Live by the sword...
This is the problem with using extortion as a business model. Eventually it comes full circle to bite you in the arse.
Apple has been hit with a $506m bill for infringing CPU design patents belonging to the University of Wisconsin. Judge William Conley, of the Wisconsin Western US District Court, has ordered [PDF] the Cupertino iPhone maker to pay $506,084,992.66 (£386m) in damages. This comes after a jury found that Apple used technology in …
I've lived in both California and Wisconsin.
1. California produces more cheese by almost an order of magnitude.
2. Wisconsin cheese is actually a bit better (I'm not allowed to wander around Madison with my bank cards...I'll get a wheel of cheese and a palette of crackers...and essentially epoxy my colon shut) but that's because...I guess we're calling it "Artisan" now...it's smaller batches of awesome.
3. The Dairy Association happily recycles marketing for both regions (Think East Cheese/West Cheese) with very little editing. [Excepting the "Happy Cows" campaign.]
So, Wisconsin being America's Dairy Land is marketing.
But That Doesn't Stop Me from buying into the BS, mostly because I love cheese and I CHOOSE to buy into the BS.
Now, I live in Seattle(ish) and there are two other Wars Of Interest:
* Food Trucks: Seattle vs SiliValley (San Francisco) vs Los Angeles (just "Silly"). This war is interesting, and the bystanders are the winners here. Collateral Damage: Start With Heartburn and work down from there.
* BEER! (Got your attention?) Seattle has some Very Fine "micro" breweries. [1] Wisconsin has some Very Fine "micro" breweries (New Glarius comes to mind [2]). Now *this* little conflict I'm quite invested in seeing continue. Collateral Damage: Liver
So, dairy is of little interest in Wisconsin. But THE BEER!!!
[1] My better and I waited in line for ~2h to get a few pints for her son (he had to work that day) on "UnBarrel Day" at a Local. There was a 2x (Imperial) pint limit for each of the two beers: Cogniac Midnight and Coconut Midnight (both Dark Stouts). With two of us we could sport back eight pints for the young man. They were both Most Fine (I got some pours for The Lady and I after acquisition.
[2] Last time I was in Wisconsin for a few weeks, I went through a Six of that brewery's each day. I think they had 23 or 25 different brews. I Loved four, hated three (don't like pilsner or most fruits, that's what wine is for) and the rest were much better than decent.
[Bonus] If you're in Madison, give Great Dane, Capital, and The Asylum breweries a shot. The Shepard's Pie is really good at Great Dane.
[Extra Bonus] University of Wisconsin at Madison has a 40' Grill outside the cafeteria where they make Bratwurst for a period of time each day. Walking in from "Downtown", you can find it by smell. They're (college student) Cheap, and Most Excellent.
There was a 2x (Imperial) pint limit for each of the two beers:
First they rediscover proper beer, and now they're serving it in proper quantities. There's even rumours of proper cheese.
I can only conclude that the USA will be being run by the UK before the year is out...
Agamemnon,
An exccellent post, but I have to ask a vital question. With your cheese and crackers, what do you do about port in the US? Do the Californians produce any? Obviously they're not allowed to call it port, but fortified-wine-for-cheese is just small enough to fit on the bottle. Or there's an Australian vineyard who produce Starboard...
Anyway it's vital to any serious cheese consumption that it be accompanied by a decent bottle, ahem, glass of port.
When I lived in Belgium they maintained that you could fulfill this duty with beer. That any food could be accompanied by the appropriate beer. But I disagree. Lamb is better with a decent red and so is cheese, though port is best for that vital role.
The Belgians did successfully infect me with a love of fruit beers though. Nice to see the US craft breweries havinging a go at them. Not many of the English ones seem to go for it. Though Meantime's raspberry ale was very nice.
I notice that while the University of Wisconsin's website design is entirely devoid of rounded corners, they've made a tactical error in using the letter "U" prominently throughout and in their logo. As plainly seen, that letter is rendered as a rounded corner so if I were Apple's lawyer I would offer an exchange of liabilities- the UWis can keep using the letter U with in all its rounded glory, and in exchange for this consideration Apple can make use of any or all of the trivial little patents UWis might happen to hold rights for.
If Apple appeals it won't matter, the appellate courts are assigned by districts so if there was any 'home field advantage' in the ruling it would be sorted there. I think people assume there is more such favoritism than there really is. While judges are human, they try to be impartial.
It is interesting that they sued in their home court instead of east Texas, this is the first major tech patent case I've seen in a while that wasn't east Texas or California.
It's about time Apple got slapped down for using tech that doesn't belong to them as though they have some sort of innate right to it. They could easily afford any licence fees and have no excuses, they'd be the first to scream and moan if anybody used any of their tech without permission.
"Turns out there's not nearly that many cheese names."
there's not nearly that many cheese names
I can havardy believe that. It may take a gouda bit of effort for a larger data center, but for most it should be a brie-ze. admittedly some cheese names may be feta'd by trademarks, so you'd cheddar get parmesan to use them. Although, I wouldn't recommend using cheese names for servers; the users may start feeling bleu when they can't edam.
The original judgement against Apple was for about 300 Million. This new judgement is punishment (upping it to 500 Million) for continuing to use the offending design in the A7 Chips without obtaining a licence to use it from Uni Wisconsin.
In addition, there is a court case (currently on hold) against Apple for the A8 and A9 Chips for violating the exact same Patent. The reason it is on hold is that Apple are trying to get the patent invalidated and that is still going through the Courts. If they succeed, probably all bets are off. If not, Apple are looking at this 500 Million plus more from using the same design in the A8 and A9 Chips.
Some of this info, might have been nice to read in the article, El reg...
How does one figure out one's chip design patent has been infringed?
I imagine it must be pretty hard to dissect and examine something manufactured at the nm scale. Especially when it has billions of transistors.
And don't these things have multiple layers nowadays? Making it even harder.
I'm pretty sure manufacturers don't publish their designs/blue prints in the public domain for all and sundry to see and copy.
Conversely how do you establish that your really great idea is already buried somewhere in an obscure patent?
As far as I can tell in the USA software engineers patent everything they produce down to trivial levels including any interesting variance of their morning turds.
--> Just hanging my coat up before.....