SGI Sues ATI for Patent Infringement

Ynsats writes "The Register is reporting that SGI is filing suit against ATI for patent infringement. The suit alleges that ATI violated patent number 6,650,327, "Display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering", which was filed in 1998 and granted in 2003, in its Radeon graphics cards. This is coming fast on the heels of AMD's announcement of the intention to buy ATI for $4.2B and it doesn't seem to be swaying AMD's intentions. AMD hopes to finish the takeover by the end of this year. SGI has also issued an ominous statement stating that they have plenty of intellectual property left and there will be more litigation to come."

Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[Ryu2]

If you can't beat them, sue them...

You suck SGI.

[dpaluszek]

Sorry SGI, you are done. Your products are done, all of your competition can bring better products to the table. This isn't 1998 where you brought these trendy cases and we all "ooed" over them.

Bye bye.

Re:welcome back SGI

[c_forq]

I submitted this yesterday after seeing it on OSNews, but my question was: is this becoming the new business strategy for technology companies that failed in their traditional business? Just on the heels of rejoining the NASDAQ and after a period of bankruptcy instead of a restructure or new plan they announce litigation. Is SGI going to use any capital gained to rejoin the table as a technological competitor, or are they following the steps of SCO?

And so it begins...

[gfxguy]

The SCO-iffying of sgi. I used to love SGI. I still love their old hardware, from Indys to Reality Engines, from the 4D85 I started on (before they gave fancy names) to the Onyx Infinite Reality that we ran virtual sets on in real time long before PCs could even think about doing this stuff, and the sgi's ran a lot of our live TV well into the PC era, doing a better job than PCs could years after the sgis were released.

But now it's over and sgi has become an office with a few lawyers, and this is what the call emerging from bankrupcy.

Re:welcome back SGI

[displague]

Patent Troll? Were they honestly hording patents or were they innovating?

It seems fair that SGI, who was very big in the game not that long ago and can no longer compete, should be able to collect dues for their patented ideas. I know nothing about the patent on hand, and whether or not it was obvious at the time, but I'm giving SGI the benefit of the doubt because of their cool blue Indigo systems.

My only question to SGI is why didn't you start defending the patent earlier? "Because we thought we were financially stable" won't make for a good answer.

I hear they make a good portion of their current income from real-estate leases to Google.

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Not the first time

[tjkslashdot]

Anyone else remember they gave NVidia the same treatment [findarticles.com] back in the heady day's of '98? This is nothing new for SGI. "Rattle the cage, and try to stave off the end with another lawsuit." How did that last one work for SGI? Not so well....

Re:Huh?

[ThosLives]

The problem is that this patent fails the obviousness test about 100%. The patent itself, if you follow the link, says that "People have used floating point before, just in emulation because hardware cost too much. Now that hardware is cheap, we just do floating point rasterization from the framebuffer instead of through emulation."

I don't understand how the USPTO granted a patent that says "This method has been known for some time, but now we just have the capability to do it."

I'm all for granting legitimate patents (they do actually exist) but this one does not pass the sanity check.

Re:welcome back SGI

[timeOday]

It seems fair that SGI, who was very big in the game not that long ago and can no longer compete, should be able to collect dues for their patented ideas.

If only you had said "legal" instead of "fair."

SGI did have their heyday. They had many good innovations, and at the time they also made a lot of money on those innovations for their employees and investors. That's all teriffic.

But now that it's over, what good will be had by forcing us to pay an "SGI Tax" on anything to do with graphics for the next N years?

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[Anonymous Coward]

Like he said, if you can't beat them, sue them. ("Valid" patents or not, they are still resorting to litigation-as-business-model like any dying company in the US does.)

Classic case of innovator's dilemma?

[defile]

SGI is the market leader in high performance graphics.

Someone makes cool 3d video game with a VGA.

SGI laughs, continues selling workstations for $10k.

Someone releases a commodity 3d graphics card.

SGI laughs, continues selling workstations for $10k.

Someone releases a fast commodity 3d graphics card.

SGI laughs, but to placate the market, throws half-hearted PC graphics effort over the wall (Fahrenheit, x86 workstations, etc.) Effort is severely overpriced due to SGI's existing value network/cost structures. No one buys it.

SGI thinks little of it, decides to let the commodity vendors have their razor thin margins, they're doing them a favor by leaving all of the fat deals to them, right?

Commodity 3d graphics vendor offers lucrative deal to SGI top talent.

SGI top talent, looking for new and exciting and more money jump ship.

SGI, instead of getting the message, continues to focus on moving up-market and ignoring commodity markets.

Commodity graphics grows into a dozens of billions of dollar market.

SGI participates in none of it. Dies instead.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

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Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the parent was trying to restate, in layman's terms, the patent stipulation that an idea is patentable only if it is non-obvious to someone skilled in the trade. If the idea is very simple, but that company was just the first one to think, "Hey, we can patent this", then it is pretty lame. At least, that's how I read it after a few mental contortions. :-)

Re:The solution is easy

[Dachannien]

If AMD can buy ATI for $4.2B, can't they simply add a few bucks to buy SGI too?

Why else would SGI be doing this? Eventually, either they'll sue the right deep pockets and get bought out, or another company will take a look at their growing list of pending lawsuits and decide they want in on that action. At least, that's the plan.

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Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[russotto]

A patent is not on the concept itself, it's on the actual "invention" - the method and / or mechanism.

You're thinking of the old patent system. In the new patent system, you patent the goal and then sue anyone who reaches it. This patent is definitely an example of that.

Re:Paradigm Shift

[LWATCDR]

Except SGI could actually have legit patents.
SGI should have thought of spinning off it's graphics IP a long time ago. Take a look at ARM. They make nothing but IP and money.

Re:welcome back SGI

[cgenman]

A once great company behaving like a patent troll is still a patent troll.

A patent is intended to be a device to protect non-obvious research and innovation from being stolen so that you can reap the rewards in your product line. In this case, the research was not stolen, as ATI thought of it too. And SGI no longer has a product line to protect.

They're suing ATI because they have no way left to make money. Period. They're not protecting their own product line or income stream, as they have neither. They're not even protecting their own research, as ATI developed this independently. They're just in their death throes, and are suing.

Remember, patent mutually assured destruction doesn't work if one company no longer has a product line to destroy. Dying companies have a habit of taking others with them.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's so obvious, why didn't you do it first?

Ok, so maybe SGI did it first. Then let's give them a nice gold-plated medal or something. Regardless of how much time and money you spent training for the competition, winning a race shouldn't give you the right to charge an arbitrary fee to anyone else who wants to run that course in the future (or prevent others from doing it at all).

Re:welcome back SGI

[fistfullast33l]

Good catch on that. Not many people will pay attention. I bet it took them 3 years to file the lawsuit because law moves slower than technology, and they had to take time to build a claim. I'd like to give SGI the benefit of the doubt here and say they're not a patent troll. You don't just file a lawsuit and hope for the best. As a business you need to make sure that your decision can be backed up (otherwise you become SCOX). Of course, I bet the bankruptcy had a lot to do both with the decision to file and the delay in filing. Plus, we don't know if SGI approached ATI before this and offered a deal over litigation.

Re:Classic case of innovator's dilemma?

[SirKron]

Delete:

• SGI participates in none of it. Dies instead.

Insert:

• AMD gobbles up SGI too as the company is cheaper than the future cost of attorney fees to defend against the patent claims.
• Intel, NVIDIA shit themselves as their graphics cards also infringe the patents.
• Lawsuit proceeds pays for SGI acquisition and more.

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[theStorminMormon]

Isn't that part of the reason we have a statue of limitations? It does seem to change the moral dimensions if you are happy to watch someone profit off of your idea, then sue them once they are a nice plump target. How to you distinguish between a patent troll that's happy to watch other people do all the work and take all the risks of going to market and a company that, for whatever reason, is incapable of suing in a timely manner?

The rewards of using an idea aren't just from the IP, they're also from the marketing, from the manufacturing, and from the risk-taking. Since the patent-holder invested none of that, why should they profit from it? If the patent stealing prevented the company from doing that (e.g. if a poor inventor can't keep up with a rich manufacturing firm) that's one thing, but if a company simply sits on a patent while another company works with it - why should we reward the lack of investment?

-stormin

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[jank1887]

so... the patent was only granted in 2003. It's now 2006. I would tend to give them the benefit of the doubt that 3 years is about the right amount of time to investigate (reverse engineer, if need be) whether a rival's technology is infringing, attempt to secure a licensing agreement, and then, after that, file infringement suits. On a 17 year patent, 3 years is young. It's not like they filed on some vague idea 14 years ago that wasn't even implementable then, and now that something looks close enough to what they cooked up back then they start suing. THAT would be troll-ish.

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[I Like Pudding]

> And what, exactly, is creating something original, if not being "the first one to get there"?

something original = copyright
something original + non-obvious* = patent

* not applicable in the US (fucking goddamn it)

Re:Classic case of innovator's dilemma?

[Doctor Memory]

SGI top talent, looking for new and exciting and more money jump ship.

SGI top talent, seeing future products cancelled and current projects crippled by cost-cutting measures, see the writing on the wall and jump ship.

Fixed that for ya...

Re:And so it begins...

[HiThere]

Sorry. This is unpleasant. That doesn't suffice to make it like SCO. So far there's no evidence that SGI didn't own the claimed patents. So far there's no evidence that SGI is going to refuse to say what it's suing about. Etc.

SCO is so much worse than any ordinary company that it's difficult to comprehend just how foul they are, and how foul the legal system is to allow them to use it so. SOMEBODY's got to be being paid off. It can't normally be THAT bad.

The SCO case is so bad that they have yet to clearly state what they are suing about. Currently it appears to be something about the AT&T contract with IBM. AT&T and IBM both deny that the contract means what SCO says it means, and under contract law that should mean that the case is immediately dismissed with prejudice (caution: IANAL). And yet it goes forward, spending IBM's and Novell's money. (O, Yes. SCO is paying it's lawyers with stolen money. Stolen from Novell.)

Do not compare SGI with SCO. SGI may well have a legitimate grievance.

Ridiculous Patent

[logicnazi]

Go read the background of this patent. The patent itself admits that there was plenty of graphics prior art that used floating point values to do the calculations. All they are claiming a patent on is implementing this system in hardware! And they include a line in their patent about how it has now become possible/desierable to implement the floating point stuff in hardware.

To be fair it seems their 'advancement' is that they kept the data in floating point format in the framebuffer rather than converting it to fixed point. Now their implementation of this approach probably contained some genuine advancement but just the notion of doing everything in floating point is pretty fucking obvious.

What I don't understand about this is that surely SGI has some much more substantial patents in their pockets. Is the problem that they gave them away with OpenGL/don't want to scare people away from opengl?

My personal guess is that SGI isn't serious about pursuing this particular patent infringement. Rather they are using a very broad and simple patent to go on a fishing expedition about ATI's hardware. During discovery on this patent SGI will be able to get details about how ATI's hardware/software works that they would otherwise not be able to get. I suspect SGI thinks ATI is infringing on a more substantial patent somewhere and is going to use the discovery during this case to find out.

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[dgatwood]

Indeed, MPEG and other graphics standards have done floating point for many, many years---since 1989, even. Hardware implementations have been around almost as long. The line between a hardware decoder for a video format and a video framebuffer is essentially nil. Indeed, ATI was doing MPEG decoding in their graphics chips prior to when this patent was filed.

I'm not saying that SGI doesn't have any valid patents, but at least the floating point framebuffer portion of this one should be tossed out. It is effectively nothing more than storing the same data at a different address. The floating point rasterization claims seem more novel, though.

Re:SGI's income went to research

[Copid]

The difference is that the Altix is a shared memory machine and Blue Gene/L is a cluster with distributed memory. You can always make bigger and bigger clusters (although it is quite a technical trick to make them as large as BG/L), but shared memory machines like the Altix are are a different ball of wax. The difference is that an Altix 4000 can be called *a* computer more readily because it actually runs *one* instance of the OS across 512 processors.

Corporate apologists eat balls.

[Generic Player]

Quit making up nonsense excuses to forgive corporations who shit on their customers. The specs required to write video drivers do not tell anyone anything that makes it easier to sue for patent infringment. The list of features on the nvidia and ati websites gives as much info for patent trolls as programming docs would. It just tells you what functionality is supported, and how to tell the card to do it.

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[ari_j]

SGI still has viable products. This is actual protection of its intellectual property in the one area that it has always (rightly) prided itself in leading. SCO is different because it is litigating something it didn't invent and has no continuing interest in protecting. SGI might be dying, but it is not yet at the point that its business model gives priority to litigation.

Where would you draw the line? When is it okay to litigate to protect your intellectual property without being accused of having a business model of litigation?

Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company

[mabhatter654]

The patent was orginally filed in 1998, but granted in 2003? that was about he time SGI started laying off the people that would create Nvidia and 3Dfx... I believe ATi has been around much longer. But That means they missed 5 years of graphics cards.. 5 years!!!! That's the ENTIRE time 3DFX was actually selling cards plus some. That's much to long to be considered seriously in an industry where stuff was obsolete in 6 months for much of that same time period. This reaks of a "submarine" that was tweaked at the last minute to hijack everybody else that outdid them by leaps and bounds.