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Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

bbc.com

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Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#71

Post by fisherjeff »

bpodgursky wrote: post #57
Kristine1975 wrote: post #47

>The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer. How can it be that the research of this university isn't in the public domain? The public paid for it, the public should reap the benefits without paying again. Sure, Apple tries their hardest not to pay taxes, but the patent isn't limited to them.

> So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer This is not true, at least for most states. For example, the UW system got 1.2 Billion from the state out of a 6 Billion dollar budget: https://www.wisconsin.edu/about-the-uw-system/ The large majority of most state university funding comes through tuition, research grants, and donations.

Well the majority of tuition funding is on loan from the federal government and I'm sure a big chunk of that grant money comes from DARPA, NSF, NIH, etc.

That's not necessarily to say their work should be in the public domain but it would still be nice to see them focus on more productive uses of their IP rather than just license fee extraction.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#72

Post by aganders3 »

bfg wrote: post #68
bpodgursky wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer This is not true, at least for most states. For example, the UW system got 1.2 Billion from the state out of a 6 Billion dollar budget: https://www.wisconsin.edu/about-the-uw-system/ The large majority of most state university funding comes through tuition, research grants, and donations.

And patents!

WARF (the designated rights holder for UW patents) gives an annual gift of ~$60M to the University, if I recall correctly.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#74

Post by toufka »

propter_hoc wrote: post #38

This is sort of a depressing precedent. Do we really want to turn our universities into patent trolls?

It has already happened. As was pointed out, it is a direct result of the Bayh-Dole Act [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#76

Post by gmarx »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #67
Kristine1975 wrote: post #47

>The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer. How can it be that the research of this university isn't in the public domain? The public paid for it, the public should reap the benefits without paying again. Sure, Apple tries their hardest not to pay taxes, but the patent isn't limited to them.

You can thank congress for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act

The reason for the act, I think, was to provide the incentive to commercialize the results of potentially valuable research. It's not an entirely loony idea

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#77

Post by revelation »

DanBC wrote: post #32
monochromatic wrote: post #31

How is this journalism? It doesn't even tell you the damn patent number.

At the top of the gray bar there's a "Contact BBC News" link. (Not the "contact us" link at the very bottom of the page.) For this article it's here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 Please do let them know that they need to start linking, or at least naming, documents that they're talking about. They do it all the time and I agree it's annoying. They'll discuss a medical study and not have any links to it. Sometim…

This is how journalism operates in the internet. I don't think I've ever seen a report that had an actual working external link in it. I don't even click links in news articles anymore because they inevitably lead to some bullshit more news of this type on our site meta-page.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#78

Post by bpodgursky »

fisherjeff wrote: post #71
bpodgursky wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer This is not true, at least for most states. For example, the UW system got 1.2 Billion from the state out of a 6 Billion dollar budget: https://www.wisconsin.edu/about-the-uw-system/ The large majority of most state university funding comes through tuition, research grants, and donations.

Well the majority of tuition funding is on loan from the federal government and I'm sure a big chunk of that grant money comes from DARPA, NSF, NIH, etc. That's not necessarily to say their work should be in the public domain but it would still be nice to see them focus on more productive uses of their IP rather than just license fee extraction.

The federal government generally makes a profit on student loans -- (most of them) get paid back eventually.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#79

Post by oldmanjay »

sitkack wrote: post #42
matthewmacleod wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear from even a cursory look – the patent covers a second level of branch prediction, where the processor determines whether or not it should bother speculatively executing an instruction based on the previous outcome of that speculative execution. Whether or not there was a prior implementation of this, I don't know – but it's also obviously more than a simple saturating counter branch predictor or wha…

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/fuck-everything-were-doing-... So inductive patent expansion. Take previous innovation, add 1, profit. What about L0 and L4 caches? Or Renaming sets of renamed registers? The problem as others have outlined, that patents are not concrete enough. Simply describing a problem is enough to be granted a patent. The value of the description of most patents is zero, which afaik this opposite…

The blithe dismissal of the value incremental improvement doesn't make you look smarter.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#80

Post by joezydeco »

wmf wrote: post #55
Kristine1975 wrote: post #47

>The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university So it's a university [mainly] funded by the tax-payer. How can it be that the research of this university isn't in the public domain? The public paid for it, the public should reap the benefits without paying again. Sure, Apple tries their hardest not to pay taxes, but the patent isn't limited to them.

I guess the university can provide better services[1] to the public if it's profitable. [1] Like an NFL-class stadium.

And those copyrights get enforced.
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