Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#81

Post by monochromatic » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #61

monochromatic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the information content, this article could have been two sentences long.

No, it could have been one sentence long, which is why the opening section is only one sentence long. To quote directly from the article (the first sentence, in bold): > Apple faces a bill of $862m (£565m) after losing a patent lawsuit. It then goes on to describe what products the patent covers, when the patent was filed, what it does, what other companies have been sued infringing, what the outcomes was, what the l…

> It then goes on to describe what products the patent covers, when the patent was filed, what it does, what other companies have been sued infringing, what the outcomes was, what the likely outcomes is going to be in this case and the factors that are likely to have an effect.

Oddly enough, they got lots of these things wrong. Here's the patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/US5781752

1. It was filed in 1996, not 1998.

2. The patent itself doesn't say anything about power efficiency (although perhaps that was argued at trial), so I'm not sure where they got that.

3. The article says it "relates to use of the technology in the iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus - but an additional lawsuit making the same claim against Apple's newest models, the 6S and 6S Plus, has also been filed." That may be true, but it's so vague as to be pretty information-free.

The whole article reads like it was written by someone who doesn't know anything about patents, doesn't care to learn, and just uncritically copied information he read elsewhere. That isn't journalism.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#82

Post by lotharbot » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #73

bwilliams18 wrote: post #70

What if patents could only be held by individuals and not corporations?

I suppose you’d have to fix that “American corporate personhood” problem first

Corporate Personhood is an intentional design goal of US law.

The earliest case I'm aware of dealing with "corporate personhood" is The Rev John Bracken v. The Visitors of Wm & Mary College, from 1790, which is discussed in the linked article [0] (page 434 discusses the founder's wishes, treating the corporation as an extension of the will of its founder, through its charter.) The rest of US case law, long before Citizens United, follows this same pattern -- corporations, being "merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose" [1], function legally as individuals in many ways, with the right to speak and own property and other such things that fit with the purpose for which they are founded.

A relevant quote from US case law: "The principle at stake is not peculiar to unions. It is applicable as well to associations of manufacturers, retail and wholesale trade groups, consumers' leagues, farmers' unions, religious groups, and every other association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions .... It is therefore important -- vitally important -- that all channels of communication be open to [all of the above types of associations] during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community." [2]

[0] http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=23...

[1] Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 1888 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/

[2] United States v. Auto Workers, 1957 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/352/567/

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#83

Post by mzs » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #53

mzs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpha 21264 (also from '96) had load store buffers that would notice the dependence violations and flush the pipeline during speculative execution. Sparc and power also had this to some extent with write buffers. I can't think of any that used a predictor though to decide whether to execute speculatively or not back then, they all just either did or stalled on the first potential violation. The patent appears novel f…

DEC was working on it, allegedly for EV8: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/store-sets.pdf . They cite to the inventor of the patent in question: "Independently, Moshovos et al. published a comprehensive description of memory dependence prediction. This is the first published work identifying that memory dependencies are problematic for out-of-order machines."

That's a great paper and insight, thanks again.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#84

Post by skaevola » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

I'm curious how the university could discover that Apple was using its patent. The internal characteristics of the processor must be secret, right? Do they examine die photos and reconstruct the gate netlist?

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#85

Post by wang_li » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

Kristine1975 wrote: post #75

SG- wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's just Apple?

No of course not. There's also Facebook, Amazon etc. etc. etc. But the article is about Apple.

Don't forget UWisc!

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#86

Post by fisherjeff » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:45 PM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #78

fisherjeff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. My point was more that their budget would look very different if not for federal guarantees on those (relatively risky) loans.

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#87

Post by acomjean » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

propter_hoc wrote: post #38

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

Its too late to some extent. Though patent situation has improved a little recently. The (licensed patents) that a startup I worked at had were used to sue google when the startup failed. The suit was started by the company but finished by the university.

http://www.law360.com/articles/239435/google-northeastern-se...

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#88

Post by viewer5 » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

bwilliams18 wrote: post #70

What if patents could only be held by individuals and not corporations?

And then the individuals would grant use licenses to the corporations, so they can implement the process/manufacture the good/etc?

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#89

Post by mzs » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #64

roc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, patents aren't granted for ideas, but for specific executions. Granted, the execution is generally defined at a higher level than, say, "this exact chunk of silicon". But it's at a much lower level than the "idea".

In the case in question, there appears to be no implementation or execution by the UW folks, certainly not one appropriated by Apple. This looks like an "idea" about instruction scheduling to me.

5.1 Methodology The results we present have been collected on a simulator that faithfully represents a Multiscalar processor.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.7.7...

Dynamic Speculation and Synchronization of Data Dependences, Moshovos et al, Proc. ISCA-24, June 1997

Re: Apple facing huge chip patent bill after losing case

#90

Post by jsprogrammer » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #62

kumarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent is at least more innovative than Slide to Unlock. If you encourage crappy patents, they are gonna bite you some day.

I actually think slide to unlock is brilliant, specially the old skeuomorphic ”track on rail” one. The new, cleaner one is made possible by old one being burned into our collective unconscious. I also think “one click to buy” is brilliant. Since it's impossible to unambiguously distinguish between crappy and worthy patents, we should either abolish them, or have them last for a really short time, like a year or two.…

Something can be brilliant without being innovative. Most people have no problems operating a "slide your finger on the screen to do more" widget, even without being trained by Apple's original visuals.

Think about it. A touch screen can only detect a limited number of basic interactions. All interactions with the software must occur through those basic primitives. Touching the screen and moving your finger are really the only two things the interface can recognize.