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Apple drops appeal of $21.7 million patent suit against OPTi
Another great day for the patent trolls: Apple has decided to stop throwing good money after bad in its case against OPTi, which has been awarded a US$21.7 million settlement, according to AppleInsider. AppleInsider explains that the patent was for "predictive snooping" of "memory caches that speed the flow of data between a system's memory and processor." I have only a vague idea of what that even means, but apparently OPTi has decided that suing people is better than actually working for a living. AppleInsider says OPTi stopped being a manufacturing business and became a "full time patent-suing operation in 2003." OPTi's found a court that is happy to award patent trolls; Apple seems to have decided that enough is enough, and it will be cheaper to just pay OPTi rather than risk additional financial penalties. It seems like each week we hear of another company that has decided to roll the dice in court to try to make a profit off of an idea, regardless of how obvious an idea it might be, because "they had it first." I'm no lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, but it seems like this sort of thing was almost unheard of even a few years ago. Now it's commonplace. AppleInsider also noted "Apple has been the most-sued technology company since 2008." A decade ago you couldn't read an article about Apple without the word "beleaguered," but since they've turned things around and started to make significant profits, I guess they have a target on their backs.
Apple ordered to pay damages in Opti patent case, Apple appeals
Full-time IP licensor Opti sure has been keeping itself busy in the last few years suing the likes of NVIDIA, AMD and Apple, and it looks like its case with the latter may now finally be drawing to a close. After a few years of battling it out in the courts in Texas, the judge in the case has ordered Apple to pay Opti $19 million for three instances of patent infringement, as well as $2.7 million in pre-judgment interest. The judge didn't find that Apple willfully violated the patents in question, however, which concern a memory access technology known as predictive snooping (hence the relatively small damages). Apple apparently isn't quite ready to call it a day just yet though, and has reportedly already filed a formal appeal to have the case overturned.
Patent troll strikes again: OPTi heads after Apple this time
With a $7 million settlement from NVIDIA under its belt, and an AMD suit in process, OPTi is really coming on strong in this whole frivolous patent suit thing. Of course, we never were so up on that whole "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses" family of patents (there's three of them, all named the same thing -- we know that much), so we very well could be overlooking a hefty amount of intellectual property owned by OPTi that the big bad computer industry -- in this case, Apple -- is trampling upon, but somehow we doubt it. The patent was filed on January 16th in the US District Court of Easter Texas, a popular spot for ill-advised tech-related patent law decisions. We can't say this one is looking good for Apple.[Thanks, DeShaun]
Patent troll going after AMD for infringement
"Those who can, do; those who can't, sue." Although the original version of this phrase is (unfairly) used to describe teachers, we think that it does a nice job summing up the current state of the consumer electronics industry as well; it seems that nary a week goes by these days without some "intellectual property firm" crying patent infringement against a company that actually makes something, and this time around it's silicon powerhouse AMD being taken to the mat by lawsuit-happy Opti Inc. According to Reg Hardware, do-nothing Opti is suing AMD for violating three of its patents covering "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses," and is hoping that a jury will decide to ban the sale of those chips which supposedly employ this arcane technology. As a bit of background, Opti started out as a chip developer itself before selling most of its assets to another company called Opti Technologies (no relation); after the sale, Opti Inc. was de-listed from NASDAQ due to a business plan that hinged on "pursuing license revenues from companies we believe are infringing Opti's patents." While it's tempting to dismiss this suit as yet another baseless gold-digging scheme, Opti -- like NTP -- does have a history of prying cash away from big ballers in the industry: in late 2004, the company accused NVIDIA of violating these same patents, and was able to wrest somewhere around $7 million from the graphics powerhouse. Sadly, with Transmeta suing Intel, SGI suing ATI, and now Opti targeting AMD, it looks like most of the PCs we buy next year will be labeled Via Inside.Read- Opti vs. AMDRead- Opti vs. NVIDIA
