I have personally enjoyed community SparkFun events in Boulder, Colorado, which were hosted at a level that was both cool and fun for kids, adults, and experts alike. A really creative and intelligent company. Thanks Nathan for the courage to publish this, and helping other entrepreneurs inventing the future, to not be afraid to call fraud (and prior art) exactly what it is.
SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
121–130 of 186 posts
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#122Altair Logic actually sued Asus as well in 2019, after the patent had expired in 2018, alleging that Asus sold products infringing exactly this patent 6,289,434 before then. Asus tried, unsuccessfully, to get it dismissed, so we'll see where it goes later.
But the dismissal judgment is enlightening about what happens when you sit on a patent for 20 years and then start to sue people. The 'marking requirement' referred to is that you stamp products with a US patent number.
> The '434 Patent was valid for 20 years from the filing date, meaning that it expired on February 27, 2018. See 35 U.S.C. § 154(a)(2). Because Altair did not bring suit until after the patent had expired, it is entitled to relief only if it can ultimately establish notice of infringement prior to the patent's expiration date. Here, Altair would need to prove either that it satisfied the marking requirement or that neither it nor any of its licensees ever made a product which needed to be marked.
It seems the fact of never having licensed your patent to anyone allows you to avoid having to give notice to infringers. I'm guessing the damages limitations around non-marking are drafted to avoid a situation where someone sees a product, sees it and copies it thinking that because it has no patent number, it hasn't been patented. There appear to be other 'constructive notice' provisions. But it seems a little perverse that you're at an advantage, notice-wise, as a patent troll if you avoid the marking requirements by never attempting to license the patent to anyone in 20 years, and separately nobody takes a second look when searching for patents applicable to their products. Normally both those things point to the patent not being useful or valuable from a licensee perspective.
https://casetext.com/case/altair-logix-llc-v-asus-computer-i...
(Morbid detail: the patent was issued on September 11, 2001. Somehow the USPTO worked through that day.)
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#123> > The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system. [...] > Dynamic ram? Can I poke fun at them for not knowing what RAM is? Yes I can. > The above paragraph succinctly describes malloc(), which is perhaps one of the most fundamental advancements in modern computing. The problem is that Al didn’t invent it. Memory management (the ability to take RAM…
You are mistaken. The lawsuit itself is clearly referring to dynamic memory allocation. It refers to "static or dynamic ram" to mean RAM in general, but the paragraph has nothing to do with the characteristics of SRAM vs DRAM. From page 6 of the lawsuit [0]: > in fixed function implementations all possible functional requirements of the necessary data processing must be implemented on the silicon regardless of the fi…
No, you are obviously wrong here. Even the wording of the lawsuit is extremely clear: "The cost is further reduced by employing only static or dynamic ram as a means for holding the state of the system." - that is, they only use S/D RAM for holding the state of the system, no other kind of memory.
I have no idea how you can misread this to think it refers to requesting memory dynamically - they explicitly say "static or dynamic ram" - they claim the system can work with static RAM just as well as dynamic RAM. How do you or SparkFun come up thinking they are saying dynamic RAM is better?
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
What chance does our legal system have of gauging the validity of these patents when we can't even get a forum of technical people, with no horse in the race, to agree on what these things mean?
My understanding is that this is basically the endgame of all patents related to computing. You want to patent something so vague and poorly defined that it can be used to make a claim against anything.
Yes, that is very common for patents, but is not the case here. The patent and even lawsuit are very explicit that the "invention" works with both static and dynamic RAM. There is no point where they claim that dynamic RAM is better or some novel part of their invention. They are instead excluding the need for things like ROM.
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some pretty obvious followup questions: - What are alpha particles made of? - When an element undergoes alpha decay, its atomic number is reduced by two. Where do the protons go?
An alpha particle is a particle produced during alpha decay. It's always just a helium-4 which is made of two protons and two neutrons but with no electrons. This is why we have to mine for helium because it is produced in the ground by alpha decay. It's different from normal helium because it doesn't have any electrons and it has an empty orbital which means it really really would like to have some electrons and als…
As far as I understand, the claim is actually that an Alpha particle is made up of quarks and gluons, the same number you would find in 2 protons and 2 neutrons, but that the proton and neutron are different things.
It sounds like there's a very technical distinction about exactly how you define a particle. Essentially, I believe that the claim is something like saying that modeling an alpha particle as 2 neutrons and 2 protons loses some information that you would have if you model it as 12 quarks, because the 12 quarks interact in (slightly) different ways than a proton and a neutron would.
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no patent lawyer either, but I skimmed over the pages of "434" and it's clearly a bunch of half baked shit. Can you list one novelty in there worthy of patent, even for 1998? I'll grant you that `malloc` might be a bit of a stretch for the full extent of the patent, but surely FPGA manufacturers aren't sweating about this, right!? Anyway, space-time tradeoffs and the like, it's all basically the same shit, so why…
If you "skimmed pages" you are reading the wrong pages. The only page that matters is the final one, the text after "I Claim". It is very narrow (as the GP points out), and for something that probably actually existed and did something arguably, if minutely, novel. It sounds like a particular implementation technique for some sort of MIMD vector processor. The entire rest of the document is explicatory, and indicates…
Bit of a stretch to claim MIMD/vector processing covers that particular product [0]; maybe they're going after that because it's got a Mali 400 GPU (in which case I'd just refer them to ARM's lawyers).
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20160909142123/https://www.sparkf...
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#127I wonder if one could make trolling patent trolls self-sustaining. For example, let’s say you get hit with a demand letter. I review it and agree to finance your case. Using my resources, I prepare to invalidate the troll’s patents unless they settle for some amount less than their expected lifetime value from said patents. This gets split between you and me (after litigation costs), with maybe some of my share reser…
I think you could scare off a good number of these trolls by saying. "I look forward to the discovery processes during this lawsuit as well as reviewing the prior art associated with this patent. I will be creating a blog to document this process for public consumption as soon as the lawsuit is filed."
"""Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it."""
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#128I like SparkFun and I don't like patent trolls, but I have to say that SparkFun's mockery of the patent doesn't make sense. It is pretty clear that this patent was written by an engineer describing their actual system in great detail followed by one fairly narrow claim. I've seen many patents that are mostly written by lawyers, and I don't see any influence of lawyers in this patent. SparkFun's criticism is kind of p…
I agree, the patent is slightly odd in that it only makes a single claim on the media processing units. I think any multi-core processor would fit the claim of the patent. It seems that in this case the engineer was told to file the patent but they didn't have enough money to get the lawyers to produce some proper claims to protect the unique elements of this design.
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no patent lawyer either, but I skimmed over the pages of "434" and it's clearly a bunch of half baked shit. Can you list one novelty in there worthy of patent, even for 1998? I'll grant you that `malloc` might be a bit of a stretch for the full extent of the patent, but surely FPGA manufacturers aren't sweating about this, right!? Anyway, space-time tradeoffs and the like, it's all basically the same shit, so why…
If you "skimmed pages" you are reading the wrong pages. The only page that matters is the final one, the text after "I Claim". It is very narrow (as the GP points out), and for something that probably actually existed and did something arguably, if minutely, novel. It sounds like a particular implementation technique for some sort of MIMD vector processor. The entire rest of the document is explicatory, and indicates…
The claim as I understand it (for reference: based on the description on the last page of https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/home_page_posts/3/9/1/7/Pate..., after "I Claim"):
"A data processing device with these components:
- RAM for storing data and instructions - Multiple processors, each connected to the RAM, each with a multiplier, an arithmetic unit, an arithmetic logic unit, and a bit manipulation unit, all of these units coupled so that output from one can be used as input for the next.
The processors can work in parallel. They can - read instructions and data from RAM - execute the instructions to process the data - output the results "
That's it (unless I missed something, but I don't think so). That is not very narrow. On the contrary: it describes pretty much any multi-processor system. It certainly doesn't describe a particular implementation technique.
Re: SparkFun Hooks a Patent Troll
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lawsuit is decidedly not referring to dynamic memory allocation. There's no way to "request" a runtime-specified amount of memory dynamically here. The memory in question is a tiny, fixed-size block of RAM inside the chip that's directly connected to the various logic blocks. There is no way to allocate or request anything -- that memory is all you've got, and all of the bits have been spoken for by the time the…
What chance does our legal system have of gauging the validity of these patents when we can't even get a forum of technical people, with no horse in the race, to agree on what these things mean?
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