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DRAM Industry vs RAMBUS
Greyfox writes: "The DRAM manufacturers are considering filing an anti-trust complaint against RAMBUS in an attempt to get their SDRAM patents declared unenforceable. "
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My watch has two patents engraved in the back of it, and there is surely plenty more patented technology inside. I'm fairly sure that there's nothing particularly revolutionary about this watch, it's just a matter of Timex protecting its engineering efforts. What RAMBUS is doing is not a matter of protecting a specific feat of engineering, but trying to control an entire class of technologies. That's not how patent law is supposed to work. It's supposed to keep someone from taking something apart and make copies and undersell the first maker who sunk so much into R&D. Somehow I suspect that the other memory makers, who are making items that get the same task done (store and retrieve high-speed volatile memory) but in fairly different ways (different chipsets, even) are not making a direct ripoff of RAMBUS technology. While it's true that they may be operating on a principle that RAMBUS is also using, this doesn't mean that general technique should be patentable and enforcable. It just means a specific implementation of it should.
My car probably has a couple hundred, if not thousand patents. Still, my neighbors drive a car made by a different company, and neither of these companies has sued the other any time in recent history.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Read the story and the background. RAMBUS are claiming pretty damned wide patents on anything vaguely approaching SDRAM technology. They were part of the JEDEC standards organization when SDRAM was being standardized. According to the rules of that organization, companies are required to disclose any patent interests they have in a technology that's before the organization. They failed to do so. They allowed the standard to progress and become all-pervasive. Then they popped up exclaiming "Oh, look what I've just found in my back pocket!"
The other way to look at it is RAMBUS are effectively claiming a monopoly on the worldwide RAM market. They get to set the price of a given technology. They get to say that their madcap RAMBUS technology will be licensed for a slightly less extortionate rate than SDRAM. If that's not in breach of the Sherman Act I don't know what is.
Paul.
What you meant to say is that in theory patents aren't bad. In practice, however, they are almost all unilaterally bad and do NOT promote "innovation", let alone "invention and science in the many States."
What the current system does promote is predatory patent portfolio arbitration. Corporations have long figured out how to maximize profit and stifle competition, all without appriciably "innovating", and all in the name of "patent" protection.
Corporations are blatantly misusing patent law so they can use their patents as poker chips in the grand game of Who-Can-Patent-As-Many-Concepts-As-Possible.
The corporation with the most patents has the largest supply of ammunition should they become the target of a patent infringment lawsuit. Invariably, such lawsuits end in a out of court-settled cross-licensing deal.
I speak from first hand experience as I have worked in the R&D department of several large corporations. There is always a race to patent your silly idea first, and if you have alot of them to back you up, when you inadvertently step on somebody else's patent, you have a good chance of being able to continue your work.
If you are in a small business, or are an "independant" inventor (arguably the main things patents supposedly serve to protect) you are screwed if your widget happens to use somebody elses "obvious" idea.
In all these battles, I have NEVER seen the best techology win, and I have NEVER witnessed a patent (issued OR pending) that "incentivized" innovation or invention. It's all about the benjamins, never about science.
Just a nit pick, the Bill of Rights doesn't mention patents and copyrights. It is covered in Article 1, Section 8 in the main body of the Constitution.
Finally, I'd like to close with a little quote from Jefferson, just to clarify what our Founding Fathers could POSSIBLY have been thinking when they decided to take this path.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
Too bad corporations have brainwashed everybody into thinking financial incentive always leads to innovation. Jefferson would be spinning in his grave.