Slashdot Mirror
Commission Affirms NVIDIA Violated Rambus Patents
MojoKid writes "The International Trade Commission has announced its findings in the NVIDIA/Rambus patent infringement lawsuit, and it's not the sort of ruling Team Green would've preferred. The commission found NVIDIA to be in violation of three Rambus patents. The trade panel also granted an injunction Rambus had requested, which theoretically prevents NVIDIA and the various companies attached to the lawsuit (Asus, HP, Palit, and MSI among others) from selling products that contain the infringing IP. The commission's decision this week affirms a January ruling that saw NVIDIA in violation of three Rambus patents while dismissing two additional claims of infringement Rambus made."
And RMBS takes down yet another member of JEDEC's bag of targets!
1. Submit tech to standards body.
2. Get tech widely used.
3. Patent tech.
4. SUE!
5. PROFIT!
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
If you're going to spend $10 billion on a process, you'd better make sure that the product it makes isn't infringing any patents. This isn't a helpless small developer; nvidia is the biggest of the big.
How can the US Patent office find that the Rambus patents are groundless http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1588351/nvidia-us-import-ban, and yet the ITC finds that some how NVIDIA violated 3 patents. This is the circus that never ends.
If you listen carefully, you can the lost souls of the Voodoo 5 6000 laughing.
We need to face facts; the patent system, like almost all other legal systems here, is ridiculously broken. The patent system was supposed to grow creativity but instead has become a tool for quick profits. Its ridiculous and needs to go.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Well, there is a downside too, but I would say it _did_ provide an advantage compared to ye olde days when (A) there wasn't much incentive to put too much money into new research, and (B) if you did, it was only if you could keep it secret.
Probably the best case that could be made is the Greek Fire, which gave the Byzantine armies and navies a major advantage. But they kept it so secret that a few centuries later they themselves didn't know how to make it any more. Probably a family business and once it went out of business, nobody knew how to make more. Suddenly a whole fleet of boats with flamethrowers was out of ammo. Yes, there is the recipe described by Anna Komnene, but it doesn't actually work. Even the royal family paying for that flamethrower fuel got a bogus recipe as what they're paying for.
I'd say it couldn't have hurt to let them patent it, ya know?
Another good case is Leonardo Da Vinci's tank which wouldn't actually work as designed. The schematic contains a simple flaw which Leonardo would probably know not to do that way, but anyone trying to steal his work would end up with a lot of work invested and monkey sunk into something that flat out can't move.
It's not the only one, btw. He hid flaws which would make the design non-functional even in such trivial stuff as his design of a trebuchet, which you have to wonder why. I mean, people had been building trebuchets for half a millennium at that point, so surely there'd be no point in trying to hide that knowledge. Oh, wait, except there totally was worth it. Engineers kept that kind of thing secret, so you'd have to pay them instead of just make your own copies, to the extent that for example Gengis Khan's armies made a point to capture the engineers from each city they took, and make them build siege engines for them.
Sometimes active disinformation went into protecting a trade secret too. E.g., why we got the noun "catgut". Violin strings were actually made of sheep gut, but the very few families who knew how, actively popularized a version which would be the wrong material, impractical, too expensive, and which most other people couldn't bring themselves to even try anyway.
Is a quick profit worse than that? I'm not that convinced.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, it's not like patents are mandatory or anything, so, yes, there will still be things which are still just secret instead.
Also, that stereotype of software patents is simply not true. True, _some_ patents are just vague ideas, or even just something as silly as business uniforms. (And, really, why the _fuck_ is a pizzeria's uniform a patent and not, say, a trademark? what is the scientific or technology advance there?) But most of them actually include at least a working algorithm and, if applicable, the maths behind it. Even without source code to copy, someone even half-way competent should be able to implement it.
Generally there is only so much that you can patent in advance as some vague idea, and there's only so big a time window to do so. If you went to the patent office with some idea like "compressing images somehow", if it's already in widespread use, you get laughed out the door, and if it's more than 20-30 years ahead of its time, you won't make anything out of it. It's not as practical as you'd think. Most patents actually do have to describe an actual way of solving the problem, in a different way than anyone patented before.
Basically, don't fall for the Slashdot meme that all the patents are some trivial blanket idea and without any clue (or even useless) to the actual implementation. Yes, the average comment or even summary here is along the lines of someone reading about a patent on some new clockwork mechanism and going "OMG, they're trying to patent the cog". Because, you know, it's what gives lots of karma fast, and it doesn't even require actually knowing what he's talking about. Reality tends to not be quite that bleak.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So the cost of innovation becomes incredibly expensive for the small guy, and any legal disagreement gets resolved in favor of the ones with deepest pockets. The system as it is is flawed, and deeply skewed towards the party who has more money.
What, you believed just because the told you patents were to promote progress in the sciences, that that is their real reason?
I've got new for you: the patent system is working precisely as designed.
Namely:
1. Innovation is successfully limited to (mostly) large enterprises
2. Smaller innovators can be sued or shut down on demand, or allowed to flourish if the appropriate corporate or political pockets are lined
3. Technological advancement is prevented from going exponential. Indeed, it is slowed to a relative, governable crawl, ensuring those in power stay there in perpetuity.
So far, little hiccups like the emergence of the Internet aside, the patent system is delivering precisely the results its designers and administrators intend. The only losers are the rest of humanity, and we are not, quite frankly, of any concern to the ruling class.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't know which nVidia parts are affected, but it's possible that RAMBUS might have shot itself in the foot if they covered all GPUs.
After all, RAMBUS' biggest wins are in the console market, and the PS3 has the distinction of having both RAMBUS memory in it (256MB system RAM - XDR-RAM), and nVidia GPU ("RSX"). Xbox360 and Wii use ATi parts, and don't use RAMBUS memory.
So if the PS3 also ends up blocked because of the ITC, it would affect licensing revenues for RAMBUS themselves, no? Heck, it may cause Sony to consider withdrawing their support as well...