Re: But did they...
Marvell admitted they looked at the patent, and they claimed in court that it was impractical so they did something "similar." The problem for Marvell is that they got caught using exactly the same algorithm (down to the names!) as was used at CMU internally. The fact is that they were blatantly using these patents during their development activities and that came out in discovery. The patent infringement in this was went way beyond infringement to blatant abuse, which is why the award is so high. And it was so obviously blatant that the jury ruled unanimously that it was blatant (which we should probably blame the engineers at Marvell for -- couldn't they have made it at least plausible that they did this accidentally?!).
If you look, the jury's judgement of the value of the patents was pretty accurate at about 5% of the profit of the chips. Remember, using this was necessary for them to be competitive in the market, as Seagate and others testified (and Seagate is a big customer of Marvell's disk drive chips). It's the treble damages and interest costs for willful, blatant infringement that's really painful for Marvell. Well, that's the point. Marvell didn't do this accidentally, they did it with malice aforethought and now they're being called to account for that behavior.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
