back to article Gemalto rash cache clash dashed: US courts trash Android patent bid

A US Appeals Court has rejected a patent case brought by French digital security biz Gemalto against Google's Android operating system. The court upheld [PDF] the decision of the lower courts that the Android platform did not infringe three Gemalto patents that cover technology in the firm's smartcards. The three patents in …

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  1. Gordon 10
    WTF?

    wtf?

    Common sense for a Texas patent court? What ever next? I suspect the fact that the plaitiffs were French didn't help their case.

    1. theblackhand

      Re: wtf?

      I don't think there was any application of common sense involved - Gemalto patented a method where all functions were on a single micro controller and Google/Samsung/HTC/Motorola seperate the storage and processing functions.

      Common sense would have been for the judge to tell Gemalto that there patents weren't worth the paper they were printed on due to prior art and the broad scope of the patents.

      Point 1 is easy to prove, point 2 would take a lot of time and expensive lawyers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: wtf?

        Not sure it was about common sense, more likely the decision was based on the fact that the patents weren't registered by an American company.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: wtf?

          Please, if that is so then we should be allowed to comment about the senseless crucifiction (Intended) of Google by European courts for displaying search results ANY search engine would show simply because it's an American company.

          There was actually some logic involved in THIS case, not simply anti-american sentiment like in the other case.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: wtf?

            I suggest you look again at the EU Google case. If anything the EC is in trouble for being too pro-American.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: wtf?

        "Common sense would have been for the judge to tell Gemalto that there patents weren't worth the paper they were printed on due to prior art and the broad scope of the patents."

        The scope was not broad enough, hence why they lost the case. Rather than being too broad as you have suggested. I would have thought that fairly obvious.

  2. Tom 7

    Not the required result

    The patents should have been invalidated due to prior art from - well probably since SSEM.

  3. frank ly

    What about ....

    ... Intel and AMD licensing this patent so they can use on-chip caches? Has that happened?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What about ....

      Nope because the patents surround optimisation of code execution on microcontrollers which have to work with a very limited resources (power, processing, memory)....

      Typically your smart card microcontroller is an 8 or 16 bits machine, running at a few Mhz clockspeed with a total working memory (not cache) of few kilobytes at most. So yes some serious optimisation was needed to make Javacard apps work in this environment.....

      Nothing to do with the monsters one now finds in mobiles and tablets... and even less with mainstream processors,

  4. Dig

    Please Help Explain.

    But the patent says "At least a portion of the memory may be located in the processor." not that it is located in the memory just that some portion and only may be.

    Anyway how is this different from putting a Spectrum on a chip and changing the language from basic to JAVA. Thats just a progression based on the fact that previously microcontrollers wouldn't have enough memory for this and now they do. Can anyone see what the novel bit is.

  5. Mage Silver badge

    Daft

    The original patent is bogus anyway.

  6. JLV
    Trollface

    Tsssk tssk

    >courts disagreed because Gemalto’s patented tech described software stored in the same chip as the processor – as is often the case with microcontrollers – whereas the Android gadgets held code in separate storage

    Moronic patent filing. Didn't anyone tell those guys to be vague, avoid specifics and describe nothing while claiming relevance to everything? Like a proper USPTO patent*.

    Lawyerese, not techy-ese, pls.

    * it probably sucked anyway & I confess no clue either way, don't get me wrong, but a clear disincentive to go into details, neh?

  7. cyberelf
    Facepalm

    Storing an interpreter in memory ..

    Isn't this how the IBM PC (1981) ran IBM BASIC from a ROM, and any cartridge based games machine before that eg the Atari 400 (1979)?

  8. hutcheson

    >We had estimated that if Gemalto had won the case the company could have been entitled to either a one-off payment in damages, or higher royalty receipts that could amount to €30m to €50m per annum," they said in a note, seen by Reuters. It thus erodes a three per cent earnings increase potential.

    This decision, all by itself, generates an increase of €600m to €1000m (over the next 20 years) in the profits of people who actually manufacturer things that other people actually want to buy.

    That's a static analysis. The actual value of this decision, to people who make and use electronic devices, is much greater. The risk and overhead of developing new products will be incrementally lower. From the all-money-that-isn't-corporate-profits-is-just-wasted perspective, some of these new products will compete with those existing products, driving profits down. But from the perspective of all-production-that-isn't-valuable-to-consumers-is-waste perspective, this will mean incrementally-cheaper, incrementally-more-valuable, and incrementally-more-massively-produced products -- in other words, win-win-win.

    (There are other perspectives, the vituperation of which is left as an exercise to the reader: all-production-that-doesn't-produce-tax-revenue-is-wasted, all-production-that-doesn-t-create-lawyer-income-is-wasted.

  9. famulla

    There is an easy way to resolve these things. It starts with three words - Why, Who and How.

    You have set an expectation. Is that expectation realistic? Perhaps anyone would underperform in your eyes as you've set a task only you can do.

    Perhaps goals are misaligned. What they see as important to do first may not be what you see. So you discount the things they have achieved in favour of "your way". Or you have fitted the wrong person into the wrong job for them. Perhaps the job can be reshaped to suit their skills.

    Perhaps you are judging too early. Any job has a timeline and if you judge it while in the dip, the full results will not be there to show.

    Perhaps you are taking on board the wrong information. Who says they are "underperforming". Is it perhaps your informer who is trying to distract attention from their shortcomings.

    And most important of all - why is communication so poor that the situation has been allowed to build. You don't have 3 monthly performance reviews with your partner - you sort things out at the time. Performance is like a servo system - small touches on the tiller are more effective than large last minute corrections.

    The answer is always not what you think. More complex and multifaceted. The finger of blame - at least some of it - usually points backward.

    But if you get rid of the blame mindset, lots of ways forward suddenly show themselves. Usually the answer is about communication and collaboration.

    So the real answer is to involve everyone on a business collaborative platform where issues are aired and sorted in minutes all day, everyday and systems are created which everyone believes in and buys into their role in.

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