Wisconsin-Madison sues Intel over Core Duo
Intel has come under fire from the University of Wisconsin at Madison for patent infringement for its Intel Core Duo processor. The university is being represented by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that the Core 2 Duo infringes on a patent filed by the university back in 1998.
Whether it infringes on the patent or not, it highlights the need for patent reform in the United States. It is ludicrous that patents can be filed for things that companies and universities have no intention of making a reality. The sole purpose of many patents seems to be to hold ideas in reserve for future lawsuits, not contribute to society with new inventions and improvements.
I’m no patent lawyer, of course. In this particular patent infringement suit, it is the process behind the processor that is under question. University of Wisconsin at Madison holds a patent for the process of breaking data instructions into separate streams to achieve a faster processing time.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation says it attempted to get Intel to license the process in 2001 to no avail. That’s all fine and dandy, but why invent a process if you aren’t going to use it to make anything? If the sole purpose of the patent was for licensing fees and lawsuit rewards, like so many seem to be these days, that’s not contributing to society or technology. It’s a clear cry for patent reform, in my opinion.
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February 8th, 2008
The patent and intellectual property issue is a very controversial topic. You can see it from many perspectives and to come up with something that will satisfy all of the stakeholders tends to be a very complicated issue to date.
What you have pointed out in this article is just one of the many perspectives on this issue. Another would be from the researcher’s POV. The philosophy behind research is that researchers set out to find new and novel approaches, so that ideas get rigorously analyzed and the best are chosen (years later) for actual use and implementation. Researchers don’t have the means to implement and mass produce what they achieve and so their ideas depend on future investments.
The academic and research community is years ahead of what the industry is actually forcing you to use, and it’s all because the industry must make a profit and they are not going to conduct research on something that isn’t going to have a bright future (in terms of $). This is where the research community comes in and invests in the foggiest ideas and tries to come up with breakthroughs. One tends to acknowledge that it is their right to actually have some sort of right over what they have achieved years before the industry even thought about it, so that when it actually blossomed and came to fruit, someone will respect what they have achieved.
Just to note, researchers (academics) nearly always publish their findings in great detail. This is unlike companies which tend to keep them to themselves (also called trade secrets!). So the industry can easily use other people’s work and make astronomical profits without properly acknowledging what they have used. A patent in this case can actually protect the intellectual property/inventions of these people and in case of academic institutions, they tend to use that to finance future projects and the loop just goes on again.