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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issues of the case to me were that MIPS believed that hardware patents cover software emulation and (even assuming that the first case is true) that Lexra could somehow be held responsible for software companies choosing to infringe. It's like holding a car manufacturer responsible because a driver decided to head into oncoming traffic.

I don't understand why these cases weren't immediately thrown out as the garbage they were. MIPS wasn't a mega-corp like Samsung or Apple which can bring lots of pressure on the system. Why did the court make such a boneheaded decision on appeal?

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All patent appeals go to a special Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that is stuffed with IP lawyers and is extremely pro-patents. Their caselaw is filled with numerous nonsensical decisions. Only in the past 10 years has SCOTUS been giving them the equivalent of a spanking, repeatedly taking up patent cases to dismantle the CAFC's decisions.

The Oracle v Google trial ended up there thanks to the patent claims Oracle raised. If you've read their decision in that case it doesn't matter if you believe APIs should be copyrighted... the decision is incompetently written on its face.

It seems the biggest issue is that you can patent "unaligned loads" in a way that covers both a hardware instruction and software fault handler.

These are very different things. The software fault handler doesn't even do unaligned loads, naturally.

As I understand it, patents cover results and not so much mechanisms. It's just that people tend to listen the intermediate results in such detail as to appear that they cover mechanisms.

Which is, of course, fucking insane, but nobody seems to want to act on that.

If it covers results, what about the virtual ISAs that allow you to load data from any address of a byte-adressed memory and their implementations include optimizations?

The patent doesn't cover the result of an unaligned load. It covers the specific mechanism of doing an unaligned load using two instructions and a shifter to get the two pieces into the right place in the target register. You can read the claims here: https://www.google.com/patents/US4814976.

That the court considered a software implementation of this to also be in violation again underscores how nutzo that is.

> Why did the court make such a boneheaded decision on appeal?

The appeal was never decided. The patent was invalidated at the USPTO. That decision was appealed. Meanwhile, MIPS got a favorable trial ruling, and the whole thing settled before the Federal Circuit heard the appeal.

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