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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."
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?
Which article are you talking about? The one linked in the summary doesn't say anything of the things you said it did (it doesn't claim Marvell makes hard drives, doesn't claim they made a billion off of that, and doesn't even mention Seagate).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Whether they've made billions from the supposed patent infringement, I can't comment on.
One thing is for sure - CMU never would have made a billion dollars by selling products containing their "invention". Even assuming the patent is worthy and that Imaginary Property deserves to exist, they never would have made anything near that amount by licensing the technology.
If they licensed the patent to Marvell for $1.5M the staff lawyers probably would have thrown a decent party.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
At least, in the opinion of Linux Torvalds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.