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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 feel strangely compelled to say: "Captain, I protest! I am not a merry man!"
What has the Son of Mog done this time?
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
Intel is like, "No I will not make out with you! Did ya hear that? WARF wants to make out with me in the middle of a die shrink. You got Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer Man up there talking about God knows what and all WARF can talk about is making out with me. I'm here to make Core 2 Duos, everybody, not to make out with you. Go on with the patent."
Whoever says that Klingons can't resolve things in a civilized manner are clearly wrong.
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.
WARF is old and famous, one of the very first attempts to fund university research by patenting and commercializing research.
It was founded in the 1920s by a professor who invented the process for putting vitamin D in milk.
I believe they also had the patent for homogenizing milk (do you see a pattern here?)
And then, of course, there is WARFarin, the trade name for the anti-coagulation agent dicoumadin, which was discovered when a distressed farmer showed up at the University of Wisconsin's ag school with a bucket of blood from a dead heifer (the pattern continues) and wanted to know what had happened.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Pretty much, and that's why WARF is a non-profit, and any profits they get from patents they license are sent right back to the university for more research.
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I am a student at the University of Wisconsin, and also happen to work in WARF.(we call the building that the foundation is in WARF as well) The Foundation was set up to protect the discoveries of the university, and has paid for itself many times over, as some of the largest medical patents are held by them. There are also an innumerable amount of Stem Cell patents held by them which in the near future will prove to make a large amount of money. Being a Comp Sci student, I also have heard from some of my professors about issues with companies such as IBM and Intel, whom they have been in contact with, and cannot describe to us lowly students the details of their dealings. However they are definitely not patent trolls. I feel this will make things a little more interesting around the University though, to the point where we can see the true purpose of WARF and how it benefits the University. Bring on a new Comp Sci building!!
arrrg, (like a pirate)
Intel did the same thing back when they were developing Pentium. Intel reviewed the architecture and design of DEC's Alpha chip which they decided not to license it eventually. Later on, Intel surprised industry with huge performance gain from 486 to Pentium chip. One of the executives of Intel mentioned that they used features from mainframe to improve the performance of Pentium. The comment sounded fishy to DEC and when they looked at Pentium, and they found out that Intel copied some of the design from Alpha chip. DEC sued Intel and they settled outside of court.
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.
I always suspected modern computers were well beyond the ability of human invention.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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A quick view of the WARF website has a whole page on the royalty distribution: http://warf.ws/inventors/index.jsp?cid=14&scid=40
Of significant note:
You could at least get your complaints right.
With every due respect this shouldn't be 'funny'. This is a geek site, and we have standards to uphold: *Worf* is the son of *Mogh*.
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.]
From http://www.warf.org/inventors/index.jsp?cid=7
After deducting this portion, a certain percentage goes to their operating costs - I'm sure keeping a number of patent lawyers around isn't cheap. The good thing is that 20% is BEFORE those costs. The rest goes into a grant given to the university, distributed as such.
Whether or not shady accounting occurs in these settlements and grants I have no idea, but I have no reason to believe so. As I said before, everyone I know who holds a patent through WARF has been quite happy with the arrangement.
At UW, if no federal funding was involved, the intellectual property generated from research is the researcher's (unless there were strings attached to the private funding) - they don't HAVE to deal with WARF at all. I know this for a fact from my dealings with them - my collegues and I chose to work with them because the benefits of going through WARF FAR outweighed the the cons.
Sure, most settlements are confidential to the public, but not to the patent holder (who would include the inventor/researcher along with WARF).
From your post:
I appreciate your skepticism, and can understand where you're coming from except for this comment - you have no clue what I do or do not know - don't pretend you do for dramatic effect. I did my research on WARF when my personal interests were on the line, and from what I was able to discern it's a GOOD deal for the researchers/inventors, the University, and the student body.
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.
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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.