5 ms·

I'm a little ignorant on this, but how can you own the rights to instructions? Isn't that the same as owning the rights to an API, or the naming and operation o

• dboreham 9y ago
  We're not talking here about what is right, or even what is correct under the law. We're talking about what a set of lawyers think they can plausibly use to bring an infringement case and not be laughed out of court. A broad spectrum of possibilities.
  • benchaney 9y ago
    Actually this sub thread is about what is right. > To be fair Intel has done a lot of work to make the x86 as great as possible. Patent lawsuits are awful. I'm not sure just copying someone's technology and emulating it without paying a license fee is all that great either.
• TD-Linux 9y ago
  Patents are entirely unlike copyright in this, in that you can come up with a totally independent implementation, and still infringe the patent. The patents are very similar to audio or video codec patents - for example, they patent the process of executing a particular instruction. For example, here's Intel's (expired) patent on the CPUID instruction: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5671435A https://patents.google.com/patent/US5671435A It claims the particular encoding of the return data. Good luck implementing CPUID in an emulator without infringing.
  • throwawaykf09 9y ago
    I read the claims of that patent, and they are all hardware claims. As in, the claims are literally in terms of registers in a CPU. I would imagine in an emulator would have data structures in memory to represent these registers, but it won't directly infringe these claims as written. There is, however, the Doctrine of Equivalents. This says that if something uses different elements / components from what's in the actual claims, it could still be argued to infringe the patent if those elements perform a role equivalent to the elements in the claims. But I'm not quite sure how far that could be stretched.
    • TD-Linux 9y ago
      Yeah, it'll depend on your jury whether they consider an emulated register to still be a register as described. However, what's super common in these sort of patents is to duplicate the same claim language several times with slight variations to cover all implementation types. If you look at claim 9, it gives a much more broad heading: "A computer system coupled to receive and respond to computer instructions from a program routine comprising" In later patents, they got even more clever and just say a "method" rather than a "processor", and explicitly define registers as potentially being emulated in the description (search AVX2 patents if you're curious)
      • incompatible 9y ago
        If you don't have a hardware implementation, you are trying to patent an abstract idea, which Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International found to be invalid.
        • TD-Linux 9y ago
          Nope, an abstract idea has always been invalid. Alice vs CLS Bank found that "on a computer" wasn't a sufficient inventive step to transform an abstract idea into something patentable [1]. This can be used to invalidate a claim, but won't shrink the scope of a claim to hardware only (as then, if software was the only inventive step, it would be a pure abstract idea). The USPTO certainly seems to think an ISA is patentable, and I haven't seen a court disagree yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
          • incompatible 9y ago
            I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean if you have a patent that includes hardware, then that patent would prevent emulating the hardware in software? Wouldn't any software patent then be possible, by the simple expedient of describing it in the patent application as running on a custom single-purpose hardware device?
• prodmerc 9y ago
  Same way you can own the rights to touch screen gestures I guess?