Carnegie Mellon vs Marvell and now Broadcom - the billion dollar saga continues

November 21 2019 Ambercite has long been following the litigation between patent owners Carnegie Mellon (CM) University and hard disk manufacturers Marvell. This long running dispute at one stage had led to a judgement of USD1.5 billion against Marvell, but ultimately the parties settled for a payment of USD750 million by Marvell.

We have been interested in this case because it was a great case study of the ability of Ambercite citation based similarity analysis to predict litigation risk. Our analysis has clearly shown that many Marvell patents were similar enough to the two litigated CM patents for this to suggest that a litigation attorney should investigate the Marvell products to see if they were infringing the CM patents - as was ultimately held.

Ambercite AI can provide the data used to build ‘Licensing Potential’ profiles (these profiles are based on a Licensing Analysis - the licensing analysis used to prepare the data below is found here).

If we prepare such a profile based on the two litigated patents US6201839 and US6438180 (both claiming improvements to the way that data from hard disc drives are interpreted) , we end up with the following profile:

Carnegie Mellon.png

As you can see, Marvell are definitely in the list.

But you can also see that while #2 on the list, they are a long way behind the #1 company, comprising Broadcom and its 2014 acquisition LSI Corporation.

Now if this the case, how come CM had not litigated their patents against Broadcom? I have never been too worried about this question, as there are a variety of potential reasons why this did not happen, for example:

  • Broadcom/LSI products differed too greatly from the CM patents

  • Some sort of unpublished commercial arrangement between CM and Broadcom,

But in fact, there is a better answer - being that now CM is, in fact, CM is now litigating or has filed suit against Broadcom, as discussed here.

Broadcom.png

So is there now no more need to find reasons for this unexpected outcome from this analysis - instead, the litigation has followed the analysis.

How can you run a licensing analysis on your own patents?

Contact us via the link below, and we would be happy to provide a personalised demonstration on how you can use Ambercite to find your licensing prospects.

 
Patent Litigation, Patent Licensing AnalysisMike Lloyd