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Court Orders Marvell To Pay Carnegie Mellon $1.5B For Patent Infringement
Lucas123 writes "A U.S. District Court has ruled that Marvell Technology must pay Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) $1.54B for infringing on two hard drive chip patents. Marvell was also ordered to pay interest at 0.14% annually, and 50 cents for each chip sold that uses the intellectual property. While Marvell did not comment on the case, CMU said it 'understands' that Marvell will again appeal the ruling and the school 'will look forward to the federal circuit court' upholding the lower court's ruling. The latest decision by a U.S. District Court in Western Pennsylvania ends for now a five-year legal battle between the two. In 2012, a jury found Marvell had violated CMU's patents, and the chip maker then appealed that ruling."
Ummm... what is a school going to do with 1.5 Billion dollars?
That'll pay for a lot of melons!
Lower the student fee?
*laughs*
Does this mean that if Marvell delays paying CMU for 50 years, they'll only pay an additional 7%? Compared to the rate of inflation, that's a marvelous deal.
So this ruling of course means that CMU will compensate some professor or former student handsomely with royalties for this IP that they stole via their "Top Hits of the Robber Barons" terms of employment/enrollment?
Calm down, they're a private university. You could've google/wikipedia that before flying off the handle.
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I don't see anything wrong with some of Marvell's profits from commercializing the invention going back to fund the researchers who invented it. What benefit to the public does it serve to let Marvell keep all the profits?
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The benefit to the public is that you and I should (would) have the same right to use the results of that research for commercial enterprise (or anything else) too.
Note that I didn't ask if this is a public or a private university; that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. I asked if it's being taxpayer subsidized. I suspect that you would be hard pressed to find a "significant" university in the USA (or anywhere else) that isn't taxpayer subsidized, frankly. Therefore, their research should be placed in the public domain.
That's my opinion; you're free to disagree, of course.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Universities were places of teaching and learning, rather than patent-generating sporting-team franchises?
What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
My own version of the preferred policy would be that publicly funded research should be patentable, but the patent royalties must be plowed back into research (not e.g. personal enrichment of the professors).
I think in many cases allowing universities to patent things produces a nice synergy between research and commercialization, which absent patents would result in a lot more use of trade secrets to try to accomplish the same effect. For example, Stanford invented a bunch of early synthesizer hardware; Yamaha licensed it and commercialized it; the royalties from those patents have supported continued research at Stanford's CCRMA. Without patents to help mediate that transaction, you'd have one of: 1) CCRMA tries to build its own synth and get into the hardware business themselves; 2) CCRMA keeps the methods secret and tries to sell them to a synth manufacturer; 3) Yamaha uses them for free, getting a windfall while CCRMA doesn't get anything. I don't think any of those situations would be better.
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From CMU's FAQ on the case:
"Their work was done under the auspices of CMU's Data Storage Systems Center, which was formed as a partnership between CMU and certain members of the information storage industry and through which CMU has worked closely with industry partners for decades. The DSSC was formed to and has played a critical role in preserving research and development efforts and jobs in the hard disk drive industry in the United States."
But if CMU wins outright, it will be a clear sign to corporations that using academia as it's main R&D "arm" is bad for business...
That's considering nearly every Fortune 500 company uses the Google model: partner with a University (or multiples) and cut corporate R&D to zero while leveraging academia. Problem is academia research has a conflict of interest with corporations and the university system and stuff that comes out of Universities are so half-baked they'll always be in perpetual beta.
Again, if CMU wins, I see the tide turning back to corporate R&D. Forewarned folks....
The link to the actual patent -> http://www.google.com/patents/US6438180
It is very hard to tell what is going on in the patent. Seems like it is an method inside an error correcting algorithm for hard drives. Error correcting is statistical in hard disks and it seems like they found a new method for some error correlation for turbo codes. I'm not an expert in this field so I don't know how much of an impact this had on error coding.
The present invention is directed to a method of determining branch metric values in a detector. The method includes receiving a plurality of time variant signal samples, the signal samples having one of signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, and both signal dependent and correlated noise associated therewith. The method also includes selecting a branch metric function at a certain time index and applying the selected function to the signal samples to determine the metric values. The present invention represents a substantial advance over prior sequence detectors. Because the present invention takes into account the correlation between noise samples in the readback signal, the detected data sequence is detected with a higher degree of accuracy. Those advantages and benefits of the present invention, and others, will become apparent from the Detailed Description of the Invention hereinbelow.
What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
It was partially supported by NSF. From the patent:
This invention was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECD-8907068. The United States Government has certain rights in this invention.
Well, the patent actually states this:
Regardless, the public isn't getting any of that money.
This transaction is obviously a cover for S.H.I.E.L.D. to fund certain research at CMU.
'The case involves chip technology that "significantly improves" the ability of drives to more accurately detect data stored on spinning disk platters. CMU originally applied for the patents in 1997'
Did Marvell reverse engineer Carnegies' drives, if not what exactly is Carnegie claiming ownership of. Could anyone produce the same improvements without taking a look at the Carnegie patents. Personally, I've seen may circuits appearing in electronic magazines that have subsequently appeared in patent applications. A brief perusal of the Carnegie patent looks to be like an error-correction and noise cancellation circuit.
until I realized that CMU had not, in fact, developed an iron man suit, or anything else in the Marvel comics movies.