Apple Ordered to Pay $21.7 Million in Patent Suit
Apple has been ordered to pay Opti Inc. a total of $21.7 million in damages following a patent infringement suit.
If this rings any bells it's because Opti actually sued Apple successfully earlier this year. Ars Technica reports that, in a lawsuit filed in 2007, OPTi alleged Apple had infringed upon its patent covering "predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses."
The technology, in general, uses predictive snooping of cache memory to speed up PCI bus data transfers, with the intent of maintaining a constant transfer rate. This year, a jury determined willful infringement and Apple was ordered to pay $19 million in "reasonable royalties."
Apple opposed the verdict, stating that it had not willfully infringed upon the patent and claiming the use of the technology is "obvious" and covered by prior art. This week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Everingham granted Apple's motion for judgment as a matter of law that it did not willfully infringe Opti's patent for predictive cache snooping. However, according to Ars, Everingham issued a guilty verdict anyway, ordering the Cupertino-based Mac maker to pay a total of $21.7 million in damages.
Read the full story here.
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Heh, sweet.
It's always nice to see apple given a kick
Yeah - same here... I hate apple - so I am glad they have to pay... but I also agree this is a stupid patent...
This is ridiculous, it's a patent on what is essentially a read-ahead cache (albeit in hardware), that Apple didn't knowingly infringe upon.
That and I expected OPTi to be on the brink of 'ancient thinking' in the hardware market.
This is really, really obvious (not even in retrospect) stuff.
Any hardware or software engineer that wants to stream anything already knows this. A plumber would understand the concept (as it's similar to flowing water at the same pressure).
Seriously, WTF ?
I am not an Apple fan, but surely this is something Apple can counter-sue for. Software tells hardware to pre-fetch and 'snoop' all the time.
And shouldn't OPTi be suing nVidia over this ?, since it's their chipset in the 'current' Mac machines (well most of the shipping ones anyway).