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Are Universities the Same As Patent Trolls? An Analysis of the Carnegie Mellon University v. Marvell Patent Infringement Case

Posted By Jaewon Lee, Feb 20, 2013

In March 6, 2009, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) filed a suit against Marvell in U.S. District Court claiming patent infringement of two CMU patents. The patents at issue concerned noise predictive technology that enhanced the speed and accuracy of signal processing in hard drives. At trial, Marvell argued that CMU’s patents were invalid because they were anticipated by a prior Seagate patent. CMU countered Marvell’s claim by producing an e-mail at trial from one of Seagate’s engineers sent prior to the lawsuit saying that the CMU patent was different than the Seagate patent.

After four weeks of trial, on December 26, 2012, a federal jury unanimously found that CMU’s patents were valid and that Marvell had intentionally infringed those patents. The jury awarded CMU $1.17 billion in damages, making CMU’s award one of the largest patent awards in history. Because the jury found Marvell intentionally infringed, federal law gives the judge discretion to triple the damage award.

Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, wrote an article titled, Are Universities Patent Trolls?, wherein he discussed whether universities like CMU are akin to patent trolls. On the one hand, both patent trolls and universities enforce their patents without actually manufacturing the inventions covered by those patents. Additionally, both patent trolls and universities focus on maximizing licensing revenue through exclusive licenses.

On the other hand, Lemley found that universities are not exactly the same as patent trolls because universities are creators of new inventions, often as a result from the extensive research they do. Patent trolls, however, do not create, but rather manipulate patents to extract as much financial gain as possible for inventions they did not discover. Patent trolls, therefore, solely impose costs on the market whereas universities, like CMU, also provide the benefit of new inventions. Thus, even though CMU does not manufacture the inventions covered by its patents, CMU is not a patent troll because CMU actually invented the patents at issue in the trial. 

Source (SSRN): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980776

Source (Invention-Protection): http://www.invention-protection.com/ip/publications/docs/Damage_Relief_for_Patent_Infringement.html

Source (Gigaom): http://gigaom.com/2012/12/26/chip-maker-marvell-smacked-with-1-17-billion-patent-verdict/

Source (PatentlyO): http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/12/carnegie-mellon-v-marvell-another-1b-verdict.html 

Source (ArsTechnica): http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/jury-slams-marvell-with-mammoth-1-17-billion-patent-verdict/