RSSJudgment: Apple is a patent infringer
By Tim Conneally | Published April 27, 2009, 11:54 AM
A patent infringement suit filed against Apple by California integrated circuit company OPTi two years ago has been decided, and Apple has been declared the loser.
The suit was filed in the heartland of patent litigation, the Eastern District of Texas, where Microsoft was sued over its JPEG patent, Sony was sued for its Cell Chip technology, Google was sued for its Database technology, and countless others are sued every day.
US District Judge Charles Everingham handed down a $19 million patent infringement ruling, which determined that Apple had violated OPTi's patent for "Predictive Snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses," which describes a method of high-speed communication between a physical bus and L1 cache memory.
Apple attempted to contest the validity of OPTi's patent by citing prior art and obviousness, but the jury was not convinced, and determined that Apple's infringement was willful and therefore worth $19,009,728 in damages to OPTi, the company which has sued a handful of notable tech companies in Texas, including Nvidia and AMD.
beware of the wrath of Steve Jobs and the Board of apple!!
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|Someday someone will be sued because they eat with a fork, after someone remembers to patent that :P
If by any change 2 or 3 guys in the world invent the same thing ,more or less the same time, work the same way and one patents it 1º, the others should pay as well?
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|yawn dood. yawn.
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|perhaps, it was an easy decision because the judge and juror's were somewhat nerdy, pudgy and wore glasses like the tv pc dude.
perhaps, it might also be to the fact that texans prefer pecans over apples for their pies.
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|They should have added a couple zeros. :)
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|cool :)
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|How do they come to the results of 9,728 on the end and not just $19,000,000?
Is it based on RRP of the OS * estimated copies sold or just made up on the spot?
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|Have you ever heard of terms "present value" and "future value"?
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|It's the RIAA model. Make it up as you go.
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|Amazingly, these guys actually *produce* something related to their patents...
Almost un-heard of in this day and age...
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|OPTi? I thought that they were just a patent holding company, though they claim to make things.
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