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NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones
Calibax writes NVIDIA has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the ITC and in the U.S. District court in Delaware. The suit alleges that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing. NVIDIA is seeking damages and a ban on U.S. import of a number of devices with Snapdragon and Exynos processors until there is an agreement on licensing.
Sue the competition!
O when Am I going to get my free software phone with free software cellular network :(
NVIDIA Sues Qualcomm, and Samsung Seeking To Ban Import of Samsung Phones
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I..I, um... what? Back to /b/ with you.
sudo apt-get install sl && sl
Thankfully, the Open Source AMD video driver has progressed enough to use it for normal computing. I've been using it on cards I already had laying around, and it performs very well for daily use. It performs much better than Nouveau (which isn't surprising, since AMD released full specifications, and nVidia requires complete clean-room reverse engineering), and integrates into a Linux desktop cleaner than the nVidia proprietary driver (nVidia destroys the boot display, for example).
Now I have enough motivation to no longer use nVidia. Thank you, nVidia, for helping AMD gain some ground.
Previously, Nvidia said that it would license it's Kepler GPU cores to third parties. Semiaccurate maintains that this licensing program was in fact bogus and was conceived purely to justify future patent trolling activities. Semiaccurate also claims that
Nvidia tried to "shakedown" Apple with the same patents and Apple subsequently gave the contract for the Mac Pro GPU to AMD as punishment.
Is nvidia using patents on commonplace patents to get a piece of the pie they are jealous the don't have. Or are these legitimate patents and said companies are willfully stealing technology?
Keep in mind my next purchases for video cards and cell phones will depend on the answer..
nVidia holds a lot of patents in the fields of graphics technology - it is a major player in this field and to date has a large market share in the desktop amd mobile GPU market. This is absolutely no patent trolling.
It's just the usual insane patent wars among major players in technology. I highly doubt this will go to court. There will just be a quiet agreement among the parties involved before this escalates too much.
--- Eat my sig.
Yeap, you didn't realize this story is related to mobile, not desktop.
I am not a lawyer, but I find it hard to believe Samsung is violating any of Nvidia's patents directly by using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and 805 in a product. They received the part and associated driver software from QCOM as a final product and all components and features therein are protected from patent violations. Just like you can't be sued for violating Nvidia's patents by using an AMD GPU which has Nvidia-patented features in your PC, Samsung is protected by purchasing the part from QCOM. Nvidia could block further sales of the Snapdragon CPU to Samsung, but not sales of derived products; even though to to the end consumer it amounts to the same thing. So unless Samsung is violating their agreement with QCOM by enabling features they didn't license from QCOM, NV can't touch them here.
Similar deal with Exynos (Samsung's SOC) since it licenses the IP involved directly from ARM and Imagination Technologies (Mali and PowerVR GPUs respectively). Unless Samsung's legal team is collectively idiots and/or assholes, they should be protected by their upstream licensing agreements.
Then again, NV is never going to sue ARM because they would be in a seriously shitty position to renew *their* ARM licenses (if ARM didn't just terminate them on the spot) and then ARM would laugh all the way to the bank about who isn't shipping products.
Based on that, it's my opinion that Samsung shouldn't be involved in this lawsuit and Nvidia just pulled them in because that's where the money is.
Its their last gasp in the mobile market. Their strategy has been to support their own SoC by not licensing their graphics core to anyone else, so now that they've failed to gain much traction for their ARM SoCs, they're left with nothing. If they'd focused on their core technology, they could have cleaned up by licensing their GPU cores to other manufacturers, so now some pointy haired type has come up with a scheme to make up for lost time by suing everyone who they've been refusing to license their technology to for the last 10 years.
Grammar has no place here.
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You need to brush up on your understanding of patent law - people and entities merely using infringing items most certainly can be sued...
Just curious, has anyone done a gpu power/performance comparison of Imagination Technology's powervr and Nvidia's tegra platforms recently? I don't know that they would clean up by licensing their IP out; it seems to me Nvidia stuff has always been more performance focused than power conscious which is something that is extremely hard to sell in the mobile segment.
I'm specifically referencing exhaustion/first sale doctrine. I believe that should apply, but as you pointed out, I could be wrong.
And thats where your idea of this business starts to unravel. Without the drivers, it could be that the Snapdragon does not violate any of those patents, any more than a bare Intel CPU violates the Amazon 1-click patent. And the same could be true for the software - without the hardware to run on, maybe it is not violating any patents (some would argue that this is, or should be, always true of all software). Generally, licensing or downloading of drivers is completely separate from purchasing of parts (this is not like retail PC peripherals, where the drivers come on a CD in the box). Only when Samsung puts them together in a product with certain features, does it start infringing.
Also, it is very common for patents to be the responsibility of the manufacturer of an end product, with "license included" variants of a component often being significantly more expensive than licensing the patents yourself if you are a big enough company to have the army of lawyers necessary to deal with the negotiations.
Would it be possible to see laptop and desktop class PowerVR GPUs in the future? Would a PowerVR be a better choice for something like the Macbook Air or a Mac nano the size of an Apple TV?
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That only applies where the patent owner is the one selling the item, which is not what we are talking about here - check out the following line from that Wikipedia article:
See the emphasis I have added.
Where a patented item is being sold by a third party to another third party, no exhaustion of rights exists - both parties are liable because both parties are individually breaching the patent holders rights.
I am not paid to edit a largish news site...
Suing the companies that might be able to buy you out is not an uncommon way to start the negotiations.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I wish everyone would just move to soylentnews, much better editing over there.
Why? Are you so bored you have to come whine here if you have a better place? I don't get it.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Henry Gouraud invented computer graphics shading 70's :https://www.google.com/patents/US8760454
1. Pixar Renderman 1988 Shading rendering, Programmable Shaders using cpu
2. Unified Shader by ATI
3. multithreaded parallel processing By INTEL http://www.google.ca/patents/USRE41849
4. Programmable Shaders Nvidia http://www.google.com/patents/US6664963 This one is questionable since it was done in software before gpu's
All these things were conceptualized in the 60's, 70's, 80's.
What's not to get? He's trying to drive traffic to a non-corporate site that's trying to be what Slashdot once was before Dice came along.
Ok, I think I now see where you are coming from here, as well as AC below you. Since Qualcomm didn't have a license, Samsung couldn't have triggered patent exhaustion because Qualcomm never had a license to exhaust. It's then open to court interpretation whether or not Samsung should be liable for use of the patent.
The difference between this case and Quanta v. LG (2008) is that Qualcomm didn't have a patent license to sell their part. Even if Samsung is not practicing the patent itself, they might still be liable. This is then the part that confuses me: if Qualcomm acquires a license for historical sales, wouldn't Samsung again be protected from infringement?
Thank you all for straightening out my confusion.
I like the comments here, and there are currently not enough commenters over there. Better editing, but way less comments, so I use both. doesn't mean I cant talk shit. This is the internet after all...
That sounds amazingly convoluted and backward, but I don't doubt that's how it works.
However, if Qualcomm sells Samsung a part without licenses and separately licenses/sells/supports the driver software without licenses (I am dangerously assuming Samsung didn't write their own), conditionally saying the driver cannot be used with the part because that would be in violation of the patent, then Samsung uses them together and distributes it, why would not Qualcomm go to town on Samsung in the spirit of cover-your-ass? They'd have to be in collusion to commit patent fraud. But if Qualcomm licensed the driver to Samsung for use with the part, the two together seem like patent exhaustion would have to apply, unless, like you said, Samsung assumed responsibility for paying Qualcomm's patent royalties and fees. Samsung wouldn't be using the patent directly, Samsung would be using a part that uses the patent.
I guess fundamentally I am misapprehending how you can somehow sell a product or combination of products as fit for purpose that are covered by patents and yet not assume patent license liability. Thanks for your insight on how this whole thing works.
I'm glad I could brighten your day :D
Some of the devices are powered by Samsung's Exynos chips, so Samsung probably stepped on the patents there. That's what I got out of it. Remember that Samsung doesn't just use other people's stuff--they do a lot of their own manufacturing when it suits them.
Yes, if Qualcomm negotiated for past use, Samsung would be protected from suit.
And in mobile, Nvidia has the fastest graphics operations. Just look at the Shield.
Business to business commerce is fundamentally different than consumer commerce. If you buy something as a consumer, it is reasonable to expect that all licensing etc is taken care of, and there are laws to protect you from liability (plus it would be prohibitively expensive to go after all the individual consumers rather than the manufacturer). But business to business, they can contract how they want when it comes to patents that only cover specific uses of a product, not the manufactured product itself. There is no collusion to avoid patents, Qualcomm merely states in their contract that the purchase of their part does not include third party patent licenses that may be required for certain usage of the product. It is then up to Samsung to do their homework and find out what patents they need to license. They may also offer patent indemnification at a higher part price, but for a large company like Samsung with its own staff of patent lawyers, and its own patents that can be cross licensed, it will almost always be cheaper to handle the licensing themselves.