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Micron sues Rambus for antitrust violations
darkrot writes "According to the Micron website, Micron is suing Rambus for violations of antitrust laws, as well as asserting its non-infringement and the invalidity of Rambus' patents." So far Hitachi and Toshiba have settled with Rambus. Toshiba still makes RAMs, so its settlement with Rambus was odd in that it could only spur on Rambus to sue more people. This suit might reduce the attraction of business models based on generating patents and suing, rather than bringing products to market. Update: 08/29 07:03 PM by S :Oops: "settled with Rambus" not Micron.
Segfault sues Slashdot posters over fake lawsuit posts
DISASSOCIATED PRESS - Dozens were shocked today as popular geek humor site Segfault sued numerous posters to popular geek new site Slashdot over posts which they claim "directly infringe upon our content".
"Segfault has long since been the home for parodies of lawsuits. Why, even recently we had to politely hint that we've been recieving too many!" commented resident Segfault PR hack Bymer Klairich, "As such, if others create their own lawsuit parodies, this will severely damage our ability to ship our own version of the product. Effective immediately, we're going to shut those freeloaders down!"
Aside from "firewalling ports", "using block lists", and various other technical-sounding terms of various feasability, Segfault plans to begin enforcing its patent on fake lawsuits.
"Patent INT_MAX - 4, 'Method for cheap laughter involving legal parody of the USPTO' is clearly in violation here. As soon as we end the current fake lawsuit we're facing over it, we plan to prosecute these posters to the fullest extent of the law."
-Denor
Kid: "Mr. Owl, how many lawsuits does it take to get to the center of Slashdot?"
Owl: "Let's find out... One.. Two.. Three [CRUNCH!]. Three.
The world may never know...
Why does it seem like latley the only news coming out of technology today is some sort of litigation? Three posts on lawsuits in one day? That's got to be a record. No offence (and you can mod me down if you want to), but has it come to "No news is good news, unless it's court related"? I would rather talk about what these comanpies are releasing then what these companies are doing to each other. Just my opinion...
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
>There is a big difference between your two example systems. Rambus is bumping up against the speed of light, your sewer system is not.
Good god, I hope the bizarre mental imagine this is creating is not being forced upon the rest of the readers.
On the other hand, sanitation workers can now discuss topics that were once solely in the realm of theoretical physics.
"Ok, normally a town needs huge waste pipes, but if we modify toilets by adding super dense toroids moving at 99% of the speed of light, in opposite direction of each other, we should be able to create a wormhole....."
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Every corporation (for some reason that still eludes me) tends to incorporate in Deleware. Don't ask me why, since almost *none* of them have their HQ in the state. (For an example of this Deleware habit, look at the MPAA vs. 2600 legal documents that have the full listing of the plaintiffs-- almost all of them end with a statement along the lines of "a corporation lawfully incorporated in the state of Deleware".)
My personal guesses so far?
A. It's cheaper to register as a business in Deleware (Wow, look Mr. CEO, we saved $5 on this business registration, won't our investors just LOVE that!).
B. Something to do with tax laws perhaps?
C. Something to do with more favorable state laws with relation to business?
If anyone has any ideas as to why 75% of businesses incorporate in Deleware, I'd be curious to know the *real* answer.
As for the lawsuit: I'm glad someone is finally fighting Rambus on all of it's BS-- claiming to own patents on technology that has been around and in use this long is utterly absurd, especially considering how Rambus acquired those technologies (EG: JEDEC).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
People hate Rambus because there was an attempt to force it down their throats when nobody wanted it. Thankfully that effort was largely crushed and is a good deal of the reason why AMD is doing so well these days.
After that didn't work, Rambus went out and started suing SDRAM makers, with the basic idea being to get royalties for no real reason other then that they own patents which they shouldn't own in the first place. They wanted to make money off their overpriced Ram, and that didn't work, so now they want to make money off the backs of the SDRAM makers without actually doing anything to earn it except for having aggressive lawyers.
Yeah, thats really the kind of thing we want to encourage.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
As soon as I read this, I thought of the MWRA (Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, those kooks in control of our sewers) making a similar change to the sewer system (not that they have, thank god.)
Imagine that they change the sewer pipe diameter from the standard size (1 to 2 meters, I think, I've never been in a sewer pipe, thankfully) to something 1/4 the diameter. Their primary purpose is to watch the turds shoot out with high velocity at the end. Of course, this introduces much sewage backlogging and latency, and would result in 5 toilet explosions daily. The pipes are lined with stainless steel and cost $90,000 per 5-meter length; about 3 million of these would be installed throughout the MWRA's jurisdiction of the Commonwealth. The MWRA, of course, would claim that the speed of the flying turds should highly outweigh the backlogging and explosion problems. Nevertheless, disgruntled MWRA customers would plan for a "Boston Turd Party."
Just a vivid (and hilarious) analogy.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Micron's always displayed a fair bit of spunk for a RAM maker, especially when somebody disses them but also when they see a chance to put the boot in.
:)
This ought to be very interesting
The "problem" is that Rambust owns patents on SDRAM. They were part of the JEDEC committee, while at the same time patenting the core technologies being finalized. If this isn't conflict of interest, I don't know how else to define it. The biggest problem with Rambust is not that it is expensive, but that it doesn't work well. The technology is immature and flaky. Don't even think about mixing vendors on the same board. Also, it is not only the PC-800 that has problems. It is not like SDRAM, whereby faster chips run better in slower systems. There are problems across the board. It's just that Rambus isn't so popular that these problems have not come out. If you buy a Rambus-based system, buy one from a first tier vendor, or you'll be sorry.
I don't know if these two corporate names sound funny to you, but hearing Micron vs. Rambus sounds alot like Godzilla vs. Mothra.
For example, "Rambus was resting deep beneath the ocean, the warm salty waters healing it after its fight with Mothra. Soon, though, the citizens of Tokyo would be rushing frantic through the streets. Why? Unbenownst to them, an evil Sony game developer, trying to learn the secret of MS's new Xbox gamestation, opened the case of a development version of the Xbox, stolen from Redmond.
Sadly, the Gatesians had rigged all development copies of the Xbox with a failsafe device, that would irradiate every chip inside the box as well as anything within a 20 foot radius.
Within that 20 foot radius was the developer and a small fly that flew onto the Xbox's main CPU when the radiation hit. Thus born of the radiation was "Micron", a 50 foot fly with the brains of a Pentium III.
And as monsters are wont, Micron began destroying and gobling up small software and hardware companies throughout Tokyo, eventually awakening Rambus from its sleep to emerge from the ocean deeps to fight Micron in the streets of Tokyo."
No more caffiene for me today. Thanks.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
I've been waiting for this one to drop. Now, if it would just squish Rambux then we can all enjoy cheep DDR SDRAM in a few months! ;-)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I will certainly buy Micron memory for my new T-Bird 900 upgrade I'm planning. Vote with your wallet, buy products from companies that stand up for what is right, and (as Sony's Veep Heckler would suggest), firewall the ones that cave at your wallet. RamBUST inc's patent claims will fail on two fronts. First, their membership in JEDEC precluded them from secretly patenting IP that the JEDEC group was involved in. RAMBUST did not disclose patents they had applied for on SDRAM technology (as they were required to), and IMO, probably kept that secret for the sole purpose of influencing JEDEC to adopt a SDRAM standard containing patented RAMBUST IP. Second, anti-trust. This is like giving a mafia don a cut of every dollar spent in a vital industry. RAMBUST is bad for technology. First, they failed to RAM inferior yet mega-expensive technology up our collective arses, then failing that they are going to try to collect on SDRAM technology that they never developed, marketed, or produced.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
RAMBUS chose it's first attacks carefuly to make it's claim seem stronger than it is. Toshiba is the main supplier of RDRAM for Nintendo. They were offered a "sweet" deal on royalty to cave. Hitatchi was prepared to fight it out, and had counter-sued in much the way that Micron is now, but they were set to sell their memory business, and to close the deal they had to settle. Note that Hitachi's settlement becomes null and void when it changes ownership. The next RAMUS suit was against a foreign company, that will be at a disadvantage in the wacky US federal courts. Now they face a real monster, Micron, a REAL company with REAL engineering, REAL assets, REAL production that could buy or bury RAMUS in REAL assets many times over.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
Following up to my own post: Here's a story on CNET. And one on Yahoo.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Hitachi and Toshiba bowed before Rambus because the extortion is negligble compared to legal costs and perceived PR cost.
Intel held/holds stock in Rambus (read: conflict of interest)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There is also a story at SemiBizNews and here
Course when I submitted it this morning it was rejected within seconds. Odd thing that.
Try looking at http://www.delbusinc.com/del7-3.html
The patents others are supposedly infringing are that Rambus were part of the working group that came up with (DDR) SDRAM. While participating they also happened to patent most of the core technology...
Now that their RDRAM technology is failing market interest, due to high cost and flaky functionality, they sue SDRAM manufacturers to bring SDRAM prices up to RDRAM levels.
I was seriously dismayed that RAMBUS, seeing that it's technology was losing the battle badly, decided that if they can't win, they are going to try to extort revenues out of all other DRAM manufacturers. I was shocked that Hitachi and Toshiba buckled without much of a fight; numerous corporations have been making SDRAM for years before RAMBUS came on to the scene. I'm putting my money on DDR SDRAM for the next generation RAM technology, as it's cheap and higher performance that the expensive, high-latency, high-clocked serial RAMBUS modules.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.