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Intel Sued Over Core 2 Duo Patent Infringement
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Intel is being sued over a patent infringement alleged to be in the Core 2 Duo microprocessor design. 'The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is charging Intel Corporation with patent infringement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison invention that significantly improves the efficiency and speed of computer processing. The foundation's complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF's United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled "Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer." WARF contacted Intel in 2001, and made repeated attempts, including meeting face-to-face with company representatives, to offer legal licensing opportunities for the technology.' The text of the complaint [PDF] is also available via WARF's site."
I have been slashdot conditioned to think that every patent suit is a patent troll trying to collect on obvious ideas from big companies. But from the background on the story, it would seem that this is not the case and that it has been on-going since 2001. That's a very long time to mess around before resorting to a law suit. How long does a patent last?
"For once, might the patent system actually be doing what it's supposed to?"
Clearly not, if these people had to fight Intel for 7 years and still haven't gotten a cent for licensing.
I read the complaint, and went through the patent. I didn't see any circuit diagrams, just some flowcharts and a lot of descriptions of them. It seems to me there's a vast difference between patenting a flowchart and building a circuit in silicon - but that's just me. I'm gonna chalk this up as a patent troll on an idea - not an invention.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Well, I've noticed that when it's an educational institution, then it's not a troll. Filed by a lawyer in Marshall, Texas means troll for sure though. These rules are weird. I guess it all depends on your point of view.
Although, you should note that a couple decades ago, universities were not well funded so some senators passed a bill that would allow them to keep patents. Why not, they do the research? Today, universities are still building those portfolios. So the joke is kind of on the companies. If they were smart, they should have been dumping millions into universities in the form of donations to keep patents in the corporate sector.
You can bet that as you start to see what was once cutting edge theory be implemented the universities will have the last laugh and hopefully the most cash. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing it any other way but I'm still paying off my college loans. It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend. Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
My work here is dung.
I don't think that just because UW doesn't have a manufacturing plant set up means they are not able to hold a patent for microprocessors. There are numerous people at the University, some who I have been instructed by (being a student) whom have held numerous industry positions including microprocessor architects, most of whom have become bored of the industry and gone into research. Which is where these patents come from...
arrrg, (like a pirate)
I am against universities holding patents period. How much of that patent was obtained using public funds? How much should go back to the public when the settlement comes in? How much of their licensing fees they gain from other patents are returned to the public from which it came?
Universities have seen the patent system as the cash cow it is and haven't thought this through.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
its most (but not all) of the laws surrounding patents and copyrights, that are bad.
Patents are bad because their only effect is funneling resources from the fast, high-powered, creative, dynamic people in the world to the retarded lazy dullards who think thy only ever have to do one single clever thing in their entire life and should get paid for it from here on in perpetuity.
To the creative people amongst us, who create new things, new processes, new ideas, new concepts, new knowledge, new value on a daily basis, Imaginary Property merely gets in the way. It hampers me daily in my attempts to innovate -- and the only benefit is some lazy geezers financing their retirement through milking the one smart thing they did in their lives back in the fifties.
Contrary to the assertions of folks like you, removing the ability to retire the very first time you've done something smart would actually result is a dramatic net increase in overall productivity, because people would have to continue doing smart things to continue getting paid.
When someone digs a ditch for me, he gets paid. Once. That's it. If I had to continue paying him in all eternity for the ditch he dug, he'd never contribute anything anywhere ever again[*]. And the same is true for "patent (copyright etc) holders": You do something good, you deserve to get paid for your work. Once. Now. How much depends on the deal you struck. You do emphatically NOT deserve to somehow "retain rights" to the thing you created and somehow expect to get paid for it for years and years in the future.
If you want to get paid next year, you should have to do some actual work next year. Whether you're digging ditches or developing processor designs. I do it. Many others do it. And it is time we stopped the parasitic maggots who think they're too good for work next year because they already worked once ten years ago.
--
[*]And I wouldn't even be allowed to say "screw this, I'm digging my own ditches from now on" because he'd be holding some kind of "intellectual property rights" on the process of digging of ditches.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
So you mean that patents are working?
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued. That's just about the craziest reasoning I've seen on slashdot.
But more to your original point, the idea of patents is to prevent "parasitic maggots" that capitalize, copy, and lazily "innovate" using someone else's effort. So, rather than the patent being parasitic, the system that you advocate for actually promotes and fosters laziness all the while minimizing the reward to the originator.
And, there is no system of patents that guarantees payment in perpetuity. Once you consider the fact that it takes years to get through the patent office, in many fields the lifetime of a patent is relatively short in business terms. **
Now, I'm not going to defend EVERY patent out there. Hell, I've seen my fair share that are incomprehensible and/or entirely obvious (both in the legal and technical sense). This does not seem to be the case here--at least not yet.
I'll probably get modded down as a troll and blow what karma I do have since you voice a very popular opinion. But, I'll do it anyway.
[** Copyright, on the other hand, does come much closer. When you're discussing about protecting anything at the "author's life+" then you're talking about a long time relative to any particular individual.]
And contrary to your assertions, the whole point is that by giving the universities the right to acquire title to the invention and then imposing commercialization obligations upon them means more of the inventions actually will get to market. Now its true, it some cases this probably doesn't work, for example, a blockbuster technology that everyone would adopt. But that's not most technology. Indeed, doing something that everyone else can do is not usually very profitable.
The reason the patent is a good tool for this is actually a result of the market. Most companies want patent protection because it gives them an advantage in the marketplace. So by allowing universities to patent those inventions, they have a tool to license the technology in order to commercialize it--basically giving the licensing company an extra incentive to actually exploit the technology.
As a significant note, you can read about how infrequently technology was commercialized prior to Bayh-Dole. The numbers are quite staggering. Most "inventions" were never licensed. The federal government retained title to all of its funded inventions, and very little commercialization was done.
In that case, it's unfortunate for you that the U.S. government passed a law that encouraged universities to patent the products of their research.
Imagine the gall. A university conducts research that results a useful, novel, and hopefully non-obvious technology, and they have the nerve to patent that technology. Then they have the nerve to ask for licensing revenue, and use the revenue to fund the university so that it can educate more students, and conduct more research, and maintain its facilities. Of course, the university should give the research product away for free, because you're perfectly willing to pay higher tuition and higher taxes to make up for this revenue that makes the university marginally more self-supporting. Aren't you?
If they're thinking of using their discoveries for profit, maybe they also should use the proceeds to fund their research as well without taxpayer money?
Because the money goes... where? And it's an all-or-nothing proposition, eh? You appear to have neglected to think this all the way through.
Imagine there's a task. Call it a XYZ task. And someone who has to perform it a lot says something like "this would be so much easier if there was an XYZ gadget that would kinda work like this and work by that principle -- that wouldn't be hard to produce. Why doesn't anybody make such a thing?" And that person looks it up on the web and indeed, such a gadget cannot be bought anywhere.
Situation 1: how things should work:
Person goes and starts manufactuing the XYZ-gadget. It's not like he wants to make a lot of money off it -- heck, it's OK if it merely breaks even. All he wants is an XYZ gadget available to him. But if there's a market, others could now try to make better XYZ gadgets. Modified XYZ gadgets. Designs the original inventor never even thought of. Applications he never even had in mind. Turns out that people in some completely different industry start modifying XYZ gadgets for their own purpose and soon a whole industry of modified XYZ gadgets springs up, with designer colors and actual research performed into the optimum way of making ABC gadgets (which were a clever derivative of the original XYZ gadget and sell much better because they can frobnicate as well as gadgerize). That's innovarion.
Situation 2: how things really work:
Turns out the notion of the XYZ gadget is obvious enough to practicioners in the field that there have been a dozen attempts to make and sell them before. But every time someone tries that, JoeDude steps out of the woodwork. JoeDude had one clever idea back in the seventies and so he got a patent. And he'll be happy to sell you the idea for a million bucks. Of course the world market for XYZ-gadgets is only $500,000 so nobody is willing to shell out that kind of money -- and JoeDude has found that he can actually make decent money by suing would-be manufacturers of XYZ-gadgets into nonexistence unless they settle with him for some sizable amount. The gadget never gets produced. XYZ-practicioners keep on having to frobnicate manually one-by-one. That's no innovation.
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued.Spoken like someone who's never had a single creative idea in his life. Who's never actually developed any new technology, made a new gadget, produced some original data.
And since you're just armchair-analyzing, you fantasize that the situation described above is some kind of rare edge-case. It isn't. It is the rule. I, personally, have at least one good marketable idea per week. A system, gadget, product for which I, myself, would gladly pay as much money as I think I could produce the product at. So does everybody around me. Because we're creative people who actually contribute usefully to society.
But in my industry (aerospace) innovation has been patented out of existence. The Boeings and Northrops and Lockheeds of the world are sitting on all the patents for every clever little idea anybody can possibly come up with and they refuse to do anything with them because that would require taking risks, breaking into new markets, developing whole new product categories. The exact kind of risk that a small entrepreneur could take on a small scale -- except that the patent situation has choked any such attempts to death.
And thus there's no innovation. People continue to do the exact same things with the exact same tools because the slightest deviation from what-was-there-before infringes on someone's patent somewhere. We do things in ways that could be streamlined to a degree that is laughable. Someone working in my group for a month should have collected dozens of ideas for products that have a real market just by listening to what we, ourselves, would be willing to pay money for. Products, innovations, that will never see reality. Because someone out there has a patent.
Ideas are cheap. Innovation is not in the dreaming up of ideas. It's in the execution. And it is that execution that is hampered by people who imagine they should be paid to the end of their lives for having had one idea somewhere.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
The biggest issue that brought patents into existence is the concept of development cost. Development cost when working with something physical can be exceedingly high. Ever look at what it costs to make one gear. When developing, people are not dealing with batches of hundreds of thousands of wheels and gears. It gets very expensive very quickly. When you're dealing with software, this is less of a problem unless you need a peculiar piece of hardware for the application. In those situations, it's once again a hardware cost.
The point of a patent is to prevent other people from taking a published work on how to do something useful, recreate it, pay no heed to the original developer, and suck the wind from their sails fast enough to prevent them from recuperating the development costs. Many brilliant men have died unknown only to be recognized years later because they invested everything and reclaimed nothing for it in spite of incredible advancements.
The problem with patents in the computer industry is that, with development costs so low in software, it is easy to develop in the field. When people need to background check for prior art, the associated body of literature is monstrous and evolving rapidly. It is extremely difficult to guarantee that your work has no prior art. Especially with computers as prolific as they are today, this is an even greater problem. Yes, patents in software hamper and are difficult to check because what might look like a simple patent could be broad enough to apply to hundreds of fields.
This is completely different from chip development!
It is not uncommon to, when you see something failing so often for a certain field, think it applies to all aspects and facets of it. The patent system has been around for a long time for a reason. In chip design, the literature does not evolve nearly as rapidly as in software design. In the post, they state that Intel met with the inventor of the technique to discuss using it. This means they were aware of the prior art and used it anyway. For chip development costs, before FPGAs were prolific, it could take months to get an in-hardware solution. Even with FPGAs, developing a processor or the key components for one takes a prohibitively large amount of hardware.
I think it's important to consider turn-around time in the length of a patent, and they fail to do so.
I'm pretty sure it's safe to venture a guess that the patents that are hampering you are software based.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.