I spent 20 years doing product development at Intel, so have a bit of an idea how things used to work there. That said, I retired quite some time ago and things could have changed.
Intel spends a lot of time and money acquiring the IP needed to build their products. It would be silly of them to knowingly incorporate IP they do not have rights to. I do believe it does happen sometimes by "accident". Lots of the patents are what I would consider "obvious" as a product development person, and as a result a patented invention can land in an Intel product by independent invention. This doesn't give them rights to it, but it also doesn't count as willful infringement. There is a reason there are patent priority rules.
As a caveat to this, Intel has tens of thousands of development engineers. It is entirely possible one of them knew about, and incorporated unlicensed patented technology in something they were working on. I suspect if Intel legal found out about it, that person would be fired.
There are a couple of good reasons Intel policy is to not allow development engineers to look at unlicensed IP. It opens them up to willful infringement. It also makes it more difficult for the development team to find a different solution for the problem. They do have a group of people that specifically look at unlicensed technology to see if there is anything out there they would like to acquire. This is different staff than the development teams.
We do know HDVY approached Intel and told them about the patent. We also know Intel responded that they don't use it and don't need it. Given Intel routinely pays for patents that they need and use why would they blow this one off? What would be unique about it. Negotiations on price never even started so I doubt it would be that. I am not an expert on pattern matching software, but it seems to me this patent would be easy to design around, once it is known. That may be what happened here.
The SVM-RFE patent case is interesting because the algorithm is coded in a public domain library. Anybody linking to that library would technically have the patented code in their software. Given HDVY did nothing about this isn't going to help their case. Note that it was not Intel that put it in there, but it is very possible that Intel inadvertently linked to it.
It is easy to misunderstand the scope and scale of the "IP machine" at Intel. They generate many patents every day of the year. In addition they license hundreds of thousands of patents from others. They are currently in several different patent litigation lawsuits, so the HDVY case is in no way unique.
We really need to wait for the court case to play out.
Alan
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