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

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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