SGI Sues ATI for Patent Infringement 283
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."
welcome back SGI (Score:4, Interesting)
the real culprit: clueless legislators (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if the money spent on spurious litigation went into actual R&D, capital investment for fabrication centers, engineer salaries, hell even advertising. Anything but litigation!
But as long as there's an avenue to make money this way, you can't really expect companies like SGI to behave any differently. You're providing a way for companies that are no long profitable (either because they have no product, e.g. SGI, or because they have an antiquate business model e.g. **AA) to leech off of the market instead of exiting it. Of course they're going to try to survive and not just go quietly into that good night. So, while I'm annoyed at this behavior, you have to realize that it's intellectual property laws that are the problem. We need fewer and simpler IP laws. Of course, trying to get lawmakers to pass fewer laws is like asking a competitive eater to "take it slow", and that's not even mentioning that the bloodsuckers aren't going to be happy to see yet another cash cow disappear anytime soon.
How long will it take for public outrage to really grow until real reform is made?
-stormin
A sad day... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a shame too, SGI was a great company with some very good products too.
However, I would point out that it's not unexpected. One of the reasons that vendors of video cards don't provide hardware programming specs or open source drivers for their products has been for fear of litigation. It's been a prevalent rumor for years that many vendors feel that their products potentially run afoul of a bunch of patents and that's why they are so cagey with letting people understand how to program for their products and to get the best performance out of them. If SGI wins in this suit, expect a horrible blood-letting in the graphics adapter business and prices for premium technology to go up across the board.
SGI's income went to research (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI is the company that today has the very fastest Linux computer - the Altix shared memory multiprocessing family - available at any price, really a technological marvel because it runs a single OS kernel and has memory architecture which is truly phenomenal - it scales better than any other multiprocessing/clustering solution.
So any defense of their patents, however 'unpopular' with the video gaming set, should be welcomed because it could help a company that we really owe a lot to in many ways get back into the game. Honestly.
They would not be a 'patent troll'. Don't forget, SGI open sources a LOT of its technology. Much more than most other hardware vendors. Much more.
I used to work at NASA and our division was largely an SGI shop, and yes, they were expensive, but at the time, there was nothing else out there that was comparable in ANY way. You won't ever find me saying anything bad about SGI except maybe that it would be great if they were cheaper.
Why? Because they are the best.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh boy.... (Score:1, Interesting)
They offered fast hardware with a robust OS.
Now you can have an equally robust OS ranging from 0$ to less than 500$ (whether you choose Linux/*BSD or MacOS/X or Win); most of them have hardware accelerated OpenGL, etc etc. Linux, MacOS/X and BSDs are even unix-like and posix compliant (most of them at 0$). Intel and AMD offer multicore processors at a wonderfully low price (at least if you compare them to the system SGI was selling..); don't even mention graphic hardware from nVidia and ATI.
When you are put in this situation (which is common between previous *nix vendors) you either 1) embrace a new business method (IBM/Sun/Novell) or 2) sue who trampled your market (SGI/SCO).
This is why they dont want to open the drivers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wikipedia article also tells the story of Antonio Meucci, who apparently invented the telephone several years earlier but was too poor to take out a patent. Seems things really weren't all that different 130 years ago.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:3, Interesting)
Alexander Graham Bell didn't sit there and watch Elisha Gray build a sucessful business selling his 'rogue' telephones. Then wait till he was tired of being a broke inventor then sue him.
Re:Floating point in graphics hardware is obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
You are highly confused. The incandescent light bulb was one of the few patents of Edison's that was not overturned [ezinearticles.com]. In fact, Edison strengthed his case by buying off previous patents for similar work, making sure that there was an unbroken chain of Intellectual Property. So when Sawyer and Man attempted to challenge Edison's patent, they had to do so on addendums they added to their own patent application. The Supreme Court found that Sawyer and Man's claims were too broad, and that their addendum was an afterthought rather than core to their invention. Thus Edison's patent was upheld as valid.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:2, Interesting)
Begun this Patent War is (Score:4, Interesting)
But this is still unfocused thrashing. Wait until they, like SCO, sucumb to the temptations of the monopolist in Redmond to focus their attack.
The patent system doesn't need reform, it needs to be scraped and rethought. I'd say cap em at 1000 per year. With a number that low only real inventions would make it through and the number in any particular industry would be small enough anyone in that industry could be expected to be aware of them.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hey! They have money now! GET THEM!"
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:3, Interesting)
Point taken, the patent titles often don't accurately describe something, if indeed they actually try to describe anything at all. We should probably thank you lawyers for that.
I'm not a professional engineer of 3D stuffs, or even more than a novice programmer, but it seems fairly obvious that floating point rasterization of fog, lighting, texturing, blending and antialiasing is no less than the obvious way to do it... Defining the size of your floating point operators to optimize the precision you need dosen't sound particularly non-obvious, either. I like SGI, but it really sounds like this is a bogus patent.
The one part that might echo of some innovative thing is the last scentance: The graphics program can operate directly on the data in the frame buffer without losing any of the desired range and precision of the data. But I'd wager that people in the demo scene have been doing that for a long time.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:4, Interesting)
Which surely would have never worked in front of the officer
The whole patent system has gone down the drain. Worldwide and not only the USPTO. WIPO is a bunch of industrial puppets these days, and the - then - great EPO has become a patent printing mill as well.
And, yes, I have spent more than 6 years of my life as patent examiner, in case you thought I was just a troll.
Re:Well its 2006 and SGI are still here. (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably inevitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Begun this Patent War is (Score:3, Interesting)
You misunderstand. I didn't mean a 1000 limit per entity. I meant 1000 per year, total. As in patent numbers could be reworked as (SOMEPREFIX)YYYYNNN. Really, when you think of 'invention' you think of real inventions, the stuff that is clever enough to warrant a government monopoly, most people do not envision the crap that gets issued nowadays. I'm saying restrict em to the big ones that nobody would dispute. The light bulb, vulcanized rubber, major new drugs, etc. There isn't 1000 per year of those, so my solution would still allow hundreds of bogus patents to be issued, but would reduce the problem to managable proportions.
If one wanted to REALLY cut em down require them to issue from Congress as individually passed bills with a stipulation that they always be by roll call vote. Would probably require an Amendment, but it would put some accountability into the system, slow the process to a crawl and generally gum up the works. Downside is that it would hopelessly politicize the process.
So leave the patent office and their examiners in the loop, just force a cap on em. And here is another idea I just had. Change the submission fee schedule to prevent the flood of dodgy apps. Require a $100,000 (cash or bond) to submit an application. If the idea really is patent worthy return the money minus some small administrative fee, otherwise keep the whole wad as a disincentive to wasting the examiners time.
Re:Reminds me of another three letter 'S' company (Score:3, Interesting)
The real challenge with patent law in the IT industry is that the patent laws were written when the pace of invention, and of the market were slower. 15 years without competition is a very, very long time in the computer world. Much moreso than competing designs of steam engine.