Eleven years have past since the 3 key patents were issued. These 3 key patents are only valid for 6 more years.
Having waited for years for the big sales boom, and looking at the rate we have been licensing (or not licensing) for the past 11 years, I just have to ask this question. Granted, there could be law suites after the patents expire. But how much do you think the courts will allow us to charge for dead patents?
I'd like to make a counter point related to this issue of sales to date and approaching expiration. Even though the patents are 11 years old, it wasn't until June 2005 that licensing through TPL was established. That's only 4 years of serious licensing effort. In the legal universe 4 years is like a fraction of a second. The problem is we only have a little more than a fraction of a second (6 years) left.
http://patriotscientific.com/index.p...
Patriot Scientific and TPL believe at least three of the patents are elemental to virtually every microprocessor design. The three most significant of these patents are as follows:
- U.S. 5,809,336: Clocking CPU and I/O Separately
- U.S. 6,598,148: Use of Multiple Cores and Embedded Memory
- U.S. 5,784,584: Multiple Instruction Fetch
Both Patriot Scientific and The TPL Group assert that these patents, which were granted in 1998 and which are valid through 2015, have long been essential to the design of modern high-speed microprocessors. These allied firms are currently having tremendous success maximizing the value of this patent portfolio.
