Slashdot Mirror
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.
Critical thinker unthinkingly accepts chart with made up numbers.
you're an idiot
the Christian Dark Ages was a European event. China and the Middle East were the centers of science and learning at the time. China, The Eastern Roman Empire, Persia, the Arabs' conquered territories.
the reason for the dark ages was that hundreds of different tribes of "barbarians" conquered the western roman empire. once they settled down their traditions of dividing the lands among all the sons created a power vacuum as the kids would go to war with each other. mostly small minor wars that no one remembers anymore. add the vikings pillaging as well. it took a few hundred years for Charlemagne and other strong monarchs to emerge and even then the empire was divided into 3 parts which caused all the wars for the next thousand years
the Christian Church is kept some knowledge alive during these times. the kings and other nobles couldn't read and basic skills like reading, writing and making books was done by the Christian Church. these newly settled barbarians had no way to duplicate what the Romans had done. when the Turks had all but conquered the Eastern Roman Empire all the artists went to Europe to jump start the Renaissance
China was sailing most of the world by the late middle ages and it was a dumb chinese king that stopped it that allowed Europe to rise up.
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.
At least, in the opinion of Linux Torvalds.