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Apple Ordered to Pay University of Wisconsin $234 Million in A7/A8 Patent Lawsuit
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A university takes in state and federal tax payer money to fund much of their operations. Secondly they get more notoriety if they publish more research which attracts more government funds and makes more students want to go to their institution... If UWS dont want to be involved in taking government money, then they should do their research separately as a business. Should a non profit even be allowed to apply for a patent?
They dont even pay student athletes who generate billions for universities directly and indirectly. Yet somehow researchers who do research that may not ever make a dime off the research should be allowed to cash in even as their research and education was funded by the tax payers. Secondly, doing research is not the same as being able to create a product and a viable business around the research. You go to school for the education unless you work there.
Im not one way on this but I think there something to be said for tax payers paying multiple times for the same thing. We paid for the research why shouldnt we get to benefit from it without having to pay again through patent wars from institutions who had no intention of making a viable product out of it. They assumed no risk of actually doing business and making a product that is sellable.
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That's more of a personal commentary, not agreeing with anything is fine. This is a case of what the law says you can and can't do...maybe a change in he law would be a good thing. As the way it stands now with all things being considered it seems Apple has infringed on their patent, which gives them the lawful right to protect it. The courts only are in place to uphold the law. I don't like many many laws and think they should be changed but......I follow them. Not liking the law is OK, not following it is not.
But they still feel the need to solder memory and make things proprietary because they do not make enough.
Free tuition for all!
Actually, This won't even cover the state's budget cuts to the University over the next 2 years. That's how bad higher eduction has gotten in WI.
I hope UW wins this, and a whole bunch more big lawsuits.
Oh how the ignorance can fly around here. "tax breaks for nothing"
When government "TAKES" less from you, they are not giving you anything. They are taking LESS.
When the government gives someone a "tax credit" (primarily for lower income), they are giving someone money (usually from higher income). This is how Demoncrats give their voters money, cell phones, health care, etc. All for votes. Of course it is disguised in political speeches that most of the lower income can't, don't, or don't care to understand. They just want their free crap.
So giving stuff away for "nothing" is a Demoncrat way of buying votes, not a republican thing.
The facts are that they wealthiest 1% pay more taxes than the lower 95%. An unbelievable statistic that shatters anyones obnoxious statements that the wealthiest should pay more or don't pay enough.
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/tax-burden-top-1-now-exceeds-bottom-95
I'm not saying that they don't license their patents, but however has this patent ever been licensed
before?
Quite the contrary. Wisconsin taxpayers have been getting raped by the UW system for too many years. UW is financially irresponsible.
Fortunately for us, that's not how it works. Normally you have informative quotes. There's so much wrong in this particular quote, I'm inclined to believe someone is impersonating you. You said, "We paid for the research why shouldnt we get to benefit from it?" What benefit do you get when multi-billion companies can just "borrow" the patent from us (the tax payer), use it to their benefit, and grow their profit? If your scenario was valid, we would still be paying multiple times with no benefit to the tax payer. Suffice it to say, that's not how it works.
Several earlier posts in this thread give a better, more accurate picture of university research. You should check them out. Even better, you could do a little research yourself. You're better than this post.
The students who designed it were probably working for the university on paid research grants, and many of them are likely getting a free education as well. When I went to graduate school I had to pay, but between research grants and paid teaching.. I was debt free when I finished the degree.
I admit I don't really know how patent law works, but how can you accidentally infringe on a patent? I thought they were supposed to be specific designs that one could only make by copying them.
People have come up with the concept of evolution, and also invented calculus separately. Look up Alfred Russell Wallace/Darwin, and Newton and Leibniz.
As you know, patent infringement does not require copying to be involved. All it requires is that someone patented a method before you came up with it yourself.
In theory, this should not happen often, because an invention is supposed to be non-obvious, among other criteria. But that depends a lot on the skill of the examiner to determine. The check and balance is that when bad patents are let through, they can be invalidated later on when challenged.
In reality, it happens a lot with software patents, since developers all around the world often end up inventing similar methods of solving a problem... without ever knowing that some company somewhere had the time and money to patent it. It's why many countries don't allow them.
This patent is about hardware, but it's still possible that someone who's spent a lot of time working on the problem, could independently came up with the same solution, especially when exposed to other solutions published in the years since the original patent was granted.
Doesn't matter, though. Unless the patent is invalidated, independent invention is not a defense. Many of the utility patents that Samsung infringed were like that. No code copying involved, just accidental internal similarities.
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However, they're no longer accidental once the infringer is informed of a patent. There are several ways that can happen:
The old traditional way is that the infringed invention had a patent number marked on it.
A more common way these days is that the patent holder notices and informs the infringer, sometimes via a lawsuit out of the blue.
In this case, they were not only contacted to license the patent, but Apple themselves had cited the patent in almost three dozen of their own patents over the past eight years.
sort of like tax breaks for big business then?
btw if the wealthiest 1% is unhappy paying such a high percentage of the taxes they should pay higher salaries and share the tax burden. your % only shows how nonsensical the wealth distribution has become.
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Raises interesting questions about other CPU manufacturers like Qualcomm, Samsung and nVidia. Surely they must be using this technology in their CPUs too. Are they already paying to use it? If not, the precedent is set now. Keep watching that letter box guys...
I have no idea how it will all shake out in the end. My post was just an estimate using the publicly available information regarding patent licensing at UW. For their sake, I hope they get a lot more and can retire (or, retire in Cupertino and work for Apple)
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The two main inventors are top professors at the university. The other couple of inventors were probably grad students.They assigned the patent to WARF, from which they'll get a nice royalty.
A note about WARF:
WARF is not part of the University of Wisconsin per se, although it has very strong ties. It is self-sufficient and does not use University funds. Quite the opposite, in fact.
WARF was founded in 1925 by one of Wisconsin's professors who had invented a process to irradiate food to increase Vitamin D. (He's the reason we have Vitamin D milk, and why rickets disappeared as a common disease. Huge patent.)
Instead of keeping the vitamin D license money to himself, he, along with other teacher alumni, set up WARF (the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) to fund research and to handle university patents. The profits are funneled back into more research and also to make large grants to his home University. Basically, it's an ongoing alumni endowment and R&D machine, set up as a non-profit entity. Pretty neat, really.
A note about the award:
Apparently the jury gave WARF about $1.60 per CPU, about half of the $2.74 WARF had asked for.
However, Apple's lawyers claimed that Intel had only paid WARF about $0.07 per unit in their 2009 settlement.
