When SGI’s boss Dennis McKenna vowed to get serious about the bankrupt company’s IP portfolio this summer, he wasn’t kidding. “We have a hell of a lot of IP left,” he told The Register at the time. A day after it returned to NASDAQ SGI has filed suit against ATI claiming patent infringement.
A few years ago SGI was one of the best companies in computing world. They make great hardware and his I+D department was very productive. It was a sad notice when SGI got bankruptcy, one great company was in problems.
But try to leave this situation in the past using PI is not a good way to do that. It’s not the same, but it reminds me the SCO case.
It is following the same strategy as SCO. Once the core business model goes toes up, switch to one focused on litigation. I have to wonder why a person would invest in them.
Well in this case, it’s quite valid imo. They spent major bucks developing technologies, and though they squandered most to Nvidia and Microsoft, they got the right to reap the benefits from what they got left.
We shall see if the case holds of course, and I’m not saying the patent system is in any way healthy..but licensed technology is all they got left.
It’s quite valid, it’s their PI and they can do whatever they want with them. But it’s sad that they want to do that.
nighty5 said in another comment “If you can no longer innovate, its time to litigate!”. I think that a company like that must make money through their engineers work, not through their lawyers work.
“but licensed technology is all they got left.”
That’s not a sign of competent management and a healthy company, is it?
I was surprised when they filed for bankruptcy that Nvidia, ATI, or Microsoft didnt buy them just to leverage IP rights against there competition.
I love how when a company starts to go under, they suddenly start suing everyone.
…They said. Back from Hell with Satan on their right and software and other patents on their left.
Sounds to me like the latest fashionable thing for jealous companies with no where to go just pull some old patents out their rear ends and start trolling for some cash.
What a load of crap; SGI has a legitimate case on these patents; companies KNOW full well that just because the a company doesn’t enforce their patents immediately, doesn’t mean they won’t do it later on – are you really so stupid as to think that IBM wouldn’t turn around and sue a company for authorised use of a patented technology given the MASSIVE portfolio that they hold?
SGI sat around, out of control; they’ve got a new CEO who not only has a new (and according to him) profitable direction, he also wants to see that past R&D spent by the company is actually reaped, not only in the form of NEW products, but ensuring that companies who use those said technologies in their product, pay their appropriate royalties.
As for AMD/Ati and SGI; and easy solution? why not sit down with SGI and hammer out a deal relating to AMD64 and technology sharing agreement in lieu of royalties? I doubt the new CEO would turn down the opportunity of being able to offering AMD64 machines and other goodies.
What a load of crap; SGI has a legitimate case on these patents; companies KNOW full well that just because the a company doesn’t enforce their patents immediately, doesn’t mean they won’t do it later on – are you really so stupid as to think that IBM wouldn’t turn around and sue a company for authorised use of a patented technology given the MASSIVE portfolio that they hold?
SGI sat around, out of control; they’ve got a new CEO who not only has a new (and according to him) profitable direction, he also wants to see that past R&D spent by the company is actually reaped, not only in the form of NEW products, but ensuring that companies who use those said technologies in their product, pay their appropriate royalties.
As for AMD/Ati and SGI; and easy solution? why not sit down with SGI and hammer out a deal relating to AMD64 and technology sharing agreement in lieu of royalties? I doubt the new CEO would turn down the opportunity of being able to offering AMD64 machines and other goodies.
Regardless of whether SGI’s case is legitimate, it signals that SGI has quit the graphics business and is pursuing a business model based on IP litigation. The graphics industry has long operated under the principle of mutually-assured destruction with respect to patents. Everybody has them, and everybody is violating everybody else’s. It’s a big, incestruous IP love triangle. If you choose to operate in the graphics space, you archive your patents for a rainy day.
Now that SGI has started exercising its patents, there is no looking back. There will be no meaningful products. Like other burnt-out husks of former hardware vendors, SGI will live out its days licensing its IP portfolio and filing briefs.
This demonstrates several key failures of the (U.S. et al) patent system:
1) Patents protect companies that fail in bringing their ideas to market. For every company that brings patented technology to market and leverages its 20-year monopoly to rightfully recoup their R&D investment there are dozens that never produce anything at all. It takes more than good ideas to bring products to market, and so if we need an institution to protect innovation (questionable in and of itself), it should be designed to reward the companies that do something productive with their ideas.
2) Patents reward their holders by punishing their competitors. There are no aid programs, incentives, or tax breaks for patent-holders. Instead, patents bar competitors from innovating down certain paths. There is no evidence that patents serve as an effective incentive for innovation in a healthy, modern economy, simply because we don’t have a no-patents baseline economy to compare. However, there is aboundant evidence that patents impede innovation in many industries.
3) Patents imply that the development of ideas is an exclusive and unilateral endevour. However, it is easy to observe that in a well-connected society of thinkers, the availability of information trumps individual insight in the creation of new ideas. When the right information becomes available, several parties working independently often develop the same idea at around the same time.
4) Patents don’t keep up with the pace of innovation. The idea of a floating-point framebuffer-based graphics processor might have seemed quite novel in 1998 when the patent was filed. But by the time it was issued in 2003, everyone in the graphics industry had been using this technology for quite some time. Not to mention, the number of graphics vendors plummeted from a dozen or more down to just three in this timeframe.
Patents were a questionably idea when they were first introduced (Thomas Jefferson didn’t like them), and they have become increasing unfit for more classes of intellectual property even as their scope has broadened. It is obvious to nearly everybody in the technology sector that patents don’t work well, especially when it comes to software-based IP. Although patents might seem necessary in the pharmaceutical industry, this is an extreme case where R&D is so much more expensive than productization. Even so, patents in the pharmaceutical industry have their own problems. Drugs that might see unforeseen demand spikes (i.e. vaccines that might treat an epidemic) could become scarce due to patent protection.
In general, any government institution that benefits those with the best lawyers is not working properly. Like land and slaves in previous time periods, in today’s world ideas are the property of the rich and the gateway to upward mobility. The patent system not only represents a barrier to innovation, it represents a threat to the “American” Dream.
4) Patents don’t keep up with the pace of innovation. The idea of a floating-point framebuffer-based graphics processor might have seemed quite novel in 1998 when the patent was filed. But by the time it was issued in 2003, everyone in the graphics industry had been using this technology for quite some time. Not to mention, the number of graphics vendors plummeted from a dozen or more down to just three in this timeframe.
Your comment is great, but from TFA: “SGI has licensed this technology to ATI’s major competitors”.
Basically, it would be unfair competition if everyone but ATI pays for it.
This doesn’t invalidate the rest of your comment however
If you can no longer innovate, its time to litigate!
They are suing over the concept of using floats instead ints to represent pixels. I’m having a lot of trouble with the non-obviousness of that.
I’m also 99% certain that there were software implementations of floating point rasterization before 1998. I think Mesa may have even done it.
…it’s clear… we have a winner!
SCO #2
Here starts the downward spiral my friends.
When you’ve put your future into something like the Itanium
When your brightest minds have left the building
When all your innovation is lost
When you can’t beat them anymore
SUE THE BASTARDS!
“The patent allows software to operate directly on data in a frame buffer”
Wow! I never though it is possible ^_^
Whether or not a particular company chooses to pursue litigation over patent infringement is perhaps one aspect, but the bigger issue, I feel, is the whole question of granting patents in the first place. Originally these were a means to protect designs for a physical invention. The problem, where it concerns software, is to what extent an invention would be so unique that it wouldn’t simply be the result of the only, or most obvious, solution to a problem.
In this particular case we are probably somewhere between physical engineering and software, I do not know, but It seems very clear that there have been too many patents granted without enough “clear air” around them to make the invention so unique as to justify the claim for a patent.
US patent law seems to have taken this matter to a degree beyond that accepted in Europe and seems to lie behind these problems.
AMD Geode GX has 3DNow SIMD FP which could render to its integrated raster engine.
I’m not a big fan of suing your way to prosperity…
LOL, I love buisness wars. See their’a a differents between Software/Hardware people amd us Buisness folks. I’ve seen colleges fall into this same situation.