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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.
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?
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)
Maybe not. But maybe this verdict is actually a valid one?
Use some common sense. That's $1.7B for two claims that make disk reads a little faster. That would mean that manufacturing entire hard drives, which contain thousands of "patentable" ideas, would be worth trillions of dollars, an amount comparable to the entire US gross domestic product.
Even if the law technically allows such a ridiculous outcome, that doesn't make the situation "valid".
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.
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!
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.
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.
For the same reason the US gave up on capitalism a century ago, pure systems fail.