Wednesday, March 3rd 2021
Intel Fined 2 Billion USD In Damages For Patent Infringement
A federal jury in Texas has ruled that Intel Corporation violated two patents of VLSI Technology and must pay 2.18 billion USD in damages. The damages include 1.5 billion for one patent and 675 million for the other. The patents are related to clock frequency control and minimum memory operating voltage technique and were awarded to Freescale Semiconductor Inc in 2012 and SigmaTel in 2010. Freescale bought SigmaTel gaining control of the two patents before being passed to NXP after the company acquired Freescale in 2015, these patents were then transferred to the newly resurrected VLSI Technology in 2019 with the sole purpose of launching a legal battle against Intel. In a comment to Tom's Hardware the company said "Intel strongly disagrees with today's jury verdict. We intend to appeal and are confident that we will prevail.". This legal battle will likely drag-out for several years as Intel plans to appeal the recent ruling. Intel recorded a net income of 5.9 billion USD in Q4 2020 so this fine is by no means insignificant.
Source:
Seeking Alpha
62 Comments on Intel Fined 2 Billion USD In Damages For Patent Infringement
It also must cost a LOT of time and money for every engineering change to be compared to a global list of patents
'wait kevin has a patent for upside down triangles and ours is a sideways triangle, can we still use it? Also his patent is in french so the translation is vague'
I like people being paid for their IP. I just really, really hate patent trolls.
Also i just like picking on kevins in this example, cause i hate patent trolls and ugh kevin stop it
You know what would mitigate that? More competent people at the patents office.
I mean, what kind of thinking could lead someone to think that this could be patented?
patents.google.com/patent/US5443036
LOL
Well, if there is anything of use out of that one, I'd say the citations.
Though, I don't know how Microsoft came to relate laser-pointing cats with a patent for "secure machine counting" (piracy deterrent)
Either Google made a mistake or someone at MS was drunk at the time.