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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Apple and Broadcom have been told to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a beefy billion bucks for ripping off three of the US university's Wi-Fi patents. A federal jury in Cali decided on Wednesday that technology described in the data signal encoding patents owned by Caltech is used in millions of iPhones without wireless chip designer Broadcom nor phone slinger Apple paying the necessary licensing fees. Broadcom supplies radio communications components to Apple for various iThings.
The jury took just under five hours to decide its $1.1bn patent-infringement prize following a two-week trial, with Apple being forced to pick up the bulk of the damages, $837m, compared to Broadcom's $270m. The figures were what Caltech asked for.
[...] Despite the massive award, the news had no noticeable impact on Apple's share price coming a day after it announced better-than-expected results. Broadcom's slipped just a quarter of a per cent.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:11PM (5 children)
Patents filed for publicly funded research and software patents.
I guess it's marginally better that the university holds the patents than a private individual, but I still don't like it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by exaeta on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:32PM (1 child)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:59PM
Yes. That is indeed constitutional. States have essentially unlimited power under the tenth amendment to raise funds as they see fit. It's dumb, but constitutional.
For state constitution, it actually makes it easier, because they have article XIII of their constitution which mandates they not raise more than 25% of their annual funds from property taxes. The state of california, in spite of its reputation of a hive of evil leftism has a constitution that makes taxation all but impossible. These kinds of alternate funding sources are probably important to their increasingly overstretched university system.
(Score: 5, Informative) by captain normal on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:49PM (2 children)
Publicly funded? Cal Tech is a private institution. Do you have any citation for the statement that any of the research behind the patents received public funds? I hate it as much as anybody when large corporations rip off research that is paid for by taxpayers, but as far as I know Cal Tech has a huge endowment from prior research and patrons, and pretty much pays it's on way.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:28PM
Backing this up, Wiki says CalTech is private. Unless the commenter meant that the research itself was publicly funded.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_Technology [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @02:15AM
A vast amount of research is publicly funded, even if the institution is private. I don't have the patience to dig through who-knows-what amount of stuff to find the original publications, but I bet it'll say something like "this research was funded by DARPA grant #abc123" or similar somewhere.
OTOH should multibillion-dollar corporations be allowed to profit from taxpayer-funded research? It's not like either Apple or Broadcom are short of money to pay a license fee.