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

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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