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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.
I'm generally pretty against patents.
However, I love seeing bad things happen to bad people, especially if it's ironic punishment. Yeah patents should probably be scrapped, but anyone who tries to patent rounded courners and then sues deserves to lose patent lawsuits.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Here you go.
The IP in question, U.S. Patent No. 5,781,752 for a "Table based data speculation circuit for parallel processing computer," was granted to a University of Wisconsin team led by Dr. Gurindar Sohi in 1998. According to WARF and original patent claims, the '752 patent focuses on improving power efficiency and overall performance in modern computer processor designs by utilizing "data speculation" circuit, also known as a branch predictor.
Oh no... it's the future.
This is a very technical patent having to do with prediction. Not predicting branches, but predicting data. It might even be valid - I haven't kept up with processor architecture for too long. The gigantic question is: given the state of the art at the time this patent was filed, is it a logical extension obvious to a person "skilled in the art". That would be a very tough question to answer, even for an expert in the field.
Just how is a jury of non-technical people supposed to figure this out?
I'm sure they will have heard from Apple's experts: "This is obvious, a kid could figure it out", and the university's experts: "wow, what a clever invention". How will they have judged and compared these expert opinions? Their charisma? Their hairstyle?
The whole patent system is one gigantic disaster. Even for potentially valid patents, the process is just wrong.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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.
Here's a nice windfall for the Job Creators of Wisconsin. This may be as much as another $800 million you can cut from University funding.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Is it trolling or flamebait to point that large companies are constantly suing one another over patents which mostly seem obvious to us, and that it's about time one of them came up short?
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.
Patents are probably doing more to stifle innovation that foster it, precisely because they all patent even the smallest thing to have in their war chest.
Honestly, seeing the big players getting screwed in patent lawsuits gives me hope at some point they'll all wise up and start pushing for patent reform themselves.
Because as long as it's a stacked deck which makes them huge amounts of money, they have no interest in things ever changing. If the only way for things to change is by costing these guys a bunch of money, bring it on.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Yeah, 800 million dollars is nothing. You fucking idiot."
They have $212 billion that they can't figure out what to do with. Otherwise it wouldn't be in the bank.
And that's *Mister* fucking idiot to you.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the people who actually hold the patents (the university isn't allowed to have them directly), did a similar thing to Intel not all that long ago (5 years?). I guess I can't complain since WARF funds my research (and a lot of research on campus -- having an internal funding mechanism is great). However, I recall that a bunch of the Intel money was supposed to go to the college of engineering (COE), which seems to have spent the money redecorating Engineering Hall (which, admittedly, is super ugly) and cutting ECE teaching assistant positions. It would be nice if the COE got a chunk of this and actually put it to good use...
Apple has somewhere around $200 billion in cash. If they have to pay $823 million they still will have around $200 billion in cash.
If you buy something for around $200, do you care if it's $200 or $200.80? Do you really miss the extra 0.80?
The money goes to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). The university isn't allowed to own the patents directly. That means that the university and state can't just raid the money as they see fit, which is probably a good thing.
WARF doles out the money in various ways. Much goes to research on campus, some goes to "faculty retention" (i.e. when another university tries to poach a strong faculty member, WARF steps in with money to keep them here), some is administrative costs (WARF assists university personnel in getting patents), some gets returned directly to the university, some goes to the people who did the research to get the patent, etc.
In short, the answer is "all of the above and more".
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'm generally pretty against patents.
Fair enough. Patents do have their problems and I would agree that our current patent system has huge flaws. So what is your alternative solution to the free rider problem? That problem is the primary reason why patents (and copyrights) exist. I'm not opposed in principle to scrapping patents and doing something else. Our current system clearly needs major reforms but I have yet to hear anyone come up with any solution to the free rider problem that is better than a reformed version of a patent process. We know what scrapping the patent system would result in (it would not be good) because there are plenty of countries without such a system and it's easy to see the effects on their economies. So tell me, how do we solve the free rider problem so that we can get rid of patents? (and no, just ditching them wholesale will not work and won't happen anyway)
This patent is a bit different to what RISC and MIPS were doing back then. It involves out of order execution, which IIRC ARM didn't do in the Acorn Archimedes era. When doing OoO execution the CPU executes instructions based not on the order in which they are programmed, but on the order in which its resources are available to them (ALUs, FPUs, bus access etc.) This patent also predicts when data produced by one instruction will be needed by another, in a very specific way.
Other manufacturers have either licensed it or used a difference scheme to do data prediction, but the specific method they claim appears to be novel, or at least was back in 1998.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If the only way for things to change is by costing these guys a bunch of money, bring it on
To Apple, a half a billion dollars is not "big money".
These university patents are paid for by the tax-paying public, why does this no longer make them public domain?
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The linked article is just wrong -- this is not in any way a branch predictor. It's predicting when to perform load-store speculation. The idea is that when you execute a load, you may not know whether there are any in-flight stores to overlapping addresses that are earlier in program order. If there are, once you detect it, you will have to squash the load (because it might have gotten a wrong value) and re-execute, flushing the pipeline. That's bad from a performance and energy standpoint (for the same reason branch misprediction is bad). You could always wait until you know that the load won't conflict, but that really hurts performance as well.
The innovation in the patent is that most of the squashes come from a relatively small number of load-store pairs, so by keeping track of them in a prediction table, you can get a large performance benefit for a small area overhead. The patent wasn't terribly useful in 1997 because instruction windows were small, but the authors thought that it would be once chips hit order of 1 billion transistors, which is pretty much what happened.