University wins $1.17 billion hard disk patent verdict against Marvell

The most valuable patents are the worst patents: the ideas that everyone else will come up with on their own and only later discover that they infringe when it's too late to do anything about it.

Oddly enough, the fact that something is repeatedly reinvented independently does not appear to have any bearing on whether a patent fails the legal 'obviousness' test, because everyone is assumed to know about every patent (in the sense that they won't believe that you came up with it on your own even if you did), in spite of the fact that you get punished for having any knowledge thereof.

In my experience patents are a tremendous driving force for innovation. Universities use patents to be able to get a cut of the revenue stream generated by the inventions they produce. Start-ups in engineering fields with high capital costs depend on patent protection to compete with bigger players that could otherwise steam roll over them with their manufacturing prowess.

The whole wide world of engineering doesn't all look like Web 2.0. Innovation in "Big Engineering" is not by and large someone thinking "gee, wouldn't it be cool if we had a site that did this" and whipping up an RoR app to do it. Rather, it's PhD projects that take years of painstaking research and access to specialized equipment. It's teams of researchers analyzing reams of data and doing hundreds of experiments.

I worked at a very small tech company doing defense research, and we had individual pieces of equipment that cost as much as the YC VC fund gives to YC alums. We blew through double-digit millions of dollars just at the basic research stage, long before bringing a real product to market was on the table.

In this sort of environment, you need some way to keep other people from taking your ideas, after you've done the hard part, and competing with you using your own work. If you can't protect the designs, then all the competition comes down to who can most efficiently outsource manufacturing to China or who has the most efficient supply chain. And that's not exactly good for innovation either.

This has not been mentioned on all the other patent threads.

That the idea of a monopoly somehow facilitating innovation and competition is accepted by so many people is the mark of a political and economical system which is corrupt at it's very core. I'm not just talking about software or hardware patents - medical patents have caused regressions in innovation just the same (see chapter 9 in the link below). How something so fundamentally and obviously incorrect has seeped into common culture is something which needs to be investigated and taken seriously.

That this has happened in the software industry in particular, where since day one everybody rejected the idea, is a testament to the notion that there are social and political factors which are actively spreading misinformation. Naming names might be an effective way to shunt them out of the economy by refusing to do business with them.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

This is very obviously and sadly true.

Where I work we are encouraged to not even look at patents, because then we would know about the "invention" leading to triple damages if we are found infringing. This is clearly nonsense and the diametric opposite of what was intended.

One thing to keep in mind is that the alleged infringement has been ongoing for nearly 10 years. Over that time, they sold over 2 billion of the infringing chips. A billion dollars sounds huge, but $0.50 per chip doesn't necessarily sound huge.

I believe that the current standard for figuring out what damages should be is based on trying to figure out what deal the parties would have made had their been a negotiated license deal under the constraint that both parties feel that they MUST come to an agreement. This should take into account royalties that the defendant has paid to license similar patents before, and the importance of the patents to the defendants business. There is a whole big list of factors used to guide this hypothetical negotiation. They were established in a case involving Georgia Pacific, so googling for that along with patent damages will get more information if you are curious.

To find out exactly what happened in this case, you'd need to get records from the trial. Both sides would have had hired experts prepare damage reports that look at the Georgia Pacific factors and argue for what royalty should result. It sounds like the jury decided to go with the plaintiffs estimate.

    Since the jury found the infringement by Marvell
    had been “willful,” meaning the company knew it
    was using the patented technology, the judge can
    award up to three times the verdict amount,
    according to a statement by K&L Gates, the law
    firm representing Carnegie Mellon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/technology/marvell-ordered...

This was a Pittsburgh jury that decided in favor of a Pittsburgh institution against a Silicon Valley company. I'd imagine the results would be a bit different if the trial took place in San Francisco.

This seems like a silly way to analyze things. If, as you seem to assume, the US is currently at the forefront of innovation, then why shouldn't we attribute the status quo to the US's strong IP regime by the same logic?

By that standard, every court case has "no net productive output." Should we disband the legal system?

Yeah, we're probably doing a better analysis glancing at the claims than the team of patent attorneys defending against a billon dollar lawsuit did.

Yeah, it's so obvious that it was published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the author got a PhD from CMU for it.

Not a Kalman filter, but rather a Viterbi decoder -- a type of error-correcting code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_decoder

From lurking on HN, I read that the whole field of ECC's is infested with patents. There's even an example on here of a specific startup (allegedly) destroyed by an ECC patent:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3432322

Why does the winning litigant not count as a real winner?

In the process of research, professors and graduate students (and sometimes non-academic appointment staff) make discoveries and inventions that can be patented. The University owns part of every patent, because the University often provides the infrastructure yadda yadda, but usually the academics are the ones who start companies to exploit the patent. Technology transfer officers who manage the University patent portfolios will negotiate licenses if you call them up, but these offices are often dealing with grant compliance issues as well and are dealing with so much data it seems like they can hardly keep track of all the research going on in the academy, let alone look for patent violators. I don't think a University ever owns 100% of a patent, so I have to believe it is the inventor's company that is really going after people; and the university is just a co-plantif because they own part of the patent are are legally compelled to take part in the patent defense / plus they want to get their slice of the pie.