one for the nerds..maybe..?

[sky otter]

entire article at link


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/jury-slams-marvell-with-mammoth-1-17-billion-patent-verdict/


University wins record $1.17 billion verdict against Marvell Semiconductor
Carnegie Mellon latest school to play 'patent roulette' at court.


A Pittsburgh jury found that hard drive control chips made by Marvell Semiconductor infringe two patents owned by Carnegie Mellon University. Following a four-week trial in federal court, nine jurors unanimously held that Marvell should have to pay $1,169,140,271 in damages—the full sum that CMU's lawyers had asked for.

If the verdict holds up on appeal, it would wipe out more than a year of profits at Marvell, which made a bit over $900 million in 2011. It would also be the largest patent verdict in history, beating out this summer's $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung for infringing patents and trademarks owned by Apple.

The two CMU patents describe a way of reducing "noise" when reading information off hard disks. The jury found that Marvell's chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. At trial, Marvell hotly contested that CMU had invented anything new; they argued that a Seagate patent, filed 14 months earlier, describes everything in CMU's invention.

Court documents showed that Marvell sold 2.34 billion allegedly infringing chips between 2003 and 2012, according to a report on the case in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. About half of the chips were sold to Western Digital. Seagate is also a major purchaser of Marvell chips.

the rest here
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/jury-slams-marvell-with-mammoth-1-17-billion-patent-verdict/