Former SGI Entity Sues Apple, Sony, Samsung Over Graphics
Graphics Properties Holdings (GPH) has made a name for itself to monetize about 300 former SGI patents. LG, RIM and HTC hunted as well.
Following the sale of SGI's assets in 2009, GPH is the legal successor of SGI, at least as far as its IP is concerned. In the latest wave of patent suits, GPH is suing Sony, LG, Samsung, HTC, RIM an Apple over an alleged violation of U.S. patent 8,144,158 entitled “Display System Having Floating Point Rasterization and Floating Point Framebuffering.”
The patent covers a geometry processor, a rasterizer compatible with floating point data, as well as a frame buffer connected to the rasterizer that is able to store color values in floating point format. GPH claims that consumer electronics devices offered by the lawsuit targets are violating the patent and are subject to licensing fees. In Apple's case, GPH says that the company's "handheld computers, tablets, cellular telephones, and other consumer electronics and display devices and products containing the same, including Defendant’s iPhone device and other substantially similar devices" are infringing the patent.
This particular patent cannot be traced back to SGI origins as it was filed only on January 11, 2011. There is not history of this patent available in the USPTO database yet. However, GPH did not waste any time launching the lawsuit; the USPTO granted the rights to it on March 27, 2012.
Considering how many years the iPhone has already been shipping, Jan 2011 is super late for a filing date.
Thus the MAJOR problem with the "first to file" rather than "first to invent" change of the patent system.
Still I am disgusted by patent trolls' wanton lawsuits. As in the trademark practice, those patents that the owner haven't tried to commercialize should be either forced to be licensed, or nullified. It is disgusting that trolls wait until others have spent their resources developing certain technology, hiding under the radar, and come after them once they smell hints of money, like hyenas.
I still stand by the "you patent it; you market it" concept. If you don't ship something incorporating your patent, and don't work with a manuf. to ship something incorporating your patent within 2 years, then the patent and its legal effects are null and void until such time as you do so.
Too many of these greedy lawfirms are searching for patents that others own that have a slight infringment. They then go and purchase the patent soley with the idea of sueing apple/samsung/microsoft to get a payday. This type of practice should be outlawed.
I personally don't think any patents should be valid until the system is fixed.
I think patents last 20 years, so they wouldn't have expired yet unless I'm wrong about that or your date is wrong.
What if patents could not be used to sue someone else if you wait more than 18 or 24 months after the other party infringed on the patent. That way, any troll "companies" would be left unable to troll anyone without at least semi-legitimate reasons.
Oh, and doesn't the patents in this article basically apply to every modern graphics system with a display because GPUs and such pretty much all have ROPs of some sort and a GPU is based off of floating point processing too? Each core in a GPU does 32 bit floating point math to display a picture. Going further back, we have other bit widths, but it's been mostly floating point instead of integer math for a fairly long time. Basically, these patents apply to the entire graphics and display industries.
So, what's to keep AMD, Nvidia, and everyone else safe from this? AMD's doing bad enough right now, they really don't need this stupidity. This is just another case of someone waiting until entire industries are built off of their patents before suing everyone in sight for it instead of suing them when it comes out. It's practically theft.
Well, I was figuring that if they released the product around 1993, it was probably in development for a couple years; if they patented it when they started working on the idea, rather than waiting until the product was already headed out of the door, they'd be right around 20-21 years now...
Can a person younger than 30 name at least one display system without floating point rasterization or framebuffering? How patent law suit fly around I'm just waiting for day to hear someone has patent for "telecommunication device powered by power source independent from communication lines".