Apple Loses Patent Suit To University of Wisconsin, Faces Huge Damages (reuters.com) 312
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.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed, however, for many research orientated universities patents are a vital source of revenue.
Wisconsin-Madison is a state-supported school. I realize these days it's considered okay to double- and triple-dip into taxpayers pockets, but this system where schools get to have tax money for research, and then patent the results for profit, is completely wrong. As a citizen, it means I'm paying for the research, then paying AGAIN to have any access to it. Based on state-granted monopoly.
At best, any revenue derived from these university patents should go back into the general fund, not for the (une
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Yeah, but how are you going to replace that funding? Increase funding from the state? Not in Wisconsin, zomg taxes. The state government is already doing its damnedest to gut higher education and running a large deficit, again thanks to tax cuts. I agree about patent licensing not really fitting into the vision of a public university system, but it's a reality that needs to be fixed as a unit, and that's really unlikely in many states.
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So no, you're wrong.
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The grim world of software patents doesn't fill me with optimism about them; but if this is actually a decent
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I am not someone who knows a lot about the subject, but it appears to be a patent on a method of doing out of order processing of instructions, which was pretty damn innovative in 1996.
Free rider problem solutions? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]? 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)
Re:Love that this is modded troll (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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".
Re:Love that this is modded troll (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Lawyers galore, again.
1. First, they come see companies, explaining that they need a patent war chest. Everybody is sincere and lawyers win.
2. Then they explain to some CEO/CFO/shareholders that they could use it to gain more money with it (or as a strategical weapon against small companies endangering their business). Lawyers win again and more other companies need to go to step 1.
You need a CEO with very strong feelings about patents to resist the temptation of using patents the wrong way.
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I'm giving up mod points to reply here but the articles linked to above provide no evidence of the claims made by the parent.
CapS said:
As for Google never filing a non-defensive patent lawsuit, that's not true. A quick Duck Duck Go search reveals this:
http://www.informationweek.com... [informationweek.com]
Did you even bother to look at the article you linked to? It says:
Google, believing that litigation was imminent, responded by asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that it is not infringing Netlist's patent and that Netlist's patent isn't valid.
That is pretty much the exact opposite of an offensive patent suit.
Then CapS said:
And there are plenty of examples of Google trolling other companies with patents as well:
http://blog.splitwise.com/2013... [splitwise.com]
In this article Google applied for a patent and then, horrors, asked a company that was in the same field to get on board a patent reform initiative. Applying for patents and advocating for patent reform is not the sa
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I am not an apple fanboy, but I have to say that any post bitching about "one mouse button" in 2015 should automatically get a -1.
Ah, but is it a troll, or flamebait? Since you're not an apple fanboy and it's 2015 you should be able to tell the difference.
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I am not an apple fanboy, but I have to say that any post bitching about "one mouse button" in 2015 should automatically get a -1.
This is true. One button was apparently too confusing so they removed that. :-)
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Insightful)
such as the concept of an integrated app store
You mean like Cydia: the first app store for the iPhone? Fun fact it was available via a jailbreak before apple launched an app store.
I'm not sure why they bothered with superficial patents on things like the shape of the device's packaging
Because they're not much of an innovator. This is not a troll. They've never been terribly good at inventing brand new things. What they do very well, arguably better than anyone else is taking a bunch of existing but not very popular technologies and producing an implementation which doesn't massively suck before anyone else.
I don't believbe I'm doing them a disservice with that, doing such a thing is clearly very hard else they wouldn't be the first people to do it after others have tried and failed. But it's not generally protectable with patents.
In actual fact, I think claiming Apple has made innovations where they haven't is actually doing them a disservice because it detracts from what they are uniquely good at.
Look at the history of things they're well known for:
The iPod: the canonical MP3 player. Not the first, afterall we know it had no wireless and less space than the Nomad (lame!) but by far the most popular and became synonymous with MP player. Due in large part because all the ones before had horrendous interfaces and other awful misfeatures.
Smartphones: IBM invented the concept of the toucscreen only phone in 1993. Nokia had this device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. AT&T pretty much nailed the real concept of a smartphone http://www.xorl.org/people/njh... [xorl.org] as one might recognise it with a decent UI and apps, except it needed a remote application server, too much connectivity and generally the tech wasn't up to it in 1998. Heck, they weren't even the first to put multitouch on a phone. What they did was combine all those elements in a way which didn't suck.
And so on.
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Wait a minute. Apple calls them "smart corners?
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Look at the history of things they're well known for:
The iPod: the canonical MP3 player. Not the first, afterall we know it had no wireless and less space than the Nomad (lame!) but by far the most popular and became synonymous with MP player. Due in large part because all the ones before had horrendous interfaces and other awful misfeatures.
The iPod had large "misfeatures" for most at the time it was released: It was firewire and Mac-only.
This is where Apple (or likely: Jobs) show how they were really clever - it generated a huge buzz in the media, suddenly everyone wanted one, and they had to buy a Mac to get it. When the Windows version came out, they managed to do it when the interest in the iPod was still very high, and it was just like printing money.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Informative)
The iPod had large "misfeatures" for most at the time it was released: It was firewire and Mac-only.
Mac only limited the market, but I don't think that made it suck. Firewire was a good choice at the time: all macs had firewire. USB2 was only juuuuust out and if you cast your mind back to 2001, it stank. The chipsets were yound and flakey as was the software. Firewire was much faster, and much more reliable.
Eventually USB2 realised it's potential and stopped sucking and actually caught up with firewire in terms of actual speed, but that took years.
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Yes, that's why I had it in scare quotes.
I had the 1st generation iPod. Loved the thing, especially the mechanical scroll wheel.
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USB still sucks compared to other connection protocols, because it's CPU bound. Want to have fun? Get a Windows USB3 laptop and a few USB3 disks, and do some massive file copies concurrently from the internal SSD to those disks. The last time I did that, you could barely move the mouse because it was CPU locked.
FireWire had it's own controller, so it could (mostly) pump that speed regardless of whatever else the computer is doing; this is why it was chosen to be the early connectivity standard for digita
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The last time I did that, you could barely move the mouse because it was CPU locked.
True that firewire is better with CPU usage, though that sounds more of a Windows problem than a USB one. My rather old i7 Q820 based thinkpad doesn't suffer from that problem---I use Linux.
Also, FireWire had a higher voltage included for self-powered devices (12v versus 5v)
It's actually anything between 7.5 and 40V. 12 is common because ATX supplies provide it readily.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:4, Informative)
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The iPod had large "misfeatures" for most at the time it was released: It was firewire and Mac-only.
Uh, the ipod gained PC support pretty damn early on. The first generation was released October 23, 2001 and the second generation was released Jul 17, 2002, the second generation supported PC's so the ipod was Mac exclusive for considerably less than a year (and it was really less than that as they added FAT32 support in a firmware update to the first generation between those two dates, though there was no o
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They needed time for USB2 to actually make it's way into PCs. Transferring your library of music over USB 1.1 was horrible, and they weren't going to subject users to that. Thus, they used FireWire for the first few generations, and then removed it as an option once USB2 was ubiquitous.
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The iPod: the canonical MP3 player. Not the first, afterall we know it had no wireless and less space than the Nomad (lame!) but by far the most popular and became synonymous with MP player. Due in large part because all the ones before had horrendous interfaces and other awful misfeatures.
The problem with the "no wireless" part of the comparison back then was the Nomad didn't have wireless either. Also the Nomad could not be used as a HD. And for many years, wireless was completely impractical for the MP3 player. I would argue that it still as because the devices today are not MP3 players but more like small computing devices that you can play media on. There's an important distinction there.
Nomad had FM radio (Score:3)
Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley wrote:
I heard you on my wireless back in fifty-two
UnknowingFool wrote:
The problem with the "no wireless" part of the comparison back then was the Nomad didn't have wireless either.
Several Creative Nomad models included an FM radio, which is more wireless than anything on the first generation iPod classic. In fact, a lot of present-day smartphone chipsets include an FM radio, but carriers have disabled them [freeradioonmyphone.org] to sell bigger data plans.
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Several Creative Nomad models included an FM radio, which is more wireless than anything on the first generation iPod classic. In fact, a lot of present-day smartphone chipsets include an FM radio, but carriers have disabled them [freeradioonmyphone.org] to sell bigger data plans.
Please, you're on slashdot. Wireless in the context wasn't radio. It was wi-fi and you know it.
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At the time, it wasn't a joke.
Yes, I know I was there. That's precisely why it's become a running joke ever since. The article was "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" and it turned out to be the most successful MP3 player of all time. So it's been a running joke ever since. You know, because of the sheer scale of the misprediction. That makes it funny.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] - 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 [youtube.com]
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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.
I'd agree that this is often true, but not always. Apple innovates in hardware when it makes sense for them, and buys off-the-shelf when it doesn't.
Here's an obvious example, although from quite a long time ago; Apple developed its own chipset [arstechnica.com] for the PowerPC 970, aka G5. Although it was fabbed by IBM, their architect confirmed that it was an Apple design. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they bought some of the IP inside from somebody else too.
Another example is touch input. Apple used to get all thei
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Because they're not much of an innovator. This is not a troll. They've never been terribly good at inventing brand new things. What they do very well, arguably better than anyone else is taking a bunch of existing but not very popular technologies and producing an implementation which doesn't massively suck before anyone else.
I don't believbe I'm doing them a disservice with that, doing such a thing is clearly very hard else they wouldn't be the first people to do it after others have tried and failed. But it's not generally protectable with patents.
In actual fact, I think claiming Apple has made innovations where they haven't is actually doing them a disservice because it detracts from what they are uniquely good at.
Look at the history of things they're well known for:
The iPod: the canonical MP3 player. Not the first, afterall we know it had no wireless and less space than the Nomad (lame!) but by far the most popular and became synonymous with MP player. Due in large part because all the ones before had horrendous interfaces and other awful misfeatures.
One might say that the iPod was successful because of its excellent and intuitive interface. One might even say that it was an innovative interface. One that's patentable.
I think you're assuming that user interfaces and designs are not patentable, but that's not true at all.
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AT&T pretty much nailed the real concept of a smartphone [...] as one might recognise it with a decent UI and apps, except it needed a remote application server
In other words, AT&T invented the iPhone 1, which depended on web applications running on remote application servers and accessed through HTTPS.
Heck, they weren't even the first to put multitouch on a phone. What they did was combine all those elements in a way which didn't suck.
Which meshes with Apple's acquisition in 2005 of the patent portfolio and other assets of FingerWorks, whose engineers invented multitouch gestures that didn't suck.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Informative)
Apple Tax
I'm not an Apple fan: I can't stand 'em, but I'm pretty sure the Apple tax is a myth. Last time I was shopping for laptops, for comparable weight, size, build quality, speed, memory and performance the Macbook Air was pretty close in price to similar machines such as the Zenbook UX11 (when that was current).
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Bullshit. It was a slick repackaging of existing concepts. Nothing wrong with that, it was very slick, and existing smartphones had plenty of rough edges that could use some sanding off, but innovative it was not. Unless you want the word to lose all meaning.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I had a Palm Pilot and a cell phone back in that day. I can tell you that I wanted them to be integrated from the moment I was carrying two devices. All it would have taken was someone somewhere designing a Palm Phone. Palm had full opportunity to make this work, the problem is, they were a PDA company, not a Phone company (until it was too late).
This goes to Apple's credit, when people wanted an MP3 Player built into a phone, and Apple licensed iTunes to Motorola. I knew at that moment, Apple was using tha
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such as the concept of an integrated app store
That is obvious. Like, really fucking obvious. With that in mind, I'm surprised they didn't patent it.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't conflate design patents, which are explicitly about looks and marketing, with utility patents, which are about inventions and have a longer term.
IANAL, YMMV (especially outside the US)
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Informative)
A shame this got modded as Flamebait, since it's exactly the right answer. For some reason, many Slashdotters seem to be completely unaware (or perhaps willfully ignorant) of the distinction between utility patents (i.e. what we think of when we say "patents") and design patents, which are something else entirely. As a result, when they hear that "Apple got a patent on rounded corners", they rightfully think that's utterly ridiculous and an example of a broken patent system, when it's actually nothing of the sort, since design patents more closely resemble a time-limited trademark than they do a utility patent.
The reality of the situation, is that Apple is one of likely thousands of entities with design patents that include a claim for rounded corners. That's because those design patents aren't just making a claim for rounded corners. They're for rounded corners + a long list of additional claims that makes each of those products uniquely identifiable as the product they are. In the case of the iPhone 5 series, the design patent was for something along the lines of rounded corners + chamfered edges + aluminum trim + flat glass front + aluminum back + no adornment on the front + some other stuff I'm forgetting. I've seen a similar design patent filed by Samsung that covers some of their phones, and, as you'd expect, rounded corners were included in their list of claims as well. Again, each claim is considered alongside the other claims, rather than independently of the other claims, and for a competitor to be infringing, they need to be infringing against not just one of the claims, but against many or all of them. After all, rounded corners do not an iPhone make.
In the end, I'm just disappointed that there's a cadre of Slashdotters who appear to be willfully phrasing it as they do so as to confuse the issue, since in most subjects we discuss here, the commenters are seeking the truth of the situation. Unfortunately, when it comes to discussions that elicit fanboy-ish responses, they would rather seek out phrasings that help suit their narrative, rather than accurately convey the facts as they are.
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According to Wikipedia, Steam came out in 2003 (and began carrying 3rd party apps in 2005), Apple's App Store in 2008. PC's have come with preinstalled crapware since time immemorial. So this particular IP seems even more Imaginary than usual.
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but anyone who tries to patent rounded courners and then sues deserves to lose patent lawsuits.
Apple did a lame job in protecting their IP: patenting smart corners, instead of something more vital about their type of product, such as the concept of an integrated app store, and the kind of applications they brought to the platform, but the iPhone, their implementation of the smartphone truly was an innovation that got stolen by now competitors (e.g. Android).....
I'm not sure why they bothered with superficial patents on things like the shape of the device's packaging, which was probably the least-important aspect of the product beyond initial marketing and making the device look 'cool' to prospective buyers.
They have a design patent on the shape of the packaging and the look of the device because that is how business works. Ford have a design patent on the way the Mustang looks. Coke have a design patent on the way a coke bottle looks. A design patent is an incredibly common thing and it is subtly different from a method patent (such as the processor one that Apple has infringed).
It seems on slashdot, however, that Apple is apparently held to a different standard about how it conducts business - somehow a desi
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Mostly because lawyers are typically very dumb, and lawyers are who file the patents.
Most lawyers I've met are pretty bright. The one trait the majority of them seemed to have in common was arrogance. Besides, don't blame the lawyers for filing bad patents, blame the patent office for not rejecting them.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:5, Informative)
> Mostly because lawyers are typically very dumb, and lawyers are who file the patents.
Patent lawyers are required to have degrees in STEM fields. They don't just let any Tom,Dick, or Harry esquire become a patent attorney. You are not dealing with someone that did underwater basket weaving as their undergrad degree.
(that probably makes the situation all the more sinister)
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Not to mention, I'd claim Debian's package management system as prior art.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Invention should be just that.
You represent the current problem with the patent system. You think that just rearranging the deck chairs is something that is worthy of granting a 20 year long industry crushing monopoly to.
People treat this stuff like candy when it's more like toxic waste.
Patents are meant to encourage people to disclose useful trade secrets. It's supposed to make industry MORE efficient rather than less. It's not supposed to be some lame virtual land grab.
Great Artists Steal (Score:3)
Re: You are joking, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Wow! (Score:2)
Better coverage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there a better article somewhere that explains WHAT was the issue?
Re:Better coverage? (Score:4, Informative)
Here you go [appleinsider.com].
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.
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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 sam
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You'll notice that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution has a bunch of major companies implementing a version of "branch predictors" since the 1960s.
You'll notice that none of them are being sued.
Obviously, there's something more than just "caching"...
Re:Better coverage? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Pocket change (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure there's more loose change than that in the couch cushions at one infinite loop.
The bigger question: does it also occur in the A9/A9X, or were they just not out when the lawsuit was filed. Could UW request an injunction against the current crop of processors as well?
WARF (Score:2)
oh yes, and that chip thing.
Jury competence? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 shoul
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The University seems to be arguing that Apple wilfully violated the patent. If that is the case then it is likely that they were able to show that Apple engineers enquired about the patent or obtained copies of it, which suggests that it isn't all that obvious. If it were they would have just quietly got on and implemented it without any help.
Sadly we don't have any info on the arguments put forward, but since have asked the judge to consider wilful infringement it's likely that Apple's own actions pretty m
Re:Jury competence? (Score:4, Insightful)
No you only do the not looking for patents thing if you are a startup. The key difference is that if your startup fails then nobody cares, and if your startup succeeds and you are challenged by a patent holder you can just negotiate royalties without them being able to threaten triple damages on you. If you are Apple you do due diligence and freedom to operate processes on any new tech area you operate in because you aren't going to get away with flying under the radar. They probably have in house lawyers who trawl patents checking for this stuff.
More than likely Apple did a very thorough assessment of the patent and concluded that they did not think they were infringing it. They have now been found to be infringing it so of course the plaintiff is going to try to get wilful damages on the basis that they knew about the patent. Somebody at Apple stuffed up in their assessment and it looks like they should have just negotiated a license early on, but on the other hand you can't just go around paying off everyone who you think might be able to win a jury trial.
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I'm not really convinced that Apple evaluate patents properly. They have had this problem before, e.g. with standards essential patents that they didn't want to licence under the usual RAND terms. It seems like their plan was basically to infringe and then argue the point in court, at least during the Jobs era.
Paging Governor Walker (Score:5, Insightful)
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The UW's endowment is in excess of $2.3 billion. They will be just fine.
Re:Paging Governor Walker (Score:4, Informative)
In terms of endowment per student, that's practically nothing (relative to other universities). The endowment is meant to generate income on interest -- not to be spent directly.
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Ohh they could lower tuition..... Nahh, they will never do that.
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It will be a double whammy. Not only will the state legislature have an excellent excuse to make an enormous cut in the UWM budget, but the university itself will use a very large chunk of that money to hire a small army of new administrators while growing the university bureaucracy at a furious pace, resulting in even higher overhead costs for future UWM research contra
Should be more (Score:2, Troll)
They did the same to Intel (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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How do you spend money cutting teaching assistant positions? That's a pretty novel idea. Maybe they should patent it.
Just think, recursive patents!
$823 Million ... 0.4% of Apple's cash on hand (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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No worries unless it turns out someone has another 249 patents like this, which actually isn't a lot of patents.
governor Scooter Walker (Score:3)
'Huge' is a matter of perspective (Score:2)
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If that were even remotely true, Apple would send me (an you and ever other Slashdotter) an iPhone, iPad, iMac and for grins, a MacPro with matching MacBook pros in several configurations. It would not even touch their bottom line.
You don't get to be a big, profitable company by giving money away (unless it's to executives, that is completely different.
Huge is relative (Score:2)
Apple is currently earning around $18 billion in profit each quarter. So, while I'm sure it will be a boon for Wisconsin and Apple will try to get out of paying it - $823 million isn't going to hurt Apple's bottom line too much. I'm sure they see it as the cost of doing business.
University patents funded by the public (Score:5, Insightful)
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These university patents are paid for by the tax-paying public, why does this no longer make them public domain?
Why would they be?
It's not a requirement that the fruits of your research be automatically public domain if you have a source of public funds. Tax money is not the only source of income for these sorts of research groups and spin out companies.
They frequently offer very favourable terms for non-commercial use, and make the meat of the licensing revenue on commercial interest. The purpose of doing it this way is to flow money back into the university. If it was all public domain then companies (like Apple) c
Re:University patents funded by the public (Score:4, Informative)
"This" did not make them public domain in the first place, and ever since 1980 the Federal Government [wikipedia.org] has said that the patents can be owned by the universities themselves. The Federal Government gets to say so because state governments historically do not fund research, only educational activities and infrastructure. The Federal Government funds research (NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc.).
As to why the inventions aren't simply dumped into the public domain: university research does not take a product to commercialization. It is proof of concept, at best. Companies developing truly new concepts to commercialization want IP protection, since the next company entering could otherwise simply reverse engineer and duplicate the functional aspects of the commercial product while claiming license to 'public domain' patent behind the new concept.
Of course you can point to individual products that might have been commercialized anyway, but in aggregate the decision has been that this scheme will deliver more commercial products to market than the 'public domain' route.
If you think differently, then write your Congresscritter.
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Based on the other comments up above, it actually sounds like they weren't paid for by the tax-paying public. Rather, the research was funded by WARF, so it makes sense that they'd be the owner of the patents. It's no different than any other private corporation funding research at a public institution. The institution may be public, but not everything that comes out of it is.
Others? (Score:2)
I'm curious, have others licensed this tech, or is Apple simply the first to get sued? The article mentioned Intel, but what about other mobile manufacturers?
Brief summary of the 'invention' (Score:3)
Dynamically optimize the execution order of the instruction set depending on previous hits or misses.
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The membership to 7 digit user id club is particularly valuable as credntials.
Jackpot! I had a hunch laying about here for tens of weeks would finally pay off!
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A 7 digit id can be a result of a rich, fulfilling professional and personal life (no time for slashdot posting; only reading when it was still worth it); he might also be a good listener who didn't speak up on first inclination (i.e. didn't need a user id). In the good old days the summaries were still bad, but there was enough meat in the discussion to reverse engineer what it was about. These days, I'd have to RTFA - I'm in the middle of the stream and still haven't an idea of what Apple did as optimizat
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Your expert witness credentials check out just fine. When can you start?
In what way does his "expert witness credentials", or possible lack thereof, invalidate the facts of his comment? An expert witness is a person who is permitted to testify at a trial because of special knowledge or proficiency in a particular field that is relevant to the case. His comment does not require any special knowledge. It is a statement of fact, which can be verified as either true or false. In this case a request for a citation might be in order but an ad hominem reply such as this only refl
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And there was me thinking there was no such processor as "Acorn Archimedes", and the Apple processors being ARM derivatives anyway (aka the processor used in the Acorn Archimedes"
Re:Prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Who would receive this money? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Who would receive this money? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
False (Score:3)
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
That is simply false. Researchers here aren't required to go through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) to get patents. If the researchers decide to, they make a contract with WARF where the researchers get a cut of the profits. Even grad students often get a cut.
I don't know how it works at other universities, but universities aren't for profit corporations -- at least not yet. If universities didn't give faculty a cut of patent revenu, I'd imagine they'd soon find their strong, patent-generat
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I got lunch at a Mexican restaurant and a dollar.
WARF gets it (Score:5, Informative)
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".
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WARF does pay a substantial share to the inventors: http://www.warf.org/for-uw-inv... [warf.org]
From the link: "20% of royalties (before expenses) will go to you [the inventor]."
No (Score:3)
Using WARF is _voluntary_; UW researchers don't have to go through them. They can patented inventions on their own and take all the profit if they'd like (and pay all the filing costs, pitch it to companies, sue infringes, etc. on their own). Moreover, what middlemen take the money? The money returns to the university one way or another -- mostly as research grants within the university, not pocketed by a CEO.
Chill out.
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Lawyers.
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Well until the president gives them a pass like last time.