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Apple, Others Hit With Lawsuit On Ethernet Patents
bth nods an AppleInsider story on a patent troll who has gotten hold of fundamental Ethernet patents and is wielding them broadly. Three guesses which US Appeals Court the lawsuit was filed in. "A Texas company has targeted a number of technology companies, including Apple, in a new lawsuit regarding a handful of computer networking patents issued in the 1990s. ... 3Com Corporation was granted four patents from 1994 to 1998 pertaining to network adapters. Two deal with the automatic initiation of data transmission, and one addresses 'host indication optimization.' ... The company's Web site states that U.S. Ethernet Innovations was founded 'to continue 3Com Corporation's successful licensing program related to a portfolio of foundational patents in Ethernet technology.' A press release from the company states that it is the 'owner of the fundamental Ethernet technology developed and sold by 3Com Corporation in the 1990s,' suggesting it purchased the patents. ... In addition to Apple, the lawsuit names Acer, ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, Sony, and Toshiba as defendants."
Seems to me that asking for a trial by jury may very well backfire on them.
Token ring, here we come
looks like one day we'll have someone come up and say they filed a patent for life..
Three guesses which US Appeals Court the lawsuit was filed in.
None! You cannot originate a patent infringement suit in a United States Court of Appeals, any more than you can file in the Supreme Court. Instead, patent litigation must start at a United States District Court. The losing party may appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Everyone uses the _internet_, now. Who cares about ethernet?!
Now I suppose it's back to those pain-in-the-ass coaxial cables.
Legitimacy of the patents aside, I wonder why an Ethernet technology suit would be leveled against companies that do little more than assemble circuit boards.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
How difficult will it be to find a judge and jury whose sole access to the Internet is through dial-up, and whose workplace involves no computer networking whatsoever?
I seems to me that by waiting until this late in the game, to the point which nearly the entire world's Internet and telecommunications infrastructure is based on Ethernet in on incarnation or another is just plain sleezy.
The fact that 3Com, once a reputable company of top notch networking technology appears to be trying make money by exercising their patent pool through a 3rd party to raise much needed money. This is sad.
There was a point when the 3Com 3c509 and 3c905 ethernet adapters dominated the Ethernet world. In fact, while their cards were more expensive and more complex than nearly any other on the market, they were likely to be found in nearly every PC that was built of quality parts (meaning machines that chose ASUS motherboards over some fly by night).
The integration of Ethernet logic within chipsets pretty much destroyed the 3Com business model, after all, 3Com made more off the adapters than anything else. Today however nearly every high end motherboard I encounter implements a Marvell Ethernet PHY. Intel is selling tons of Ethernet PHY's to embedded vendors that implement their designs on FPGAs (meaning most high end rack based devices). 3Com is nowhere to be seen.
I have been patiently waiting for 3Com to come back and start taking the high end workstation and the server market seriously. I've been waiting for them to make great products again. Instead, they keep shoveling out lower and lower interest items. The trust the world once associated with their quality is decreasing so rapidly, soon people will see them as no better than Linksys or D-Link.
If I were 3Com, I'd seriously consider taking a project like Vyatta or the likes, start developing it into a high end system capable of managing switching (Layer-2 to Layer-4) and then build every product starting with their cheapest routers based on it. I'd start producing new silicon with high end features like TCP and UDP offloading and trying to get into the mass market PHY business. Most importantly, I'd start selling trust.
The problem is, by exercising these patents which people knew about but trusted 3Com to never exercise since it would just force all the other vendors on the market to lash back at them with their huge patent pools, they're destroying the last remaining bit of trust which was for a long time the only the 3Com had left.
Rest In Peace 3Com, it's unfortunate that everything I ever loved about you is gone. Another great innovator has died. Now you can sleep eternally in a grave dug next to SCOs
I wonder why the plaintiff is not suing some obvious companies. Cisco would be an obvious candidate -- and they have deep pockets. But all of the current defendants don't actually make Ethernet equipment. They buy Ethernet chipsets from companies like Intel, Broadcom, AMD, Marvell, VIA, and NVIDIA, among many others. Why isn't the plaintiff suing them?
Just imagine what would happen if PARC became a patent troll. The ethernet originated there in the form of an office memo, so they can make a pretty good lawsuit out of that one. Not to mention laser printing, page markup, OOP, groundbreaking work on NLP, rudimentary VLSI and perhaps most famously the GUI. They did loose a landmark case against Apple for the GUI, though.
It's pretty amazing if you think about it what a few people can do to change the world.
Amazing that Slashdot still can't master the technology of the "spellcheck", which I had in WordStar in 1987.
Probably because they're idiots and don't really know what "patents" are or Ethernet for that matter. I could understand Broadcom and Intel getting sued, but like you say PC "producers" barely produce the parts they use! I wonder if it will get thrown out of court quickly or really quickly?
Anyone else read that as Use Their Net Innovations?
This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?
Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.
Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.
Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.
Or am I completely missing something?
Assuming that the article's list of defendants is complete, it's interesting that this troll is going after companies which make finished systems, and not the companies which make the actual ethernet chipsets and MACs that go into those systems (Broadcom, Marvel, Intel, RealTek, etc)
One would think that those would be the source of any patent infringements (real or imagined) when talking about ethernet itself.
Maybe he was not terminated, but instead became himself an Ethernet terminator.
<sarcasm>It patents the idea of putting a memory buffer on the network card. Who would have thought of that?</sarcasm>
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them. Well, the US patent system has a lot more problems like obvious things being patented and being able to patent business processes.
But apart from the US,some of the biggest problems come up in companies buying patents and being patent trolls. Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, selling the patent isn't protecting the inventor anymore. Also unless a company merges with another company I think all patents that the company owns should dissolve with the company and be unpatentable.
If you have a patent, I think you should be required to have products out using that patent, or at least working on making products with that patent. Too many companies patent something that they heard someone else speak about, they have no plans to use the patent, just profit off of someone else's work by beating them to the patent office, or just plain having the money to buy the patent where the person doesn't. I guess that still wouldn't quite solve the problem. There would need to be some process where you proved that you created the idea.
*start rant* Now as for the US Patent system, there is an official report that calls it too much of a joke for us to merge our patent system with their's. Our company started looking at US Patents and as far as we can tell, you can't write a line of code with out violating a patent. It is so silly that "If...else" is patented. "ifelse" is patented. "Begin...End" is patented. I think you can get away with "{...}" blocks, but not much else.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
So you'd like to prevent specialisation? A company that's good at R&D probably won't be good at manufacturing, selling and distribution.
The problem in this case, like many others, is the breadth & vagueness of the patent.
At the bottom of the
Unlike copyright terms, which have cancerously grown to effectively more than a century (for every work created more than 30 years before death), patent terms are still at the relatively reasonable lengths copyright used to be.
It varies by type, but the standard appears to be 20 years. This patent was filed in 1990.
Someone really did wait until the absolutely last possible moment. In another year, the patent will run out, so we should be able to keep using ethernet without disruption regardless of the outcome.
However, the damages would likely be retroactive, so the companies involved must still hope that the patent gets tossed out.
((Also, all of the above is Wikipedia-fueled speculation by a non-lawyer.))
There are valid uses for patents that are not held by a manufacturing firm.
For one thing, the person inventing a new device may not have the capability or desire to manufacture it -- should they not be allowed to procure and then sell or license a patent to protect and profit from their design.
Or consider patents held by a licensing group; two or more industry players hold patents that would work well together -- say for two different but compatible methods of improving motor efficiency. They might want to form an independent business that owns both patents and provides licensing to the entire industry but does not in itself make motors, so as to avoid being be competitor either to the original companies or the rest of the industry. This is a fairly common scenario for everything from compressors to DVD players, and while in some instances you could form a joint venture or simply provide cross-licensing, there are other situations where an independent, non-competing licensing consortium is the best option.
The old model was: if sales are down, borrow your way out of debt.
The new model is: if sales are down, patently sue yourself out of the red.
Problem: SCO have long proved this does not work...
they all use coinsneakernet
OK, so everyone who appreciates their privacy has left or is leaving.
Those who don't like paying US tax when they're not even living there are changing citizenship.
Any non-US company running anything in finance is closing shop (thus reducing available capital to lend).
Anyone using the US Dollar is slowly reducing their exposure as there is credible evidence both reserve currency as well as energy trading currency may not be the US dollar for that much longer - all that holds that one up is foreign ownership which is gradually being reduced too (tick tock tick tock).
Every entrepreneur who wants to set up shop avoids the US as well as it's likely that even breathing can be patented and litigated. Sure, you can fight it in court, but why not avoid the problem (and costs) altogether by not having a US business?
The last one out doesn't need to bother switching off the light - it's already dimming now..
But, I hear there's a lot of that going 'round at the moment...
"Good news, everyone!"
Now, I'm not a lawyer, however isn't a part of the patent system protect it or lose it, if it was made apart of a standard that is used globally, it means they can't say they didn't know about it, so isn't them waiting 10 years invalidating the license because they didn't protect it?
The named Companys betwee them could most likley by sell and then crap on the troll a dozen times a day for the next 100 years out of their small change
why dont they just tell the troll to go play in the traffic during the rush hour whilst i am driving down the road Oh ! dear flattened troll Police report toady a drunken bum got flattened by passing traffic the victim was and unknow patent troll remains will be incinerated tomorow.
3COM's playing the "May fortune favor the foolish" strategy.
From 1994 to 1997 I worked for a company that worked with 3Com writing device drivers for the 3Com adapters that seem to be based on these DMA patents. My vague recollection is that we spent at least 2 years working with at least 3 different versions of 3Com's EISA and PCI ethernet adapters and as far as I know the full DMA mode never worked 100% correctly on any of them. The different versions of their controllers had different bugs. Some would lockup, some would drop interrupts, or randomly stop DMA mode, or corrupt buffers, etc. I think in most cases the workaround suggestion from 3Com was to periodically poll the adapter status and if you detect it's wedged force a full reset and completely reinitialize the adapter. Of course doing stuff like that totally destroys system performance so we simply ignored the DMA capabilities and did PIO in the interrupt handlers to transfer packets to/from the adapters 1-2K buffers (one packet per interrupt). I might be wrong but I think it was at least 1998 and their 4th generation PCI-ethernet adapter before 3Com had a PCI-ethernet design that did DMA to/from ring buffers correctly and by that time the rest of the world was all shipping products based on $10 dnet-clones from 6 or 7 companies in Taiwan (and 3Com's design had morphed into a something that looked a lot like dnet-clone but with a lot of extra, useless features).
That fella is givin Texas a bad name..
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
This has been brought up before in the past when similar actions came up. My question is, does estoppel even exist anymore? Or is it an archaic somewhat quaint idea that only a naive person would expect to be honored? It seems these days submarine patents and the like are the norm and this simple legal concept should stop such things in their tracks. It's obviously the new business plan, sit on a patent for 10 or 20 years til everyone is using it, then all the sudden start suing.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Just because a company holds a patent you dont like doesnt mean they are a patent troll.
3com may have very well held legitimate patents that were routinely and widely violated, they sold the patents
because it wasnt worth the effort to sue patent violators.
These are not software patents, they are regular old style patents.
They are not suing open source, they are suing large well funded companies that made healthy profits
using the technologies these patents were based on.
In any event the patent they are referring to expires in three years so if they are going to sue its now or never.
I read that as
"Apple, Others Hit With Lawsuit On Ethernet Pants"
I've started documenting it here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/U.S._Ethernet_Innovations_v._many_defendants_(2009%2C_USA)
Help sought. Thanks.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
...Apple infringing on patents. When will you iPeople wake up and realize that Apple is NOT the benevolent company that you have all built it up to be?
A fine kick off for the patent reform would be to shut down that Texas district court. I was going to say 'revolution' and 'burn down' but those words are too big for me.
I was excited recently (OK, I'm a language geek) to learn that there's a "real" word for patent trolling: champerty (http://wordsmith.org/words/champerty.html)
Is that little rule - I before E except after C - still actually being taught?
Besides 'weird', here's a collection of other words that do not fit that rule:
e-ism (atheism), e-ing (being), e-ish (blueish), etc.
interrupted: albeit
sounds like 'A': airfreight, aweigh, beige, bobsleigh, heinous (heehee, he said heinous), heir
sounds like 'I': abseil, feisty
silent: forfeit
Even if you take the modified form of "I Before E except after C when it sounds like 'E'"...
caffeine, casein, codeine
Even if you modify it further "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't some chemical compound"...
Ashleigh, Keith, O'Neill (two "L"s, the one with a sense of humor)
So let's make it "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't a name like that of a person, object, or substance.."
ceiling, conceit, conceive, deceit, deceive, obeisance
I haven't even paged through my dictionary file beyond the letter 'O' yet and already I think you can tell that the "I before E" rule is an abomination. Not in the least due to all of the exceptions made above where you'd have to come up with new rules, or just teach the kids the correct spelling of the word 'as is'. I sure hope "I before E" is not still being taught.
Oh hell, I just noticed there's a Wikipedia topic for it - of course there is. *mutter* - and at least the Brits clued up; "In June 2009, the British government advised primary school teachers to stop teaching the rule."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_before_E_except_after_C
gah.. forgot to note the odd one out in the "ceiling, conceit, conceive, deceit, deceive, *obeisance*" list. /me *seizes* the preview button /nokarma while waiting for the post delay (oh noes it's been only 1 minute! slashfail to my postfail.) while reply posts point this glaring omission out.
If this company is actually successful in bleeding "offending" companies for money that they really aren't entitled to, I see a work-around in the future!! I hope either the judicial system sees the light (not likely) and tosses these idiots out of court on their but, or the industry just circumvents the DMA procedure with another method of getting the job done.
So let's make it "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't a name like that of a person, object, or substance.." Ceiling, conCeit, conCeive, deCeit, deCeive, obeisance
I
You have a point, however most of the examples you used in this particular point do not actually support that point (notice where the E and the I come relative to the C)
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm starting to think that one of the biggest problems with patents is being able to sell them and hold them with out making products based on them...
Patents were supposed to protect the inventor, selling the patent isn't protecting the inventor anymore. Also unless a company merges with another company I think all patents that the company owns should dissolve with the company and be unpatentable.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea. All inventors should be employed by large faceless corporations, and if anyone is self-employed or invents something in their garage, they can't sell the patent to a company to make their invention. This would absolutely crush innovation by anyone not employed by a large corporation. As a wealthy investor who's opposed to competition from innovators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses, I welcome your idea.
Naaa, the biggest problems are pretty much the following:
1)There are no effective checks to stop people patenting obvious things or things that are not patentable. Combined with a complete lack of penalties (at least in practice ) for abusing the system and the expense involved with defending yourself against a lawsuit this allows patent trolls to cause a great deal of harm to companies and individuals who have done nothing wrong.
2)There is in practice a complete lack of punishment for deliberately filing invalid patents and patent claims.
3)Patent law is to a very large extent not based on any form of independent analysis of its consequences but rather the work of lobbying by special interest groups. In otehr words, patent law is designed to be profitable, not just.
4)Because patent law allows very vague and broad interpretations of patent claims, and because you can be found to be infringing even if you had never heard of a plaintiff's patent, it is in practice impossible to market ANY product without infringing on SOME patent.
5)Because large plaintiffs can essentially force smaller companies to settle by simply dragging a case along, the outcome of a lawsuit is often determined not by who is in the right, but who has the most money to spend on legal battles ( this is a more general problem with the US legal system ).
Or simply put: Due to intense lobbying by patent holders and existing monopolies the system is more or less designed to allow plaintiffs to abuse the system for purposes different from the original motivation of promoting arts and sciences. There is little justice or balance in the system and patent lawsuits mostly boil down to who has the deepest pockets rather than who is in the right.
...the end users of pre-designed/manufactured dropin chipsets providing this functionality? Apple certainly doesn't develop their own ethernet cards any longer, they just pickup a pre-designed chipset from some OEM and plop it down in their design. So, it would seem to me that companies like Apple are perfectly in the clear and it would be the chipset OEMs that are at risk.
Of course the same could be said for the recent WiFi patent disputes, very few of those companies sued or coerced into licensing actually produce their own chipsets, so why would they need the license? Only the OEM should need the license if they even really need one at all...
In your last iteration, all but one example were after C.
First - someone please notify Al Gore that 3Com is claiming patent rights over the internet HE invented. I'm sure a movie will be forthcoming.
Second - and slightly more seriously - what about RFC 826 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc826.html) regarding ethernet? Oddly enough 3Com isn't a part of that document and it clearly says "...This protocol was originally designed for the DEC/Intel/Xerox
10Mbit Ethernet..." and was published in 1982. Here are the other ethernet related RFCs (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/np.html#ETH).
Now there IS a patent for the original ethernet standard issued in 1977 to Dr. Metcalfe, et al on behalf of Xerox (do we hear echos of PARC?) - http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4063220
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.html
Calling 3com a patent troll? Are you serious or just stupid?
Nazi!!!!
Just another company claiming rights over something Xerox invented. Thank God Xerox didn't invent MP3 players.
"I" before "e" except after "c" or when sounding like "a" as in "neighbor" or "weigh" and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say.
--source unremembered
yeah, that was my point.. which I failed to actually note down >_ where's a version control system in slashcode so we can start editing our posts so we don't have to post follow-up posts? :P /nokarma /anon
...It's good to see Darryl McBride found a new job so quickly, isn't it? Who says the job market is down...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I suspect, that they avoided suing members who were on the 802.3 (Ethernet) committee. Each of which contributed technology to the Ethernet standard(s). (Excepting HP, which split off it's semi tech to Agilent Technologies. )
AMD, IBM, Intel and 3com where all core members. "802.3 Patent Letters of Assurance"
I can only imagine that this lawsuit is over Ethernet tech not based on Intel, AMD, IBM, or VIA chip sets/technology. But, instead it's about routers, gateways, wireless access points, printers, etc which connected up via Ethernet tech.
The concept of bus mastering/DMA hidden control & buffer memory technology is just an extension of intelligent add on Ethernet boards, (VME, MultiBus-II, etc), dating back to the early 1980's.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would hope you're right...
DMA wasn't intented in the 90s. Even low-speed serial ports *should* have been doing this kind of stuff in the 80s (and before).
I recall having a 386SX-16MHz that couldn't handle a screensaver and a file transfer at 2400bps dialup modem at the same time. [And that was a real "hardware" modem, not this soft-modem-crap that came out much later.] Not exactly the hardware's fault, but networking was not always about high-speed.
The companies are major leaque international players with the financial, legal and political clout to kick back very hard. Also the Wikipedia entry for ethernet (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet) would indicate prior art and patenting. It says:- "Ethernet was originally developed at Xerox PARC in 1973–1975.[2] In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson as inventors (U.S. Patent 4,063,220: Multipoint data communication system (with collision detection)). In 1976, after the system was deployed at PARC, Metcalfe and Boggs published a seminal paper.[3] ... "
So let's make it "I before E except after C when it sounds like 'E' and isn't a name like that of a person, object, or substance.."
ceiling, conceit, conceive, deceit, deceive, obeisance
Y'know most of those are after C.
... and *thick* coaxial cables ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.