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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7560)	9/22/1998 6:55:00 PM
From: Bob Howarth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

In defense of TDFX in lawsuit. If you as a company risk lots of money in an attempt to invent a gismo of some kind and you actually succeed and spend your own money creating a market for the products, and you patent it, why should others get to simply steal it? No sane person would invest money in anything in a capitalistic society if it could simply be stolen. That is not what competition means. I think a good comparison is the CDMA stuff from Qualcomm. Everyone pays a royalty to them because they spent the up front money and took the risk. Would they have even bothered if Lucent could come along and simply steal it? Of course not. So pay TDFX a couple of bucks per chip.

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7560)	9/23/1998 1:10:00 AM
From: Stuart C Hall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

I think the TDFX lawsuit is interesting but....completely unenforceable. (Is that a word?) Technology moves way too quickly to be encapsulated in a lawsuit. By the time this hits a court we'll be at Banshee 4 and TnT 1.1 ;-) and all this fuss will be forgotten. Look at Microsoft. The DOJ was up Bill's rear end and still couldn't stop Windows 98. Now it's all water under the bridge. Now, if TDFX got an injunction against nVidia to pull their chips off the market that would be NEWS! BTW, saw in InfoWorld an article on ChromeEffects. I haven't followed it too closely but supposedly there will be ChromeEffects enhanced websites in early '99. Of course only viewable if you have Win 98 or better. Can anyone with some deeper knowledge comment on this? Regards, Stuart

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7560)	9/23/1998 1:04:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

3Dfx cannot possibly be holding a monopoly on the use of multiple texure units within a chip. They may only have a patent on the way that they've implemented multi-texturing in V2. Now if their method is the best and greatest way of implementing TMU, then you can expect others to license it from them. Otherwise they will develope theirown. I went over this in detail over at yahoo board. Here is the last post I put over there to explain how patents work. Sun Tzu Perhaps I was unclear. On a philosophical level, every invention is the concrete realization of an "idea". But on a practical level, it is the invention that gets the patent and not the idea. Let's say I notice the inherent problems of propelor based aircrafts and come to the "novel idea" of using gas momentum to move the airplane. This idea is not patentable. In fact if I publish it, it will become public domain (so none of the sci-fi writers can ever lay any claims on future inventions). Once however I can demosterate that idea in the concrete form of jet turbine, the "jet turbine" i.e. the realization of the idea, becomes patentable. Now as an inventor, my life will be much easier if I can demonsterate this as working, or psuedo working prototype. But if I can suficiently demonsterate that this idea is realizable on paper alone, that will do too. Even so, it is still the turbine that gets the patent, not the idea of flying, not the idea or using momentum to move or fly, and not any other idea from this. What you can try to do, is to think of all the different ways that your idea may be implemented and pantent them too. Also, you should try to break down your invention (again not the idea) into as many none-trivial pieces as possible so that any permutation of assembling them into making another widget to do the same job will also fall under your patent. Again, you go through all this pain because the idea (like using multiple texture units to do multiple textures in a single pass) is not patentable. Hope this clears it up Sun Tzu