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Apple Loses Patent Suit To University of Wisconsin, Faces Huge Damages (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has frequently been in the news for various patent battles, but it's usually against one of their competitors. This time, Apple is on the losing end, and they're losing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A jury found that the university's patent on improving processor efficiency (5,781,752) was valid, and Apple's A7, A8, and A8X chips infringed upon it. Those chips are found within recent iPhone and iPad models, which generated huge amounts of money. Because of the ruling, Apple could be liable for up to $826.4 million in damages, to be determined by later phases of the trial.
Typically there is an income distribution agreement where some of the money goes to the inventors and the majority gets distributed within the university itself.
While its difficult to provoke one to action, never mess with a large university that has a law school as they are just as vicious as a large corporation, if not more formidable.
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
Engineers should form some kind of intellectual property defence league and refuse to sign employment contracts that blanket assign all inventions to an employer for a wine and cheese basket and day off. Of course employers deserve some level of ownership for creating the environment in which the innovations could occur, but without the engineers they would have neither the environment or the ideas.
Intellectual property is increasingly becoming one of the most valuable assets in our economy, yet most engineers trade their ideas for an hourly wage that is barely enough to buy a place to live in most cities now.
Hi,
I've done CPU design. I'm not a professional, but I'm definitely familiar with it. The amazing thing about a lot of CPU innovations is, once thought up, they seem incredibly obvious. But you get somebody holding your hand and you're trying to think of what they did before they flat out tell you, and it usually only dawns on you about 1 or 2 steps before they flat out tell you.
Just because something seems obvious once you've been told about it, doesn't mean it was obvious.
I asked a judge that question this weekend. The answer seems to be to let side a make an argument, then see what the other side says about it, the repeat until somebody blinks. Kind of like judging a debate where you don't really understand the meat of the arguments, only the jist. A really scarry situation in a country where you are guaranteed the right to be judged by your peers.
1997 seems a really late time ( 30 years?) to have discovered statistical branch prediction in a cpu. But if so, Apple should have been able to show that and apparently they couldn't. Hopefully it is not a case of they did and the jury did not understand.
Perhaps the jury should take a test after the verdict to see what they understood.
Agree with everything you said except this part. They're not a hardware innovator. If you've opened up Macbooks to repair them, you'll find the same commodity parts used by every other laptop manufacturer. Heck, they're not even made by Apple, they're made by Quanta, an ODM (original design manufacturer - like an OEM except they also design the product). You wouldn't believe the number of people I've had to argue with about that; they seem to think Macbooks contain Apple-brand fairy dust and unicorn horn powder inside It's like telling a kid Santa doesn't exist when I tell them the CPU is by Intel, the awesome-performing SSD is by hated Samsung, the memory by Micron, the screen by LG, etc. Those are the companies doing the true hardware innovation; Apple is just buying and reselling their products.
But the one area Apple is really good at and really does innovate in is software. The iPod for example was successful mostly because of its tight integration with iTunes. Before that, it was a PITA to convert the music files on your computer into playlists on your MP3 player. Most involved connecting your MP3 player to your computer and dragging and dropping the individual MP3s, converting playlist files, automatic sorting via artist names stored in the MP3 (or not stored if you ripped it yourself), alphabetical sorting which sometimes got messed up depending on upper and lower case names, songs which disappeared because they were buried in the folder structure, etc. Before iTunes became a bloated mess, Apple nailed how synchronization of your music collection across devices should work. Likewise, Time Machine is the best UI I've seen on a backup program. The Macbooks are considered to have the best trackpads not because they're physically better but because they have the best software. The software augments the usability of the hardware enough to catapult the hardware into success.
To add to your list, here's pinch to zoom in 1988
The difference is that all of those smartphones had major flaws, shit operating systems that treated a handheld the same as a desktop computer, terrible web browsers, crap media playback, crap battery life.
Raise your hand if you've used a Windows Mobile device for any time at all, and didn't have to find the task manager to shut down runaway processes that were eating memory and battery. Look, no hands raised. There was a reason why even in 2006 that Blackberry was dropping the hammer on everyone - they'd at least gotten email and messaging to work properly.
Apple and Google got into this business because everyone else was fucking the dog. No, they didn't 'invent' smartphones - they just created smartphones that people actually want to use and don't hate.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi ... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.
You should leave Google out of that list. Google has never filed a non-defensive patent lawsuit, and seems pretty sincere about not using patents in the way you describe. I'm not sure about Samsung. MS and Apple definitely use patents as offensive weapons, regularly and aggressively.
However, you're not at all wrong about the effect of the system. Google discovered this. Google tried to ignore the patent game for years and then realized that you can't play in this space without a patent war chest to defend yourself. Being a multi-billion dollar corporation with lots of disposable cash, Google could and did buy such a war chest. Small players can't.
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