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Graphics Rendering Patent Suits Target Apple, Samsung, HTC, RIM, LG and Sony
angry tapir writes "Formerly known as Silicon Graphics, Graphics Properties Holdings has filed six separate patent cases against Apple, Samsung, Research In Motion, HTC, Sony and LG with the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patent at issue in the lawsuits relates to floating point calculations to render graphics, and is registered as patent number 8,144,158 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office."
Back in the mid-late '90s, I was a dedicated SGI user, working on an Indy with PhotoShop 3.0 and all that good stuff.
I'm disappointed to see SGI apparently taking the SCO path here.
(Ironically, I administered a SCO OpenSewer box far more recently than I got to use any SGI kit.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"Silicon Graphics -> Graphics Properties Holdings"
Now you have to change your name when you go from "making and selling" to "patent trolling"?
Ludicrous! What will be next? Bankers renaming themselves to Society Leeches?
You've only read the damn abstract haven't you?
How many times do people have to say READ THE CLAIMS before it sinks in that the abstract normally only gives an example and the patents claims normally go far beyond that. In some patents the abstract comes close to being completely misleading. Incidentally the claims are not restricted to 16 bit floating point representations or any other size of floating point accuracy, plus it's a continuation of other patents, so don't forget to read their claims too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I was hoping SGI would at least somewhat gracefully fade away, instead someone decided to do a cash grab before the remnants of a once-great company finally disappear...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I did only read the summary of the patent because I go into a brain-dead-mode if I have to read such English....but did they just patent drawing onto a framebuffer using floats instead of ints?
Such a gluttonous appetite for money; they remind me of two sea cucumbers trying to devour each other.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Looks like the patent was issued only yesterday.
Keep on suing each other, boys! Sue, sue, sue! That'll teach you a lesson!
and slap the label, "on a phone" or "for a mobile device", and PRESTO! You have a new, patentable use for the obvious.
--- b2b.mallaidh.org | www.mallaidh.org | www.kidsalive.org/article/kahlil-pfaff/
really. using 16 bit floating point to hold color.
"yo we patented opengl with 16bit floating point in the 2000's". should be fucking obvious. increasing it to 32bit and 64bit too and other number holding formats.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So, im pretty sure there exists prior art for putting a . behind a number to mark some fraction of a number
Actually it's dedicated hardware plus floating point is their claim. Floating point with rendering was pre-existing (the fixed point arithmetic they did away with was a way of speeding that up).
So in essence they patented doing what was done before only on hardware not intended to do other stuff.
Pity they couldn't find a market, but patent trolling adds nothing of value to society and just adds an economic burden on the viable companies.
This shows how ridiculous it is to allow companies to file patents on simple things and keep them for 20 years. A patent should protect an inventor from copycats, and it shouldn't do more than just that. In this case, making the hardware took a few months, making money before the competition did took one or two years, so the patent shouldn't have been valid for more than, say, two years.
We need a serious reform of patent law, worldwide.
no, I don't have a sig
I find patents difficult to read. They're written in such an abstract way.
However, my interpretation is that this seems to be the idea of storing data as floating point, and operating on it using floating point hardware. Surely this sort of thing has been around for a while.
So patent trolls are terrrrrists? Interesting theory, let's see...
Hate us for our freedom to produce and innovate? Check.
Cripple the economy? Check.
Try to influence politics by their practices? Check.
I think you're on to something here...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This isn't the first time SGI has sued over these type of patents, see Slashdot 2006, and the 2010 ruling in SILICON GRAPHICS V ATI TECHNOLOGIES
Simply shoot the lawyers and the "Graphics Properties Holdings" to death. This already gone too far.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
>and ate themselves
Each other, surely? Or do things get *really* bad?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Look at the date on the patent. There is a massive amount of prior art. This is a silly patent and lawsuit.
Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/
Haven't we had graphics using floating point numbers since like, the Nintendo 64 days?
Nintendo 64 had an SGI chipset. It was essentially a stripped-down SGI workstation in the same way that the original Xbox would be a stripped-down PC. This patent is owned by the remnants of SGI that weren't sold to Rackable.
I don't think there is anyone who is going to question SGI's degree of innovation or importance in the industry. I'd hope that most of their patents are expired or near expired because turning the company into a patent troll is like necrophilia, defaming the body of the dead to satisfy the living. That being said, there could be a lot of innovations there we all take for granted and this could be really harmful. I sincerely hope that they lose while being very afraid they'll win.
This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.
Even back in the fall of 1986 at University of Saskatchewan in my graphics class, the algorithms we started with were presented as floating point algorithms. We were then shown the integer variants on those algorithms, which we were told bluntly were used only because they were faster than floating point emulation.
So they got a patent for doing something that we were told not to do purely for performance reasons, not for any reason of logic or functionality. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind this whole patent should be overturned.
And, yes, I was heavily into computer graphics at the time. I even was a contributing publisher to a paper on the "Fast Line Clipping" algorithm, which really, in retrospect, was not so much an innovation as an example of a very advanced special case of loop and conditional unrolling that some of the more advanced modern compilers can probably to automatically at this present time. If you want to check out that crufty old article, you'll have a better chance of finding it by searching for Yang or Pospisil, the professor and grad student for the project; I was just a fourth year programmer at the time.
No, we didn't patent our algorithm. Back then the point of research and development was to learn and share, not to squat and sue.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Agree completely.
They buy a property low and then milk it for all they can get. They are true red neck entrepreneurs. Patents are there to protect the creators/inventor and their family to make a reasonable profit on the idea for a limited number of years. What the "owner"/"entrepreneurs" have done is take that idea, bundle the IP as a commodity and buy and sell it on the secondary market. Very different than the intent of the law and creates a system that does not favor the inventor. Much like the pay day loan business, and just as socially acceptable.
Wow! What a reaction. These angry comments that sometimes come from seemingly nowhere... really do baffle me. And they're often responses to a spot of light humour too. It amazes me that some people are really that full of anger.
I wonder if Darl McBride is working there now.
Seriously, any time the word "Holdings" shows up in a company's name, run like hell.
The claim that "Graphics Properties Holdings" is the former SGI is wrong.
SGI still exists, and has nothing to do with "Graphics Properties Holdings."
SGI had a troubled history in the dot com bust, and sold off many assets to keep itself afloat. SGI stopped making their own graphics hardware years ago; a number of patents were sold at the time, apparently a few made it to patent trolls. The current "Cray" was another case of SGI selling the trademarks and brands to Tera Computer Company - SGI kept most of the Cray engineers.
Silicon Graphics Inc. then died a slow death, going into bankruptcy twice before being bought by Rackable, which kept most of the SGI employees, and renamed itself SGI.
SGI still exists more or less unchanged from the SGI of yesteryear (though without MIPS, IRIX, or graphics workstations) - and is not part of "Graphics Properties Holdings."
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
It happens... it shouldn't. But check out the notorious CADtrack XOR patent (US Patent 4,197,590). CADtrack was some kind of CAD company from way back, that emerged in the 80s as a patent troll. They had a patent on using the XOR operation to draw and undraw a cursor on a bitmapped screen. This should have completely failed the test of obviousness... I did exactly this as a kid of 17 on my first home computer, an Exidy Sorcerer (it didn't have full bitmapped graphics, but it had programmable character memory that could be used to simulate some game-class bitmapped displays with some cleverness). And at that point, I was mostly just self-taught "in the art", having read many issues of BYTE, Kilobaud, and Creative Computing. There should be a "kid rule"... if a High Schooler or below figured out your thing independently, you lose your patent.
A buddy of mine worked with the lawyers at Commodore on this, as we were being sued. He resolved to patent AND and OR... I don't think he could come up with the cash, though.
-Dave Haynie
Patents need to die with the filing company, not be trasferrable to a patent troll.