RAMBUS Taking SDRAM Patent To Court

fdiskne1 wrote to us with the news from C|Net concerning out litigious 'lil buddy RAMBUS ^[?] who's got the SDRAM patent in Court right now. Because, hey, if what you are making sucks, why not go out and sue everything that moves? Excuse my editorial feeling on this, but it seems like everytime I see Rambus in the news, it's not for a new technology, it's because they are suing someone. Erg. Now I'm cranky. Time for more coffee. Anyway, the article is the pretrial highlights of the Micron/Hitachi vs. Rambus suit. Interestingly, although Rambus is supposed to win, if they lose, they lose all the royality money. And if you read the article, there's some more trouble brewing for Rambus.

Comments

First trial in Germany

[Trekologer]

The first case going to trial, according to the c|net article is in a German court. IANAL, but this case is important but not as important as the U.S. cases will be (Rambus' patents are from the U.S. and can only be totally invalidated in the U.S.). If Rambus looses in Germany the weight of their patents are dimished in the eyes of everyone else but they'd only not be enforcable in Germany. Rambus would still have the patents in the U.S. (and thanks to the WIPO, everywhere else in the world).

Now on to my rant...

There's no doubt in my mind (or should be in anyone's mind) that Rambus conspired to deceive the JEDEC and corner the memory market through illegal practices. Even if they did not propose the SDRAM standard, they were in attendance at the JEDEC meetings and knew damn well that the standards being proposed might be infringing on patents that they held. They knew that the standard set by the JEDEC would become the de-facto standard for memory in all computers and that all the memory makers worldwide would be producing SDRAM products. They set a trap for everyone else, led them right into that trap, and now are triggering that trap. Thank god that Micron and Hitachi are fighting Rambus' trap.

Ah, that felt better. Godspeed to Micron and Hitachi.

+ 4 insightful ? Should be -1 Bullshit.

[Carnage4Life]

In order to gain a patent, you have to disclose your design. That's the whole point of patents - in return for legal protection of your intellectual property, you have to disclose details of how the design works and mankind (is supposed to) benefit from this disclosure of knowledge. The alternative to patents and disclosure is to keep your design secret but have no legal protection of your design.

The details of patents are not released while they are still pending. RAMBUS's patents were still pending during the JEDEC meetings, so the only way for JEDEC to know about them was for RAMBUS to disclose them which they didn't even though they were supposed to as part of the conditions for joining JEDEC.

So the lying snakes joined JEDEC and steered the entire hardware industry in the direction of using technology they were in the process of patenting so that the entire hardware industry would owe them royalty fees.

IMO, JEDEC are just as guilty as Rambus for creating this whole situation

Why? Because they aren't psychic and read RAMBUS's executives minds or because they didn't make all members undertake a lie detector test?

Grabel's Law

Have you ever tried to read a Patent?

[Srin Tuar]

First of all, they are written in their own special language "patentese", which is a dialect of "lawyerese" with some suspicious sci-jargon thrown in. They are desinged to be read and written be specially trained individuals who can properly encode/decode them.

Second of all, the Patent applies to any use of the described technology, so the title of the patent and its overview do not tell you all the applications of the patent. In order to understand a patent you must understand all of the patent.

Thirdly, even if part of a patent is invalidated, the balance remains in force, so you must understand every part of a patent.

Say you are trying to invent something new on your own. Now imagine that you are charged with making sure that there is no patent you would be infriging upon. This means you are responsible for knowing and understanding every part of every patent ever issued. Even disregarding the fecundity of the patent office- this is impossible.

The purpose of the JEDEC was to avoid this problem. All parties agreed not to lay a patent minefield. RAMBUS broke the rules- they are trying to gain from the work of others- they should lose.

Re:Patent nonsense.

[jayhawk88]

I don't see how the JEDEC (Joint Electronic Devices Engineering Council) members can claim that Rambus didn't disclose their patents on SDRAM at the time that the standard was being chosen.

From the article:

Although the original claim was filed in 1990, Rambus didn't receive its patents, and make them fully public, until after it left JEDEC. By then, SDRAM was already established as the next standard for memory.

So basically what you have is this: Rambus and a bunch of other memory manufacturers are sitting around at JEDEC, discussing what the next memory standard should be. Eventually, they decide that it should be SDRAM. All the while, RAMBUS is sitting there with the knowledge that they have pending (as in, not yet accepted, or public) patents on SDRAM, yet they say nothing to anyone else.

Whether this is illegal or not is what the courts are going to decide, but at the very least it's highly immoral. Think maybe RAMBUS might have had an agenda for pushing an SDRAM standard at the conference, knowing that they'd likely be granted a patent on it in the near future? Think this knowledge might have affected what the other companies thought of SDRAM?

This should never have happened

[not-quite-rite]

Rambus knew that they had a more than a competitive edge when the standards were being drawn up.

If a politician(moreso a minister) does not disclose that they have a vested interest in a change in the legislation, then they get investigated.

Similar to insider trading.

What does the international standards organisation do to stop this. How does a standard come about with this happening?

Surely there should be measures to stop this, or at least enforce decisions afterwards, particulary in regards to violations like this.

Or is the formation of standards similar to the UN, strictly a paper tiger?

Well, Rambus DID invent SDRAM

[Patrick McRotch]

I hate to say it, but I predict Rambus will win this round of lawsuits. I know how much you slashdoters hate Big Corporations, but if you put your preconceptions aside for a moment and look at the facts for a change, you'll see that Rambus is, in fact, well within their legal rights to charge royalties for the use of SDRAM.

Rambus is one of the primary members of JEDEC, a coalition between major players in the semiconducter industry. Several years ago, when the major players of JEDEC got together and finalised the SDRAM standard, and later the DDR SDRAM standard, Rambus provided key technology to make those standards possible.

Hemos, you seem to think that Rambus stay's in business by charging frivolous lawsuits against other memory manufacturers. Fortunately, that is far from the truth. Rambus is an intellectual property corporation, meaning they devote their resources to inventing the technology that makes todays high speed memory possible, but they do not actually manufacturer memory. That is where liscensing fees come into play. Rambus liscenses their technology to other manufacturers who actually produce the DIMMs. Sadly, Micron and Hundai seem to think that it's okay for them to manufacture memory using stolen technology with out any legal repercussions. I certainly hope our court system will do The Right Thing and smack Micron and Hundai with some major penalties to make up for their theft and corporate espionage.

Re:Well, Rambus DID invent SDRAM

[Flower]

First, Rambus was a member of JEDEC. They joined in 1992 and left in 1996. This was clearly stated in the article. As for contribution, that seems to be in debate.

There is another article here at ElectronicNews Online that provides some information not included in the C-Net article. All I can say is the more I read about Rambus the more I am convinced that they were unethical in their dealings with JEDEC.

For myself, I am more inclinced to accuse Rambus of corporate espionage than I am of Micron or Hyundai. If there is any justice, Rambus will be nailed to the wall for breaking the spirit if not the letter of the law.

Re:Well, Rambus DID invent SDRAM

[jmauro]

It is actually RAMBUS that is at falt here. As a member of JEDEC they agreed not to get any patents on the technology and to disclose if they held any current or pending patents on technology they held. The technology isn't stolen at all, as part of JEDEC it is the proposed standard, which RAMBUS agreed to. I'd have some symphathy if RAMBUS wasn't part of JEDEC, but they were and by joining of they're own free will they have little or no ground to stand on as being moral and upright for doing this.

Patent wasn't awarded yet

[TekkonKinkreet]

From the JEDEC manual:

NOTE -- All committee ballots shall contain the following patent statement:
"If you are aware of any patents involved in this ballot, check this box and notify the
committee, citing the patent numbers."

The problem here is that while it sat on the JEDEC, RAMBUS had applied for but had not yet been awarded the patent. Everyone agress that RAMBUS didn't try to influence the standard setting process. The article also suggests that the outcome would have been the same even if the patents had been in place earlier, since the patents are so hard to circumvent (that's what you're going for when you write a patent). So the argument is that they should have disclosed the fact (presumably, somehow, without giving any indication of the contents) of the patent application.

Any business might reasonably be reluctant to do that. Setting the specifics of the RAMBUS case aside, if you're a company with a patent application in progress, you don't want anyone to know what the patent is about, because you don't have any protection for your technology. After all, the patent might be rejected, and then secrecy is your only protection.

As I am about the billionth person to point out, the problem is in the USPTO. Patent examiners come from the lower ranks of engineering, and patent trial juries are hopelessly overmatched by the issues they are presented with. However, there must be some system in place which allows someone to invest money in research with some expectation of making back that money. Otherwise you have the kid's soccer game model of technology, one company innovates and is immediately swarmed by as everyone clusters around the ball, and the winner is often the one who has the most to spend on marketing because they didn't have to do any engineering.

Rambus could lose based on legal precedent

[RayChuang]

I think Rambus could have tough going defending its patents because of one famous legal precedent: U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company (1945), which ruled that a company cannot use the patent laws to engage in legal practices to shut out competitors.

What Rambus is engaging in right now is almost a perfect reflection on what United Shoe tried to do to any shoemaking company that violated United Shoe's various patents on shoemaking machines in the first half of the 20th Century.

Revoke Their Patents

[mrwiggly]

Hitachi et al claims that Rambus should have disclosed their IP while
they were members of the JEDEC.

Rambus says they never mentioned or promoted their IP.

Therefore, the other committee members designed a memory technology in a
clean room environment that just happened to infringe on *pending*
patents.

This suggests to me that Rambus patented an *obvious* solution to
computer memory, and those patents should be revoked.

The most troubling aspect to RAMBUS' behavior

[laetus]

What troubles me the most is the following from the article:

In the JEDEC, Rambus "engaged in an illegal scheme to secure worldwide domination of the market for semiconductor memory" by not disclosing the existence of its intellectual property at the time the memory standards were being formed, according to court papers filed by Hyundai.

In essence, Rambus knew it had a claim to intellectual property that was being discussed in a standards-setting body in which it was participating. Basically, they were laying a trap for all the other memory makers.

This would be a good case study for an graduate studies ethics class.
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