Displaying items by tag: IP

It looks like AMD is trying to develop a new revenue stream and also create some additional competition for Intel. Ever since AMD bet the farm on purchasing ATi they have been taking a back seat to Intel. The reasons are many, but one of the big ones was not having enough money for R&D for multiple concurrent projects. After the ATi buy failed to yield results quickly they had to start cutting corners. R&D and marketing were some of the first places hit. Now, many years (and a number of CEOs) later AMD is still fighting to be relevant. They have some solid ideas, but just to not have the capital to put them all on the table at once.

Yesterday the big news was that Lenovo “bought” Motorola Mobility from Google for around $2.91 Billion dollars. This price tag is a far cry from the $12.5 Billion that Google originally paid for the handset maker. Something seems missing in the differences until you find out that Lenovo did not get the same thing that Google bought. All Lenovo is selling is the manufacturing capability and the brand name. The majority of Motorola’s assets are going to stay with Google.

Apple, the big company that likes to brag about their “originality” and accuse everybody else of stealing their ideas, apparently stole something from Switzerland. This is the country famous for inventing clocks and watches, and not just any kind of it, but truly of the highest quality and with beautiful design. Now, the Swiss Federal Railways have accused Apple that of copying their official railway clock.

AMD has finally signed the predicted license deal with ARM to incorporate some of ARM’s technology into AMD’s APUs. This was a move that we saw coming back in Q3 of 2011. Around the time when Rory Reed took over the helm at AMD we anticipated the shift to mobile computing. It was Reed’s big push at Lenovo while he was there and we did not expect anything less from him at AMD.

A recent decision in an appeals court could have disastrous effects on Intellectual Property rights holders in the US and possibly around the globe. Not all that long ago a software developer grabbed a chunk of code from Goldman Sachs as he was on his way out of the door. The code related to a high=speed trading application that Goldman Sachs uses for business. The firm immediately went after the programmer (Sergey Aleynikov) and he was convicted under the National Stolen Property Act.

After both SOPA and PIPA were publicly shelved the US government did what it always does. It finds a way to do what it wants, but by hiding it in other bills or (as is becoming more common) using trade agreements to by-pass laws altogether. This is exactly what we are seeing with ACTA and TPP. These two trade agreements are probably some of the most dangerous bits of work that we have read about in a very long time.

Lately there has been a large focus on the Internet and that it is becoming less of the open communications community that people believe that it should be. We have watched as laws like SOPA, PIPA, Open, ACTA and others have been proposed on the basis of protecting Intellectual Property. Because of the push to protect corporate interests it is often felt that the big entertainment companies are behind these laws. If the truth be told many of them are behind these laws, however we cannot remove responsibility from the government in these cases.