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Jury Hits Marvell With $1 Billion+ Fine Over CMU Patents
Dupple writes with news carried by the BBC of a gigantic tech-patent case that (seemingly for once) doesn't involve Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, or Google:
"'U.S. chipmaker Marvell Technology faces having to pay one of the biggest ever patent damage awards. A jury in Pittsburgh found the firm guilty of infringing two hard disk innovations owned by local university Carnegie Mellon.' Though the company claims that the CMU patents weren't valid because the university hadn't invented anything new, saying a Seagate patent of 14 months earlier described everything that the CMU patents do, the jury found that Marvell's chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. "method and apparatus for correlation-sensitive adaptive sequence detection" and "soft and hard sequence detection in ISI memory channels.' 'It said Marvell should pay $1.17bn (£723m) in compensation — however that sum could be multiplied up to three times by the judge because the jury had also said the act had been "wilful." Marvell's shares fell more than 10%.'"
Now stop asking me for money.
Maybe still not enough to trigger any reaction ?
We will soon live in a world without any privacy, paying for everything, and where thinking is forbidden.
Money, money, money....
Still something to eat ?
Look at this graph, move the time scale forward and change 'hole left by Christian dark ages' to 'hole left by fear of patent infringement'.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
He deserves it. He's a "maker" and not a "taker."
haw haw haw
So they claim Marvel make hard drives but since they don't, I take it they're talking about their SSD controllers? There's no way in hell they made a billion off that. Otherwise the article contradicts itself and says they instead supply parts for others to make spinning hard drives and gives a number. They said WD is their big customer but not sole customer so...Seagate sued their own supplier? Or they join sued or...I don't get it. Really nothing in this article makes sense. Does anyone have a link to a more accurate one?
P.S. after Marvel's long history of the world's worst ethernet controllers, they deserve this
Individual patent claims are not sufficient to describe the scope of a patent. They only do so collectively. So, how is it that Marvell (or anyone else) can be held liable for violating a single claim?
Of course, I'm thinking of the infamous claim: "A microprocessor controller comprising memory, input-output and memory", which when added to prior art seems to create novel technology in the eyes of the USPTO. If one could violate a single claim, then this one alone would innovation in the computing field.
Have gnu, will travel.
agreed. This is so dumb. Even if some little guy invents it the big guy comes in and buys it from him. It's a form of Monopoly. 'Merica use to care about those things, but I guess we don't anymore. Eventually it's going to be like 1 company that owns all the technology.
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
They made billions of dollars off the patents of others and didn't pay appropriately to the patent holders?
If CMU invested capital in discovering/creating these innovations, they should get *some* return on their investment. Otherwise, they'll have to stop discovering/innovating because they can't afford it.
How would it feel to score a million dollar software patent judgment against Pixar and Lucasfilm?
Thing is, making money is how for-profit entities operate. Non-profits, like CMU, get grants and patronage. I admit, without a proper patronage system, which the GP suggests, CMU is frequently going to come up short on funds, especially if they want to expand and improve their research abilities. That does not mean, however, that making a lot of money means that it's okay to punish a for-profit business for taking that idea and making profit on it without being just a little critical of the system that expects research universities to provide public research, while at the same time, feeling the need to cash in on what the for-profit producers do with it.
The idea of a jury of non-engineers deciding on their novelty is at best weird.
A story about CMU suing Marvell for patent infringement and you are blabbering about Apple? You should realize not everyone shares your off topic obsession.
The BSD license and philosophy, I'm not sure you understand it...
Just listen to the language used to describe the innovative aspect of the two claimed patents and think how few people have the brainpower to even understand what they are talking about so that they could figure out how the claimed patents relate to a prior patent. After many years playing at the intersections of hardware and firmware and software, I know I couldn't. Yet our system empowers a bunch of non-EEs to decide matters on which billions hinge. Crazy. But what is a better system, letting experts onto the jury? Been there recently and how did that turn out?
At least, in the opinion of Linux Torvalds.
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
They made billions of dollars off the patents of others and didn't pay appropriately to the patent holders?
Seagate? I haven't penetrated the patent speak of the patents in question, but the 839 patent looks suspiciously similar to the Seagate patent referenced. This is just an example of courts and expensive lawyers doing the job that should be done up front by the US patent office, ie. looking for and evaluating prior art.
Patent awards should be (as I understand it) compensated on what the plaintiff would have made had the infringement not taken place (lost sales or licensing fees). I would be very surprised if CMU had made $1bn off any licensing program, let alone 2 patents to a single licensee, so I fail to see how such a large reward could be made.
IANAL etc.
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
They made billions of dollars off the patents of others and didn't pay appropriately to the patent holders?
I would hope that a judge/jury would only be able to award punitive damages if the plaintiff provided convincing evidence that the defendant willfully and knowingly violated the plaintiff's patents.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Im not sure its really possible to "steal" BSD code. Im no copyright lawyer, but if it were antithetical to the BSD philosophy, wouldnt the BSD license look a lot more like the GPL?
I think the BSD philosophy is essentially "heres some work we did, and anyone can do whatever they want with it."
Ars has another article; this one actually cites the patent numbers and specific claims found to be infringing.
Reading one of the claims, I can't imagine how a jury of Joe Sixpacks could possibly come to a rational conclusion on whether or not infringement occured. I'm an EE and it's gibberish to me without putting some significant Google-time in. Claim 4 of US6201389, for example:
"4. A method of determining branch metric values for branches of a trellis for a Viterbi-like detector, comprising:
selecting a branch metric function for each of the branches at a certain time index from a set of signal-dependent branch metric functions; and
applying each of said selected functions to a plurality of signal samples to determine the metric value corresponding to the branch for which the applied branch metric function was selected, wherein each sample corresponds to a different sampling time instant."
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
All restaurants are Taco Bell.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
A U.S. University trying to put a U.S. Technology company out of business. Way to go guys. There aren't too many U.S. Technology companies left, and this is why.
We are putting ourselves out of business!
Returns are how you score the game. Or, to put it another way – is what you doing adding value or are you just blowing in the wind.
And if you have invested in things that don’t return returns I suggest that you are not investing – you’re doing something else. Doesn’t mean you doing things wrong – it’s just not investing.
It's simply the jury's emotional response to the death of Peter Parker.
Im not sure its really possible to "steal" BSD code.
It sure is. You must leave the copyright notices and acknowledgement intact. In the event only a binary form is distributed, it must be present somewhere in the application/documentation (usually you find it buried in help documentation somewhere). Also, depending on the BSD license version, you also can't use the author/organization for marketing/endorsing/promotion without their permission.
Basically, the BSD licenses isn't so much dictating what can be done with the code, but to require giving credit to the programmer(s) who wrote the code. Well, besides the boilerplate "as-is" liability waiver in every license.
Is this statement in any way related to CMU's Mach kernel used by Apple for OS X? That is, maybe the poster is musing that if the BSDs were not BSD-licensed, CMU could not have made Mach, and the only Apples in existence would be Mac OS 9 computers in museums?
But wouldn't a better post be along the lines of: what if CMU could somehow renege on the Mach kernel? Where would Apple be, then?
Their they're doing there hair.
Uhhh...kinda sad when the Windows guy understands licenses better than the FOSS zealots. First of all you CANNOT STEAL from BSD, the code is still there for all to use as they see fit, instead of sticking a gun to your head and forcing you to "share", second Apple has given back a hell of a lot more than they have taken out, such as CUPS and Webkit, again just as BSD intended.
Its actually quite simple, you want to lock something up in BSD land? Its not a problem but YOU are gonna be responsible for the fork you have just created, whereas if you CHOOSE to share your changes they can be incorporated into the mainline. Personally I find this to be much better that slitting the throat of the entire ecosystem because of the "blessed three" which is the only way to make money in Linux land. I of course am speaking of support, selling hardware, or the tin cup, which is why you don't see AAA games under FOSS or even a desktop that can compete with OSX, because too many niches aren't covered by the blessed three so you get half baked and poorly supported because there isn't any way to make money in all these areas not covered by the blessed three.
But am I the only one that finds it ironic as hell that when a FOSSie rails against BSD they sound almost exactly like the *.A.A copyright trolls? Its all about stealing and "protecting the rights",hell you could take any FOSSie railing against BSD and simply change a few words and you'd have a classic MPAA/RIAA rant, almost no effort required to switch between the two.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The BSD license and philosophy, I'm not sure you understand it...
I very well know that the BSD license is 'freer' and more permissive than the GPL, which was the motivation for Apple to steal BSD licensed code and close their additions to it.
Maybe you could clarify how Apple "stole" this BSD-licensed code; did they take a hard drive or CD/DVD which contained the only copy of the code?
If you're actually accusing them of infringing on the copyright, then you should just have said so. Though from reading the BSD license, it appears that Apple is in compliance.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
But you can also decide to forego this return on investment for the good of mankind. Which, arguably, is what universities should be pursuing in the first place, not trying to maximize their ROI, as private companies do very well.
Profits are very useful because you get valuable information about what you're doing and it allows resources to be put to the most valuable use. But it doesn't really apply to basic research. That kind of research is not meant to create products that can be sold for a profit, but to increase our collective knowledge. This may or may not give rise to new applications, technologies, and products, but that's not main point. And if something does prove valuable, wouldn't it be better if it were freely licensed to all interested parties to allow for cheap production, for other people to freely improve upon it, etc.?
That's the whole point behind endowments. Give universities so much money that their survival doesn't depend on their monetizing their discoveries. CMU has a $1 billion endowment that makes it very unlikely that it'll have to stop innovating because they failed to secure a patent on everything they discover. Especially since much of the research conducted in universities is actually funded by the government, as a public good.
Can't see shit in that picture except a license plate. I'm supposed to be outraged over a Ferrari? They aren't anywhere near the top of the supercar price list.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Not really; an EE will see it as gibberish because this is a software algorithm patent. The fact that someone outside of the relevant field can tell it is outside their field does not make it novel. For all I know, this is an obvious and everyday implementation as viewed by satellite communications, compression or similar folks (or hard drive seek algorithm designers), but not to any old engineer (let alone any old Joe Sixpack). Which is exactly my point - a jury of randoms trying to decide a field-specialized patent case are no better than a bag of dice.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Or NeXT wouldn't have used FreeBSD as it's core to begin with, which means that Apple would have gone a different road for OS X, like BeOS which was also a contender.
However, the Regents of the University of California had a chance to do something that would foster innovation in the computer world for decades to come, properly recognized it, and created the BSD license. Let's be glad they did, rather than listen to people like you.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Patents are definitely not evil. You will have considerably less innovation without patents -- no one wants to work for free.
The $1 billion fine over two not-so-innovative claims is simply ridiculous and extremely greedy. It should be a few million, at most. How do they calculate these fines? Does the jury know anything about the patent system, the hard disk subsystem or this particular patent?
Have you ever designed a board with Marvell chips? They require signing of an NDA by a manager before you can even look at the "personalized" watermarked datasheets. They are secretive with their products' technical data to the point of being weird. I guess now we know why.
Uhm ... the license states they need to give credit ... that was the creators ideals. They give credit as defined by the license. The creators have included with the code their ideals and they followed them as written. You claiming anything else just makes you a liar.
They didn't take anything away. They made a copy. The original students still have access to their original work.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You mean like how Marvell turned down CMU's offer to license the patents? I think that constitutes willful infringement, don't you?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If they had, I imagine all the software derived from that work simply would have been based off something else instead. No fall out, just alternative history.
How many jurors in that jury you think fully understand what the patents are and how they are applied to reward such big amount of money? Which one more likely: all of them or none of them? You would think it is necessary to understand the patent fully in order to make a right decision. Instead they probably made the decision based on what the lawyers said, and we know that all lawyers tell the truth right?
I see what you did there. You invented your own definition of "stealing". I guess you are free to do that, at the risk of clouding your communication, but the rest of us are likely to see it as a trifle eccentric.
While I agree with your opinion that the BSD license was respected, I have to point out that both CUPS and Webkit are not Apple creations.
CUPS was started in 1997 by Michael Sweet, was adopted by Apple in Mac OS X in 2002 and in 2007 Apple bought the CUPS source code.
Webkit is a fork of KHTML. KHTML started in 1998, was forked in 2001 by Apple into Webkit and Webkit itself was open sourced in 2005.
Apple did indeed give their contributions back to the community, but those projects are not Apple creations as a whole. Also, the fact that Apple has given back more than they have benefited is debatable, if those two examples are the only things that spring to mind.
Anyone know if the inventions underpinning the patents were developed using taxpayer money? If so, that issue should be raised.
The taxpayer should NOT be funding patents that are turned around and used against the private sector.
comes to mind.
Uhhh...where did I say that Apple owned either? I simply said they gave back with those two more than they have taken out by using the kernel, that's all. Just as AMD doesn't actually "own" the AMD FOSS driver but were paying several full time devs to work on it, thus giving back to the community.
The problem with the GPL in a nutshell is the redistribution clause, you could remove that tomorrow and the "printer story" would still be 100% solved while actually giving an incentive for companies to fix all the messes in Linux as they could make their money back. Instead because so much software doesn't fall into the "blessed three" model what you get is what I call the "busted shitter problem" in that if I ask you to paint me a picture or write a song? I'll have several free to choose from, some of them probably quite good. If I ask you to come fix my nasty busted shitter for free? i better get used to pissing in the sink.
Whether the "FOSSie faction" that thinks GPL is law accept it or not there are a LOT of jobs in software and OS development that are every bit as nasty as cleaning that busted shitter. there is bug and regression testing, QA, documentation, bug fixing, MSFT, Apple and Google pay millions to get these nasty jobs done, in Linux? they just don't get done at all which is why Linux doesn't gain any on the desktop. hell how many FOSS programs have placeholders instead of completed docs? and that is a hell of a lot less nasty and boring than QC and regression testing but because nobody can make a cent doing it then it simply don't get done.
I think the next 5 years will be interesting and if the GPL doesn't change in that time it will become more and more irrelevant outside the server room. Not only do you have the rise of the appstore, not only do you have Android taking jobs that formerly went to embedded Linux, but I would argue the days of the support contract, the bread and butter on which a LOT of FOSS depends to survive, is frankly over as more corps forgo contracts and just hire consultants for one off jobs or go to cloud based. Ironically I predict its the cloud that will end up seriously wounding if not killing Red hat, as last stats I saw had nearly 50% of the cloud servers running free CentOS over paid for RHEL and as the economy continues to sour I bet that number goes nowhere but up. If Linux didn't have the redistribution clause all those sales WOULD have been for RH, which gives more back to the community than the other top 5 corps combined, instead the redistribution clause will mean RH has to compete with their own product being given away free.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
At least, in the opinion of Linux Torvalds.
===
When you are no longer hungry, and you just work to merge in GIT stuff, all developed by others, what is the outcome? I would say you become frustrated and angry, and lose it too often.
Whats wrong with pointing out human nature.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada