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Cascade Lake and Skylake prove even more expensive than expected:
VLSI Technology, a patent holding company affiliated with Softbank's Fortress Investment Group, has been awarded $948.8 million in a patent infringement claim against Intel Corporation.
On Tuesday, a federal jury in the Western District of Texas, a popular venue for patent claims, found that Intel's Cascade Lake and Skylake processors violated a VLSI data processing patent.
Intel in a statement emailed to The Register said it intends to appeal the decision.
"This case is just one example of many that shows the US patent system is in urgent need of reform," a company spokesperson said. "VLSI is a 'patent troll' created by Fortress, a hedge fund that is bankrolled by large investment groups for the sole purpose of filing lawsuits to extract billions from American innovators like Intel."
"This is the third time that Intel has been forced to defend itself against meritless patent infringement claims made by VLSI. Intel strongly disagrees with the jury's verdict and the excessive damages awarded. We intend to appeal and are confident in the strength of our case."
An attorney representing VLSI did not immediately respond to request for comment.
[...] A 2014 academic paper, "The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes," [PDF] found that in 2011, "the estimated direct, accrued costs of NPE [non-practicing entities] patent assertions totaled $29 billion."
Large technology companies – many of which have amassed large patent portfolios, which they often justify as defensive weapons – have complained for years about patent trolls/patent assertion entities [PAE] /NPEs, which are companies that exist to file infringement claims.
Legal changes, like the US Supreme Court's Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International decision, which made software patents more difficult to obtain, have reduced patent trials – more claims are being dismissed. But Intel in its antitrust argument against Fortress has suggested that patent assertion entities are adapting to the new legal landscape.
"In the face of these challenges, PAEs have evolved," the company said. "PAEs have increasingly been partnering with investment firms to fuel their litigation."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 18, @04:50PM (3 children)
Without this type of patent protection there would be even less chance of "smaller entities" being able to effectively patent and market new technology.
As it is, you already have to have an operation in the top half of the market to really leverage a patent, if you don't then a bigger player can just buy you to circumvent any patent judgements. Case in point: little pacemaker company wins big judgement against big pacemaker company, judgement exceeds the value of the little pacemaker company, big pacemaker company takes the discount on the judgement by buying the little pacemaker company and shutting it down - two birds with one stone: less competition and lower price for the judgement settlement. If the little pacemaker company had sold their patent to a holding company, then the judgement would have been payable to the holding company.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії. https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/878601.html Слава Україні 🌻
(Score: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Friday November 18, @06:05PM (2 children)
So you get a shedload of money from the buyout - based on a patent that is now known to be worth a lot of money. Where's the problem? OK, bad for competition, but patents are artificial, government-granted monopolies so was anybody expecting them to help competition?
...then they wouldn't own the patent any more and would be dependent on the holding company choosing to protect their interests (rather than, say, sitting on the patent until/unless it became part of a billion dollar business and was with vastly more than the inventor got paid).
...rather than the small firm who'd lost the rights to their invention and had probably already been driven out by the big players by the time the potential damages got big enough to get the holding company out of bed. Of course, if the inventor didn't make anything either, just patented whatever they thought up while sitting on the toilet and sold patents by the dozen to the holding companies, nothing would ever get made (and couldn't get made without violating a hundred of the trivial, junk patents that such a system would generate).
Anyway, this all assumes that the patents and infringement claims are valid - and the real problem is that the patent system is a nice idea built on the fallacy that you can reliably define and enforce (with lay juries FFS!) the difference between an obvious idea and an innovation. There's no fundamental moral basis behind a patent (as there maybe is with copyright) - the infringer doesn't need to have stolen or copied anything - and the sole justification is that they is supposed to promote industry and science. It's about time that somebody stumped up the evidence to prove that, because it looks like all it does is promote parasitic rent-seeking.
The NPE problem is just a symptom of a more deeply broken system - but while big near-monopoly players who get their pockets picked are happy to call for an elastoplast to be slapped ob the NPEs they'll fight like hell against any more fundamental reform that might decimate their own patent portfolios.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 18, @07:14PM
>So you get a shedload of money from the buyout - based on a patent that is now known to be worth a lot of money. Where's the problem?
Didn't really work so great for the pacemaker company - I mean, a few principals ended up with enough dosh to almost start a new venture before they had to get VC involved, but we're talking about a couple hundred specifically skilled people who had relocated to the R&D site who were rather suddenly twisting in the wind. The buildings stood empty for years, there was a giant sucking sound in the local real-estate market as the ex-employees shuffled off to other employment. Companies are much more than their principals.
Brings to mind when Mount Sinai bought Miami Heart, the principals walked away with a shedload of money from the deal, leaving both Sinai and Miami Heart to struggle with crippling debt after the deal went through. So, was it a win for the two jackasses who skipped town with hundreds of millions, or a loss for the thousands of employees who had to pick up the pieces and tens of thousands of patients who suffered with poorer care than they would have had if the institutes had proper funding, like they did before the buyout? Also, I was working with a researcher who was developing new CPR knowledge and systems just before that - at Mt. Sinai funded by Miami Heart. Guess what happened to the funding for his, and lots of other, research after the deal...
>then they wouldn't own the patent any more and would be dependent on the holding company choosing to protect their interests
Are we then agreeing that the system, as currently structured, is fundamentally broken leaving no attractive options for small patent holders?
>had probably already been driven out by the big players by the time the potential damages got big enough
Well, what actually went down was: the little pacemaker company developed (at great expense to themselves) a far superior electrode anchor to hold the pacing lead on the cardiac wall. It was a big problem at the time, but the big pacemaker companies were making big bucks even with the problems so they didn't really feel like going to great expense to develop a better solution. Then, the better solution comes along and is offered to them at a rate which would have recouped the cost of development for the developers in, roughly, 5 years of licensing fees - not to mention saving the big pacing companies on expenses associated with faulty anchors and saving thousands of patients from repair surgeries for the inferior anchor failures. Big company does what roughly 99% of big companies do when presented with a shiny new patent not invented by themselves, they ignored it. Most times the big companies just continue doing business without the innovation (hydraulic power steering was a classic early example of this), but in this case the big company decided to try to rip off the invention and beat the smaller company in court with their superior legal firepower. Well, they got their court battle, and lost - which is pretty rare. At least pacemaker patients could finally start getting the superior anchor, but that would have happened in about the same timeframe either way: If the big company hadn't tried to infringe, the smaller company's market share was rising fast due to the performance data on their anchors.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії. https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/878601.html Слава Україні 🌻
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Saturday November 19, @01:27AM
Arguably, the mere fact that the infringer came up with the idea independently should be taken as strong evidence that the patent was wrongfully issued in the first place and so, null and void.