[masklinn]

It may be more understandable when you know that two dozen of their employees have left for Apple since 2015 (some highly placed), they're basically saying they believe Apple's internal GPU effort piggyback on Imagination's tech.

[dba7dba]

So Apple's not even bothering with buying the company for the talent? Apple is just straight up poach talent, and cutting out the company?

[rfrey]

The people don't belong to the company, why should the company get "a cut"?

[esun]

The people are free to go, but getting the same people to develop the same product again without infringing patents is a challenge.

[gergles]

Conversely, if there are any group of people who will be able to develop the same product again without infringing patents, it's the people who wrote the patents in the first place.

Patent violation doesn't have a mens rea component - either you violate the patent by doing exactly what is described in it, or you don't. If you change even one aspect, you're no longer violating the patent. I'm sure the people who wrote the original patented algorithms can easily think of ways to accomplish the same thing that don't violate it.

[winterismute]

This is very true. However, they could still lose a court case if they failed to prove that the design they shipped benefited by information that was confidential - even when the information was about what "not to do". Still, this is probably among the hardest case to bring on and win for a company, imho.

[eridius]

Patents aren't confidential information. In fact, that's kind of the whole point of patents.