaries, hell even advertising. Anything but litigation!
But as long as there's an avenue to make money this way, you can't really expect companies like SGI to behave any differently. You're providing a way for companies that are no long profitable (either because they have no product, e.g. SGI, or because they have an antiquate business model e.g. **AA) to leech off of the market instead of exiting it. Of course they're going to try to survive and not just go quietly into that good night. So, while I'm annoyed at this behavior, you have to realize that it's intellectual property laws that are the problem. We need fewer and simpler IP laws. Of course, trying to get lawmakers to pass fewer laws is like asking a competitive eater to "take it slow", and that's not even mentioning that the bloodsuckers aren't going to be happy to see yet another cash cow disappear anytime soon.
How long will it take for public outrage to really grow until real reform is made?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
SGI always poured the lions share of its income into research, and to the best of my knowledge they, even now, continue to do so.
SGI is the company that today has the very fastest Linux computer - the Altix shared memory multiprocessing family - available at any price, really a technological marvel because it runs a single OS kernel and has memory architecture which is truly phenomenal - it scales better than any other multiprocessing/clustering solution.
So any defense of their patents, however 'unpopular' with the video gaming set, should be welcomed because it could help a company that we really owe a lot to in many ways get back into the game. Honestly.
They would not be a 'patent troll'. Don't forget, SGI open sources a LOT of its technology. Much more than most other hardware vendors. Much more.
I used to work at NASA and our division was largely an SGI shop, and yes, they were expensive, but at the time, there was nothing else out there that was comparable in ANY way. You won't ever find me saying anything bad about SGI except maybe that it would be great if they were cheaper.
Why? Because they are the best.
Alexander Graham Bell was 4 hours ahead of a rival inventor filing the patent on his telephone. Being first is all, in this race. (From Wikipedia: Bell then secured his own patent in 1876, just hours before Elisha Gray visited the patent office for his own work on the telephone.)
The Wikipedia article also tells the story of Antonio Meucci, who apparently invented the telephone several years earlier but was too poor to take out a patent. Seems things really weren't all that different 130 years ago.