• Perhaps SONY and IBM are negotiating for more than the jointly held MMP Portfolio in PTSC's proprietary INFLAME(TM) architecture.
Excerpts from Peter Zura's Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog:
• CHINESE COMPANIES WADE INTO THE WORLD OF ???? (PATENT LAWSUITS): China's new electronics companies, lured by riches in foreign markets, are feeling the bite of well-honed patent protection systems that have become effective weapons of business war for their competitors.
Such lawsuits filed in the United States would have been considered little more than a nuisance by Chinese firms just two years ago, carrying little or no clout in China.
Multinationals are reluctant to file patent lawsuits in China, where intellectual property (IP) laws are new and the courts lack experience handling such cases.
But with China's exports of machinery and high-tech goods reaching $490 billion last year, up 45 percent from 2003, the threat of being shut out of lucrative western markets has become a potent deterrent against IP theft by Chinese companies, experts say.
Attorneys said the number of IP lawsuits in the United States is relatively small, in the dozens each year.
But they added the number has been growing as companies try to nip new competition from China in the bud and avoid losing market share the way they did to aggressive competitors from Japan and later South Korea starting in the 1970s.
Also, a growing number of Chinese firms are also finding they can use the system to their advantage in a range of disputes with their overseas business partners.
Two Chinese companies sued a consortium of DVD patent holders, including Philips, Sony, Pioneer and LG Electronics, alleging cartel-like behavior.
China's top TV maker, Sichuan Changhong Electric Appliances, sued U.S. distributor Apex Digital in California in December to recover an alleged $484 million in unpaid bills.
• A NEW PATENT PORTFOLIO STRATEGY - INVEST IN PATENTEES SUING YOUR COMPETITORS: AMD has decided to invest in a small chip technology development company, called Patriot Scientific, that's suing Intel for alleged patent infringement.
Patriot Scientific this week confirmed that AMD has bought an undisclosed number of the company's restricted shares and licensed not only its ShBoom processor patent portfolio but also its Ignite 32-bit processor design.
In January 2004, Patriot sued Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Matsushita and NEC for alleged infringement of patent number 5,809,336, which it owns. The company sued them because they had shipped product containing Intel processors that it also claimed violated its intellectual property rights. If the move was intended to force Intel to license the patent, it failed - Intel countersued, and was itself sued by Patriot in February 2004. Patriot is seeking monetary damages to the tune of "several million dollars" for the alleged infringement.
Since then, Patriot has notified 150 other companies that it believes their products infringe its patent, though as yet it has not initiated legal proceedings against them, undoubtedly while it awaits the outcome of its action against Intel.
AMD's interest in the Ignite technology is also interesting because Ignite is a Risc-like 32-bit processor core with a strong SIMD component. According to Patriot, multiple Ignites can work together within the company's InFlame architecture to create a multi-SIMD processor.It just so happens that this configuration shares similarities with the architecture Sony and IBM have been discussing as of late to power the PlayStation 3 http://271patent.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_271patent_archive.html
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