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Documents Reveal Rambus' Patent-Enforcement Plans
spiro_killglance writes: "Electronic News Online asked the U.S. District Court of San Jose to release the Rambus Internal Memos on JEDEC. The court did so
yesterday. Get the scoop here. But in brief, it looks like
they were planning to stick it to memory manufactures all along,
and did add patent claims from information gained at JEDEC in 1992." Hmmm. Rambus, slimy business practices? Say it ain't so.
In a suprise announcment today Rambus announced that they were retroactively announcing their patant for magenetic-core memory. Analysts speculate that this is a defensive move by Rambus in the event of a failure in their current bussiness model to patent other peoples' ideas that are currently applicable. This new initiative would patent other peoples' ideas that are already patented.
When questioned weather he expected to be granted a patent, the CEO of Rambus pointed out Amazon's One-Click patent, and said, "What do you think?"
When further questioned if he thought there was a market for slow memory in 128 byte chunks, he pointed out that people were buying RDRAM.
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On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
The primary issue here is not whether Rambus' patents are valid by themselves. The issue is that Rambus may have violated contractual obligations to JEDEC and its members. The JEDEC member rules specifically prohibit what Rambus allegedly did (sitting on patents while allowing them to become standards), and presumably if it's determined that Rambus violated those rules... then lots of penalties could be applied. I don't know what they might be (I don't know if they could actually invalidate the patent, or just force Rambus to pay huge settlements.)
There's no point in JEDEC having a set of rules for just this purpose if they can't be enforced. It seems that if Rambus really did violate them, they should be punished. Otherwise, standards organizations simply can't function, as long as for-profit members can get away with breaking the rules and producing tainted standards.
The other allegation, which is harder to prove, is that Rambus may actually have "stolen" ideas brought up duruing the JEDEC meetings. If that's the case, their claims on the patents may be illegitimate.
How d'ya s'pose TI managed to survive the latter half of the 1980's? Check out this guy's resume: http://www.jaeckle.com/attys/fitzgeraldthomas.asp -- "As part of the Texas Instruments licensing program that generated over one billion dollars in patent royalties, he was responsible for identifying and enforcing TI patents against unlicensed U.S. companies. This activity included identifying infringers, reverse engineering and analysis of infringing devices, and presentations of that analysis to potential licensees to encourage them to take a license."
I've been saying for the past three or four years that if we don't learn from the semiconductor industry, whose path we, the builders and users of the internet are following, we will end up with the same environment here, as well. Or, more succinctly, "Work toward your vision of tomorrow, or surely you will live in someone else's".
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The fact that these technologies could give them the patent to SDRAM isn't, in and of itself, at least relatively, worrisome. I think the idea that Microsoft owns the rights to Winblows has far more wide-ranging effects and is far more troubling than the possibility of a company owning rights to SDRAM.
If you think that IT patents are crazy, look at some of the non-IT patents that have had half the world paying royalties, over the years. For years anyone using plexiglass (thousands of engineers and architects around the world) had to pay the fellow who patented it. The paper clip was patented in 1899. Everyone knows the telephone was patented. Motorola patented the cell phone, for that matter. If the idea of SDRAM's rights being owned is scary, it's because we should be scared of the idea of patenting, itself, not because of any misuse of patent law by RAMBUS. Trademark Infringement: Just do it.
To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
Then, no "profit-driven" member will adopt the technology. The whole point of standards is to avoid having the industry big-wigs develop redundant, incompatible technologies that lock in customers. With things like DRAM, no one who isn't "profit-driven" can really benefit from the work of a standards committee. Just try and manufacture a new RAM standard in your garage.
Standards bodies are good, and it's essential to get the big companies on board to adopt the technologies created and to bring the experience in manufacturing and design that other entities just simply don't have.
While I have a very low opinion of corporations in general, especially profit-driven public corporations, the majority of companies realize that acting against a standards organization is counter-productive. The only people who can afford to are all near-monopolies, such as Microsoft, or little underhanded IP clearinghouses with no actual product like Rambus.
I'm just worried that companies like Rambus have spoiled the process for everyone else. Just like the article said, it's like a sporting event where you expect everyone to be playing fair. When someone doesn't, it casts doubt on all the other athletes and the event itself. The last thing we need is for Rambus's actions to destroy confidence in open standards organizations.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That's because Microsoft applications don't use standard ASCII for quotes in order to do their "smart quotes" feature. There's a program called the "Demoronizer" that fixes that and other damage if you want your web pages viewable outside Windoze.
The Register is running a short
clip about the story. Also the PR department of Rambus has been active, the result can be seen
here (althoug nothing very original, just typical quoted out of context defence)..
It's anyway funny to see that Micro$oft isn't the only company which is conserned about the protection of "innovation"...
My DeCSS archive:
Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans
Close guys. It is good you knew the "question mark" belonged somewhere in that phrase. And you were pretty close in putting it in the right position. Try one word over...closer....now try right after "Plans". There you go! I knew you could do it...
This was all part of their plan! They applied for patents on RAM technology, and when they were approved, they lied in wait like a tiger ready to ambush its prey. And then, they saw their chance in 1992. To prevent suspicion of foul play, they waited 8 years to sue the RAM makers. And when they did, they claimed that they had patents established well in advance.
IMHO, this was the perfect patent scam. They remained aloof while SDRAM proliferated in the consumer market, and then when computers all over the world were infringing on "their patents", they struck.
I hope they all fry in a vat of their own excrement (or they can just have numerous stories on FC). Such a despicable death is only fitting for this company of weasels.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I know you're trolling, but other people have bitten, so I'll correct your lies.
.5MB-4MB textures and sends them to a video card. This is only one primary read request and then a nice long stream. Both DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM shine in this area. Unfortunately, this benefit is negated by video cards with texture compression and 64MB (like all of the upcoming generation). The consumer-level chipsets used also negate many of the benefits of any technology.
RDRAM tends to be the worst for servers. The large cache on servers negates much of the benefit of high bandwidth RAM. Instead it calls for very low latency. SDR-SDRAM is lower bandwidth, but also lower latency. RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM are higher bandwidth but also higher latency.
Few real server applications involve sending fifty megabytes of static data per second, servers are called on to do dynamic data, sites like Slashdot, or CNN, or Google, where data is processed in complex ways and then presented. There's little locality of access (it's unlikely two things near each other in memory will both be wanted) so what really matters is how little time it takes for the server to fetch these isolated bits of information that it needs.
A gaming station, on the other hand, frequently loads
Low-end PC chipsets (the stuff most of us use) handle RAM a little inefficiently and most RDRAM/SDRAM comparisons are based on a consumer-level SDRAM chipset and a server-level RDRAM chipset, so they claim that the low-end chipsets deficiencies are problems with SDRAM where they're really just a problem with a consumer-level product. People are spending $400 for a GeForce 2 Pro, yet the chipsets for their motherboards cost $15 in bulk... It's like actually putting a porsche engine in a volkswagen, you might be able to make it fit but you'll realize that a porsche is much more than a fast engine.
A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels. It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.
RDRAM only looks good on paper and a few carefully constructed (ie, outright lies) benchmarks. All the claims of Rambus are outright lies. And you can quote me on this. They're thieves, cheats, and liars. They produce no product and exist merely to patent technology invented by other people. If there's a list of people most deserving of prison, these guys and all their shareholders belong on it.
I think that these memos clearly show that RAMBUS all along intended to violate the legal agreements they had with the JEDEC members. And that they deliberately used JEDEC to get patents, and also to get their patented IP into the SDRAM standard...
Now all it will take is an honest court and judge to hear this case. Which seems to be hard to get these days...
However, time and money is against RAMBUS. RAMBUS is now left completely without friends in an industry that wants to see them gone. Micron, et all have time and revenue on their side... Even Intel is no longet their friend. Intel is speeding up the release of their own DDR chipset for the P4. RAMBUS memory has already failed in the marketplace, and royalties on that is about the only income RAMBUS has to feed their legal machine.
So, one way or another, I think that this is the beginning of the endgame for RAMBUS. They are not developing any new technology (that we know of) to counter DDR. They put all their eggs in the basket of dubious IP and lawyers.
And it will be good for the whole tech industry for RAMBUS to fall in a spectacular and final fashion. The RAMBUS business model (dishonestly patent shady IP then sue everyone) needs to be demonstrated to be a failure.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Yup. RDRAM is best utilized in something like streaming video, or textures. Anything where you store a lot of large 512kB or larger chunks of data and want them to come in quickly.
It does very poorly where you have data that's between 16 and 128B and you want many different little chunks from different places.
RDRAM would shine in something like video encoding, or pumping textures to a video chip, or sending large static webpages. Stuff that benchmarks easily.
RDRAM falls over doing things like Slashdot, where each page view might be constructed from five to five hundred database accesses and many little perl scripts.
RDRAM is a quest for more bandwidth at any cost, whereas SDRAM is the quest for lower latency. DDR-SDRAM is a good middle-ground.
RDRAM is fundamentally high-latency with its complex architecture. You can add more RDRAM channels and you can't combat that basic flaw. But if you take nice low-latency SDR-SDRAM and add more channels you get more bandwidth, thus counteracting any benefit RDRAM has.
Now, slow RDRAM would actually be useful in low-end PCs, the sub-$500 market. You could make a very cheap motherboard because it requires less traces. You also wouldn't care about it being really slow because, hell, it's a $500 PC running a Winchip or something. But, Rambus killed that idea with their license fees, they'll end up making it so expensive that nobody could use it except in a server, where it really really sucks.
It is not under question here whether Rambus really could file for those patents. What is under question is whether these undisclosed patents violated existing contracts. If it can be proved that Rambus acted in bad faith on the contracts, all kinds of contract fun comes into place. IANAL, but this looks as those who are will make lots of money off of this. The lawyers may be the only ones who make good on this in the end...
More and more patents seem to seem like the intelectuall version of "First Post"s...
Rambus joins a group develuping new technology "First Patent"...
Amazon and one click shopping "If we didn't they would have"...
The whole busness of "We patented it before you could do it" is getting silly...
It's just a good thing for Microsoft somebody didn't patent FUD or they'd be sued up to there eyeballs...
I don't actually exist.