Transmeta sues Intel; Intel sues Transmeta
By Gareth Powell
Transmeta, the chip maker, claims that Intel’s Core 2 Duo is using technology Transmeta has patented. Some of the patents are about slowing down a chip when not in use. Transmeta is an important maker of chips and a pioneer of energy-efficient chips. Some of its patents go back to 1991 which means they are much earlier than Intel’s Pentium Pro. And energy saving is where all the excitement is.
Does Transmeta suing Intel move the industry forward in any way? Not in the slightest. Does it help the computer users of the world? Not at all. It merely keeps courts occupied and lawyers earning fees.
What happens now?
Intel’s lawyers file a lawsuit against Transmeta in U.S. District Court in Delaware in which it claims Transmeta infringes on seven of its patents.
So Transmeta lawyers are saying Intel infringes 11 patents. Intel’s lawyers are saying Transmeta infringes seven patents.
Intel, in its claim, stated that it is not infringing on any ‘valid claims’ relating to the 11 Transmeta patents. It also alleged that Transmeta’s patents are ‘invalid’ for failure to meet certain conditions of patentability.
Who wins from all of this?
Lawyers. No one else. Make a guess that the two suits together are going to cost millions of dollars. Who pays for this? The customer who buys a computer containing Intel or Transmeta chips. And, throughout the industry, this scenario is repeated time and time and time again.
What is needed, perhaps, is a user group which is anti-litigation, anti-lawyer, anti-patent claims.
Shakespeare wrote: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ [Henry VI, Part 2] Lawyers respond as follows: ‘In all likelihood, Shakespeare meant this phrase as a tribute to lawyers. Cade and Dick understood that in order to deprive the English people of cherished rights, the lawyers stood against them and had to be destroyed.’
It is that sort of thinking that has Transmeta suing Intel and Intel suing Transmeta. If they believe that ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ is a tribute to lawyers then they can believe anything.
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January 28th, 2007
You are completely missing the point here. Transmeta is an IP-only company, and they do a damn good job of reducing power and lowering production costs for the chip-builders that have the good sense to hire them. You are suggesting that the law and patent claims make goods more expensive. This is incredibly short sighted. Innovation comes from people working hard to make products that are distinctly theirs, for a set time of profitability until their patents run out. Having an “anti-litigation, anti-lawyer, anti-patent” group would hurt the consumer and the industry immensely. Progress, without patents and the laws you detest, stops on the corporate level. Open-source is great, but that is not capitalism, that is not the economic force that drives technological breakthroughs. You need massive amounts of capital to do intensive chip research on the scale of Transmeta and Intel, and without the influx of capital that comes from capitalizing on one’s ideas, the industry would die. If you actually care about the industry that provides your job, you should stop trying to make patents sound obsolete, and stop scapegoating the legal system that keeps them intact.
Thank you.