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Jury Hits Marvell With $1 Billion+ Fine Over CMU Patents

Posted by timothy on from the billion-with-a-b dept.

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%.'"

5 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Go Go Alma Mater by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now stop asking me for money.

    1. Re:Go Go Alma Mater by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Informative

      Are you full of shit? yes. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121226/17582221493/patent-trolling-carnegie-mellon-wins-what-could-be-largest-patent-verdict-ever-12-billion.shtml

      don't waste my time with your false flag troll. Was it invented at CMU? no, but thanks for trying. Was this about licensing? no. Is this going to stand under appeal? no. The fact that other patents cover the same thing guarantees that there is a 0% chance that this was independently invented anywhere in the world, let alone by CMU which is not Central Michigan University.

  2. Re:We Could Have Been Exploring The Galaxy By Now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Critical thinker unthinkingly accepts chart with made up numbers.

  3. Re:Patent ware at the max ? by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  4. Re:Given just the titles of those claims, by Yabol · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The idea of a bunch of people from Pittsburgh voting to not give CMU a bunch of loot is at best weird.