HP Lawsuit Will Not Affect C.U.

By wpengine | February 1, 2002

Although the University’s pending lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard may not be resolved in the near future, Cornell students will not be affected, according to University officials.

Henrik N. Dullea ’61, vice president of University relations, stated that the lawsuit “creates tensions within the corporation and the University.” However, he added that the suit would not affect student recruitment by the corporation. “The company will continue to recruit [Cornell] graduates because it is in their interest to do so,” Dullea said.

“This is an isolated patent issue,” said Patricia McClary, University Counsel. “Equipment [on campus] will not be affected.”

The University is suing Hewlett-Packard for a patent infringement of Professor Emeritus H.C. Torng’s work (US Patent No. 4,807,115). Damages could potentially exceed $100 million, according to Cornell News Services.

Cornell filed a complaint against Hewlett Packard on Dec. 27, 2001, but the issue may not be resolved for ‘a very long time,” according to Dullea.

“Patent infringement is not unusual. In most cases, the company using the idea works with you on a licensing agreement and it doesn’t come to a disagreement. Litigation is unusual, but licensing is not,” said Dullea.

For example, Intel Corp. has a licensing agreement with the University. Intel recognized Torng’s work and named Torng the first Intel Academic Research Fellow.

Torng’s invention, which took him twenty years to complete, accelerates a computer’s processing speed.To describe his invention, Torng used a metaphor of the New York Thruway. “Think of a New York Thruway where there is one lane and when one car stalls, all other cars are stuck,” he said. “Each [computer instruction] is like a car. I looked beyond stalled instructions to see if any other instructions could be processed [simultaneously].”

Torng, a retired professor, began his work in the 1960’s and patented his invention in the early 1980’s. Torng was a professor at Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering during the time of the research. He stated he was not at liberty to comment on the actual lawsuit.

The Hewlett-Packard patent suit is not the first of its kind for the University. The University also has a lawsuit pending against Zeiss Optical Company, a corporation that produces lenses for microscopes and telescopes, according to Dullea.

University counsel James J. Mingle, and Robert Lee Constable, dean for computing and information, did not wish to comment on the Hewlett-Packard lawsuit.

Mingle only stated that the University had filed a complaint. Hewlett-Packard’s legal department was not available for comment. According to Dullea, Hewlett-Packard is “challenging the patent itself.”

From a student perspective, Jordan Erenrich ’02, the president of the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates said, “I find it very reassuring that discoveries and research are protected by Cornell.”

Archived article by Jamie Yonks

Manhattan Protests Conclude Peacefully

By wpengine February 4, 2002

NEW YORK CITY — It turns out that Manhattan was prepared to accommodate dissent as well as big business after all. Fears that the World Economic Forum would spark civil unrest and result in a violent clash between protesters and the New York Police Department never materialized during the five-day anti-globalization convergence that concludes today. Instead, arrests were for mostly minor offenses and numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds among protesters whose numbers were estimated between 7,000 and 15,000. Activists opted by and large to attend public forums on Thursday and Friday in lieu of street demonstrations. Groups, including Students for Global Justice and International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), constructed a highly organized calendar of meetings and rallies to prepare protesters with discussions on various topics related to globalization. One series of meetings, called a “Public Eye on Davos Conference,” addressed social and environmental impacts of corporate globalization, export credit agencies (such as the International Monetary Fund), corporate power in global governance and impacts on the lives of women. Highly critical of the mass media, many demonstrators throughout the weekend distributed their own fliers and newspapers. Others snapped photographs and scribbled notes for independent documentation of the events. “The main issue [appearing in the corporate media] is the terrorists, but a lot of people are getting laid off,” said Greg Hardison, a union steward for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 73 in Chicago, Ill. Hardison said he traveled with other SEIU members from the midwest, because he was seeking peace. Gesturing to the crowd around him along Park Ave. across from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Hardison pointed to an assortment of placards that were as diverse as the people carrying them — but also urging for peace. Clusters of people had begun assembling near the site of the World Economic Forum meetings in lower Manhattan at around 9 a.m. Saturday under signs calling for an end to U.S. military action in Afghanistan and the Middle East. There were the two elderly women wearing sweaters that read, ‘Grandmothers for Peace;’ signs demanding ‘Money for Wages, Not for War;’ and ‘Free Mumia,’ (Mumia Abu Jamal, the death row inmate in Pennsylvania). All the while, protesters intermingled behind police barricades between 50th and 53rd Streets. Sarah Tew, a theatre teacher at the Hyde School in Woodstock, Conn. traveled with 13 of her high school students to attend the street demonstrations. The group stayed at the home of one student’s parents Friday night in Scarsdale, N.Y. and then managed their way to Park Ave. in time for a mid-day rally Saturday. “There were a lot of public put-downs in school meetings,” Tew said, after she informed parents and teachers that she would help bring the students to Manhattan. “Many from the school disapproved because they claimed that the protesters didn’t stand for anything.” As a result, the Hyde School students decided to bring along a banner that read ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’ — including elements of disunity that they came up with. Bear Kittay, a 16-year-old Hyde School student, pointed to the words ‘materialism’ and ‘militarism’ as he and his friends unfurled their sign. “It’s almost like our personal selfishness turns into corporate greed,” he explained. Along with the critique of global capitalism, scores of protesters turned out to express solidarity with the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. Several wore hats bearing the New York Fire Department logo and denounced terrorism in its many forms. Martha Grevatt, a volunteer with International A.N.S.W.E.R., wore an arm band to identify herself as part of the event security. While she stood across the barricade from the police, Grevatt described how this protest, in post-Sept. 11 New York, stood apart from earlier demonstrations in Quebec City, Quebec and Genoa, Italy — and especially in Davos, Switzerland. “The weekend’s events were more peaceful,” she said. Gazing at a nearby sign, she signaled that while only time will tell where the movement will lead, activists were correct to insist, as the sign declared: ‘Another World Is Possible.’Archived article by Matthew Hirsch
Budgetary Shortfalls Have Varied Impact

By wpengine February 4, 2002

The fiscal impact of the Sept. 11 attacks and the accompanying economic slowdown is reverberating throughout the Cornell community with varied and far-reaching effects. In response to the events of Sept. 11, funds on the state and federal levels were allocated to aid the recovery effort. In New York City, the estimated cost of this undertaking has been as high as $100 billion, before compensation by insurance. Impact Coupled with a slowdown in the economy, an effect on New York and most other states across the nation has been shortfalls in state budgets. Consequently, Cornell, like other statutory colleges and universities, will feel and has already felt the impact. “The major impact on Cornell thus far has been at the state level — Albany didn’t do the state budget funding that Cornell had been expecting before Sept. 11,” said Stephen Johnson, assistant vice president for government affairs. State Funds The supplemental budget would have included increased money for statutory colleges. The situation is also complicated by snags in the government’s dispersal of recovery funds. For instance, New York will be receiving fewer federal dollars than previously expected. “The way this could affect Cornell would be if it causes a budget shortfall for the state,” said Kevin O’Connell, communications director for local Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY). “The state would then have to cut in other areas.” Hinchey fought to secure the $20 billion in New York recovery funds that President George W. Bush pledged to the state in the hours following the September 11 attacks. The supplemental package supported by Hinchey would have kept all of the slated funds going to New York through the extension of healthcare benefits to those directly affected by the attacks. However, this amendment was overturned, and the final amount approved for dispersal was $10.7 billion–just over half of the anticipated funds. This generates another fiscal stress on the New York State government. “The funds that we wanted to go toward New York, instead were spent on defense,” O’Connell said. The White House Budget Office publicly maintains that New York will eventually receive at least the remaining $9.3 billion for recovery. However, prospects for some research funds may actually be improving. “The federal appropriations processes for most of the committees that consider issues important to Cornell have increases and several of the research related accounts have significant increases also,” Johnson said. Among the committees with increases are the Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. The Department of Defense has a increase of 10.9 percent. The National Institutes of Health reported the most substantial increase of 15.5 percent. By way of contrast, budget increases for the United States Department of Agriculture were a meager 0.3 percent — not large enough to offset an inflation rate of 1.7 percent. “We have long been concerned about the lack of significant growth in USDA research budgets to address significant problems confronting agriculture and rural communities of New York and the region,” said Daniel Decker, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and director of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station. Decker also indicated that this problem is not peculiar to this year, as funding for agricultural research “has, in effect, been losing ground in real buying power by nearly 20 percent during the last decade.” Decker said he found this especially alarming since the decline comes at a time when scientific discovery and understanding could allow for great advances. He also commented on Cornell’s access to selective funding. “Fortunately, our scientists are very competitive, so Cornell tends to do well in competitive grants programs,” Decker said. “However, if Cornell, as New York State’s land grant university, is to continue to do public research on agricultural issues of broad public concern, and not be limited to issues determined by external and sometimes private interests, USDA support of such research needs to be expanded markedly,” he added. Additionally, financial aid for students is also being affected. “Several federal student aid programs have slight increases,” Johnson said. However, he added that this increase will not be noticeable to any one student because the greater funding is being distributed to an increased volume of students who will need it — a product of recession. What has increased is the maximum the Federal Pell Grant will pay. Its new $4,000 maximum is about 18 percent higher than the previous amount. All in all, the question is not how economic fallout from recession and terrorism will affect the Cornell community. Indeed, it already has. Last year brought the largest decline seen in the University’s endowment in 20 years, and students are already seeing the effects. The University has stated that fiscal pressures spurred the recent hiring freeze, the tuition increase for the endowed colleges and the rise in Resnet fee. Archived article by Philip Lane