What is your point though? A patent is a patent is a patent. Wouldn't you agree? If a patent is truly found to be infringed upon, then restitution should be agreed upon and paid. If it is found that no patent was infringed upon, then a new suit should be brought about to pay for the legal fees incurred from initial suit. IMHO.
There are several criteria a patent needs to be valid. Successfully being filed doesn't mean that the patent can't be found invalid in court. The patent office simply doesn't have the means to properly and thoroughly audit every patent of this nature.
Look at the criteria here:
http://www.bitlaw.com/patent/requirements.html
The publication one is big minefield, there are a bazillion publications made on graphics rendering techniques, hardware or software.
well going this route, nothing can receive a patent as new tech is always an evolution of prior art...
It has to both be novel and offer a non obvious improvement over prior art. It's a really tough sell to call die integration a non obvious improvement when Moore's Law has been driving that for everything imaginable for a long time.
xpea said:But between you an me, when Geforce256 aka NV10 came to the market, with hardware T&L, it was revolutionary. Nothing was like that at that time. Same for NV30 with hardware programmable shaders (even if this GPU suffered from many flaws). Each time, competitors came very to the market with their similar tech.
You may disagree with nvidia claims but nobody will argue against the prominent role they played in the graphic technology evolution. They invest heavily in R&D, they patent their ideas first and they put it in real products...
You think it's revolutionary because you only care about the impact it had on the PC gaming market. When it came out you probably didn't have the first clue that the technology was already being used in workstations and consoles, but that doesn't change anything. Nothing in any of the patents make a claim about novelty by way of being applied to a particular market (which would probably be a weak claim, but I digress)
With products like GPUs and CPUs the devil is in the details. It's not the high level ideas that mean anything (which have very often been hashed out in academia well ahead of time), but the implementation. How they balance feature set vs die and area budget, how they tune and size and optimize everything, how they write the drivers - it's things like this where the value of their work lies. And I won't deny for a minute that nVidia has tremendous strength in the quality of their designs (although they hardly have it alone). But these patents are about much broader and higher level ideas that they shouldn't have claim to, and I don't see an argument that they contributed to the strength of their competitors GPUs at all.
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