Court Orders Marvell To Pay Carnegie Mellon $1.5B For Patent Infringement 85
Lucas123 writes "A U.S. District Court has ruled that Marvell Technology must pay Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) $1.54B for infringing on two hard drive chip patents. Marvell was also ordered to pay interest at 0.14% annually, and 50 cents for each chip sold that uses the intellectual property. While Marvell did not comment on the case, CMU said it 'understands' that Marvell will again appeal the ruling and the school 'will look forward to the federal circuit court' upholding the lower court's ruling. The latest decision by a U.S. District Court in Western Pennsylvania ends for now a five-year legal battle between the two. In 2012, a jury found Marvell had violated CMU's patents, and the chip maker then appealed that ruling."
1.5 Billion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Lower the student fee?
*laughs*
Re:Isn't that obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
build another admin building with a level opulence that would make a Saudi prince feel like a tent dwelling nomad -- duh. :)
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Upgrade the football stadium.
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They could give out USB sticks instead of 3 1/2" floppies...
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I graduated from CMU in 1994 with a Math/CS degree. I went back there this spring with some college friends for the first time in about 20 years.
There are alot of new buildings, and they are ridiculously opulent compared to what we had. Instead of the bare concrete corridors of Wean Hall (which they've actually tiled and put drop ceilings in sometime in the past 20 years - way to spoil a mood!) students now walk through gleaming glass and natural wood interiors.
I must say it all seems about 1,000 more cus
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...maybe they can field a football team?
Re:1.5 Billion? (Score:4, Informative)
And I'm sure they'll find something to do with it.
Re:1.5 Billion? (Score:5, Informative)
You don't invent patents. You patent inventions. The patents list the inventors. The inventors [names] are ON the patents.
Re:1.5 Billion? (Score:5, Funny)
You don't invent patents. You patent inventions.
Maybe that's how it works in soviet Russia, but here in America you can invent a patent on just about anything. The more obvious the better.
Re: 1.5 Billion? (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty pretentious for someone who is wrong...
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I think you meant "the two inventors OF the patents"... But then, you are AMERICAN, aren't you... You Americans sure do have problems with prepositions...
No.
"The other half will go to the two inventors ON the patents", while not completely grammatically correct, is accepted as vernacular shorthand for "The other half will go to the two inventors... whose signatures are ...on the patents".
"OF" the patents is completely incorrect because this would indicate that the people who came up with the idea of using patents would get paid and not the actual inventors of this particular invention.
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Re:1.5 Billion? (Score:4, Funny)
Does CMU have a monospace to proportional project to donate to?
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Maybe they can stop hassling me for money each year
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wow (Score:1)
That'll pay for a lot of melons!
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0.14% Interest? (Score:3)
Re:0.14% Interest? (Score:4, Informative)
I was also surprised by that, but looks like it's mechanically computed based on T-bill rates. The full opinion is here (pdf) [justia.com].
The opinion cites (on p. 47) 28 U.S. 1961 [cornell.edu], which says:
And the 1-year T-bill rate is indeed somewhere around that [treasury.gov].
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That's roughly how I felt when I found out that modern 'savings' accounts offer 0.01% interest...
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Yes, but just flat out refusing to pay will land them back in court on contempt charges.
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Good guys and bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good guys and bad guys (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, they will. CMU's IP Policy [cmu.edu] is quite clear on this matter. The inventors will get 50% of the proceeds.
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I do not know the details of these particular patents and I am not a lawyer, but I would disagree that the policy is “quite clear” on this matter. The policy defines creator to mean “person or persons who create an item of intellectual property.” Since this IP was developed at a university, creators probably refers to a professor and one or more graduate students. I do not see anything in the policy that specifies how that 50% will be distributed. It is quite possible that the 50
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Yeah, right. The professor was probably marginally involved in the invention -- he/she probably only improved/refined the original idea. The "creator" proceeds should be divided equally unless you who know who did how much work.
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You are correct that the specific breakdown of that 50% is entirely dependent on the percentages agreed upon when the internal invention disclosure was made, and that the assignation of those percentages between the various inventors is not dictated in any particular way by the IP Policy. What is clear, however is that 50% (minus 1/2 of the legal fees) will be distributed amongst to the two inventors.
That said, at CMU, any faculty member who tries to cut his or her grad students out of their invention discl
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Calm down, they're a private university. You could've google/wikipedia that before flying off the handle.
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Welcome to Slashdot, you are new here?
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From CMU's FAQ on the case [cmu.edu]:
"Their work was done under the auspices of CMU's Data Storage Systems Center [cmu.edu], which was formed as a partnership between CMU and certain members of the information storage industry and through which CMU has worked closely with industry partners for decades. The DSSC was formed to and has played a critical role in preserving research and development efforts and jobs in the hard disk drive industry in the United States."
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I don't see anything wrong with some of Marvell's profits from commercializing the invention going back to fund the researchers who invented it. What benefit to the public does it serve to let Marvell keep all the profits?
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The benefit to the public is that you and I should (would) have the same right to use the results of that research for commercial enterprise (or anything else) too.
Note that I didn't ask if this is a public or a private university; that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. I asked if it's being taxpayer subsidized. I suspect that you would be hard pressed to find a "significant" university in the USA (or anywhere else) that isn't taxpayer subsidized, frankly. Therefore, their research should be placed in t
Re: Taxpayer subsidized? (Score:2)
What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
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What do you mean subsidized? Accept students on financial aid? Have some government research grants? Why would any of those preclude the university from selling an invention?
If this research was funded by a government grant then the university would not own the IP. That is clearly not the case here or this would have died in court 5 years ago....
It was partially supported by NSF. From the patent:
This invention was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECD-8907068. The United States Government has certain rights in this invention.
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My own version of the preferred policy would be that publicly funded research should be patentable, but the patent royalties must be plowed back into research (not e.g. personal enrichment of the professors).
I think in many cases allowing universities to patent things produces a nice synergy between research and commercialization, which absent patents would result in a lot more use of trade secrets to try to accomplish the same effect. For example, Stanford invented a bunch of early synthesizer hardware; Ya
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Well, the patent actually states this:
Regardless, the public isn't getting any of that money.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
The size of the award was based on an analysis by Catharine M. Lawton, an intellectual property damages expert who testified on behalf of CMU during the trial along with CMU's technical and industry experts. Ms. Lawton applied several commonly used and court approved methods of determining an appropriate royalty for Marvell's infringement in patent cases. Ms. Lawton's analysis rested on a comparison of Marvell's business and economic circumstances both before and after it started to infringe. Her opinion and application of these accepted methods were based on a detailed analysis of the facts and financial records in the case, as well as the testimony of Dr. Steven McLaughlin, CMU's digital signal processing expert, and Dr. Chris Bajorek, CMU's expert in the hard disk drive industry.
Marvell earned an average revenue of $4.42 per chip and made an average operating profit of $2.16 for each of the more than 2 billion chips sold over more than a decade. Based upon her analysis of all the facts, Ms. Lawton determined that the proper value of the CMU invention was $.50 per chip.
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Must have been one blockbuster of an invention to deserve 25% of the chip's profits. The invention was probably less than 5% of the chip's functionality, perhaps less. Even with penalties & lawsuit costs applied, how is it fair to eat a large chunk of the product's profit?
Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
You should really just read the whole FAQ.
Basically Marvell desperately need the invention after trying and failing to come up with something that could do the same thing. CMU offered to license it to them. They declined, and then used it anyway. It completely turned around their drive business. So, only 25% of the profits for willful infringement of critical technology that they could have licensed for much less if they'd played fair back in the day doesn't really seem too bad to me.
Remeber when... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Universities were places of teaching and learning, rather than patent-generating sporting-team franchises?
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Hey now! CMU doesn't have any sports teams of note! They do make up for it in patents, though.
CMU has the right (Score:1)
But if CMU wins outright, it will be a clear sign to corporations that using academia as it's main R&D "arm" is bad for business...
That's considering nearly every Fortune 500 company uses the Google model: partner with a University (or multiples) and cut corporate R&D to zero while leveraging academia. Problem is academia research has a conflict of interest with corporations and the university system and stuff that comes out of Universities are so half-baked they'll always be in perpetual beta.
Again
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But if CMU wins outright, it will be a clear sign to corporations that using academia as it's main R&D "arm" is bad for business...
This is only the case where corprorations try to cheat academia. Marvell had the option ~10 years ago to license the tech from CMU. They said no and used it anyway.
The Actual Patent (Score:2)
The link to the actual patent -> http://www.google.com/patents/US6438180 [google.com]
It is very hard to tell what is going on in the patent. Seems like it is an method inside an error correcting algorithm for hard drives. Error correcting is statistical in hard disks and it seems like they found a new method for some error correlation for turbo codes. I'm not an expert in this field so I don't know how much of an impact this had on error coding.
The present invention is directed to a method of determining branch metric values in a detector. The method includes receiving a plurality of time variant signal samples, the signal samples having one of signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, and both signal dependent and correlated noise associated therewith. The method also includes selecting a branch metric function at a certain time index and applying the selected function to the signal samples to determine the metric values. The present invention represents a substantial advance over prior sequence detectors. Because the present invention takes into account the correlation between noise samples in the readback signal, the detected data sequence is detected with a higher degree of accuracy. Those advantages and benefits of the present invention, and others, will become apparent from the Detailed Description of the Invention hereinbelow.
Obviously a front (Score:2)
This transaction is obviously a cover for S.H.I.E.L.D. to fund certain research at CMU.
The case involves chip technology .. (Score:1)
Did Marvell reverse engineer Carnegies' drives, if not what exactly is Carnegie claiming ownership of. Could anyone produce the same improvements without taking a look at the Carnegie patents. Personally, I've seen may circuits appearing in electronic magazines that have subsequently appeared in patent applic
Got really excited reading the title (Score:2)
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No, but working on it:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research... [cmu.edu]
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research... [cmu.edu]
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research... [cmu.edu]