Slashdot Mirror
Preliminary Ruling Limits Scope of Rambus Patents
Tackhead writes "According to this article in Electronic News, Rambus - our favorite litiga, uh, innovators in DRAM technology - has been smacked with a preliminary ruling that limits their patent claims to RAM technologies involving a multiplex bus. The article goes on to quote a source who says that since neither SDRAM nor DDR use this technique, this ruling could lead to the invalidation of RAMBUS' patent claims on SDRAM and DDR. Of course, this is just a preliminary ruling, and it's only one court battle (out of at least three), but it looks like the Good Guys (well, at the guys whose business is based on making chips instead of suing chipmakers) just might be winning."
Rambus is pretty much screwed because of this. Okay, they still have a few more trials, but my guess is that they're going to lose, and obviously a lot of their investors do to (at this moment, they're down 25%).
Intel has made their intentions clear. They will not be using RDRAM for future chips and will likely not work with Rambus in the future. Intel's not real happy about the lawsuits and they're definately not happy about the price gouging by Rambus. It hurts Intel's business to have to rely on RDRAM. The memory is so expensive, people don't want to use the motherboards.
Rambus has about the worst PR of any tech company because of the suits and because of the prices. Personally, I doubt they'll recover. They've really put themselves into a bad spot and I don't think they can dig out, but that's just MHO.
Their stock declined 26% today.
Hehe. Ouch.
sig fault
Yup. RDRAM is pretty clearly a Rambus innovation, and I don't begrudge them their royalties on RDRAM sales.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about saying "we invent things and license the tech to people who want to build them". It's only when Rambus said "Oh yeah, all your RAM are belong to us!" that I think they crossed the line from being innovators into being litigators.
If you invent something, you can license it. My beef with Rambus is that I don't believe they had anything to do with the "invention" of SDRAM or DDR, and that they therefore have no legitimate claim to royalties on those products.
If Rambus makes a fortune because Intel ships a CPU/chipset combo that turns the performance potential of RDRAM into real-world advantages, and their technology gains marketshare from DDR, more power to 'em.
But if the world goes with DDR instead of RDRAM, then Rambus (IMHO) should either come up with something better than DDR and patent it, or stick a fork in itself, 'cuz it's done.
In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case. The more I read /., the more I think that all these companies are evil demons trying to take away my liberties and other people's hard work. Is this truly an accurate assessment? Surely someone can speak for RAMBUS to explain why they think that they are in the right on this matter.
it doesn't quite shut down the Rambus litigation machine. Besides the totally bogus stuff, they do have a patent on variable CAS latency in the DRAM. One could argue that this was obvious, since everyone and her sister was using controller-side variable CAS latency from 'way back when. Regardless, they have the patent and it does seem to bear directly on SDRAM and DDR.
DDR II, on the other hand, has had it designed out. Dang.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about this business.
"There goes their patent" is actually a better phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something the market actually wants.
RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers because their own technology turned out to be inferior, offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.
If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When I read the ./ headline and article, my first thought was, "there goes their patent". Then I read the article and reread the headline and it made more sense. Rambus patent hasn't been touched, the Judge has merely sided with an "expert witness" in saying that Rambus's patent doesn't even apply to SDRAM, since SDRAM doesn't use the technology in the patent.
Burn Hollywood Burn
... sanity entering the US court system? isn't that one of the signs of the end of the world?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will win this battle is completely unknown.
Do consumers want or need a P4 with RDRAM? Will AMD continue to take market share, thereby boosting DDR sales? Will RDRAM prices come down? Will DDR chipsets finally ship in volume? And which technology really works better?
This battle is far from settled even when excluding the court case. Intel IS going to ship DDR product with the P4, but at a later date, conceiveably after RDRAM is reaching mass acceptance. They are keeping the door open, though. RAMBUS isn't going away soon, if ever.
Probably not. Micron, for instance, never paid Rambus a cent - that's why they're part of another lawsuit ;-)
If you signed a contract with Rambus that said "we'll pay you a royalty on our SDRAM sales between $NOW and $LATER", well, uh, you signed the contract. Tough.
Of course, if you signed such a contract, and Rambus' patents turn out to be invalid, odds are you're gonna drive a harder bargain when the contract expires.
(I suppose that if a judge rules that Rambus knew its patents were invalid at the time it wrote the contract, it may invalidate the contract altogether - but that would require proof of fraudulent intent, which is a much harder thing to prove than anything that's been seen up to this point. Personally, I think there'd be reasonable doubt - Rambus' goons wouldn't have gone on the path of attempting to license DDR and SDRAM unless they had reason to believe they could get away with it. Even if the patents are invalidated, given what's been made public so far, I think Rambus can still credibly claim that they thought their DDR/SDRAM land grab would stand up in court.)
From the article...
If individuals are convicted of fraud, it could mean more than a financial slap on the wrist, sources said.
"This means that people could go to jail. That's what this means," the source said.
And they should be thrown in jail. RAMBUS obviously committed fraud by going into the JEDEC standards meeting knowing that that the standard reached would infringe on their patents, not notifying JEDEC that they were patent pending on technoligies that were in the standard and then modifying their patent applications to cover even more of the agreed upon standard. Hell, RAMBUS management deserves more than jailtime; they deserve to be drawn and quarterd. Maybe this (throwing RAMBUS employees and lawyers) into jail would discourage others from attempting to follow RAMBUS's litigeous lead.
Well if you'd been following the technology of RAMBUS and actually READING the reviews that you mentioned, you'd know that while RDRAM has wonderful bandwidth, it has horrible latency, heat, power, and timing problems. They've known about all of these problems since RDRAM came out and they're painfully obvious now. It may have oodles of more bandwidth than sdram BUT if the latency is bad or if you can't power it or design a decent chipset/memory controller for it, it's really worthless except possibly at the high end server market where people are willing to pay oodles of $$ for extreme bandwidth with massive cooling solutions.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
1. Go to standards commities, listen to all the sugestions, and patent them in the hope that one day the suggestions are use. (which is what RAMBUS is alleged to have done by some)
2. Go to a standards commities and suggest your recently filed patent as a standard, in the hope someone will listen and add it to the standard. (which is what MS did with CSS)
In order for standards to be accepted or even used for that matter, there NEEDS to be full disclosure and trust at the comitties. Meaning: No Patents Allowed. Really, the EU, The US, and other interested parties should sign a treaty that agrees on a uniform language to prevent patents from going into or out of a conference. That and the definition of "non-trival" when applied to a patent should mean more than "something a high school grad wouldn't understand". Sure, I don't understand RAM design, but there are those who KNOW what non-trivial is and it seems RAMBUS has patented a non-trivial technology.
Burn Hollywood Burn
And of course, The Register's take on the SDRAM/DDR SDRAM.
Assuming this whole thing blows up in Rambus' face, this would end the SDRAM subsidy of RDRAM, which you can expect to see suffer an awful fate. Makes you wonder what Intel is thinking at this moment, with it's finger stuck in the door jamb.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=marketsquot e99_news.ht&s=AOrD1LBRvUmFtYnVz
It's already been confirmed (even by infineon's lawyers) that there's been ABSOLUTELY no ruling and that the EBN article is false.
This is just more emulex-ish crappola to drive Rambus down.
Hasn't anyone noticed that Micron is one of EBN's partners? They'll do anything to knock rambus down. There are no "good guys" in this business. You idiots who consider the anti-rambus companies the "good guys" are seriously misguided. They're all in this for your money. Stop making holy wars out of monetary battles.
Hyundai is presently in rather dire financial straits due to a high debt load. Hyundai may just have been hedging their bets, as they may not be in a position to afford the cost of losing the case against Rambus.
It's also possible that since RDRAM is more expensive than SDRAM or DDR, and we all know how low RAM prices have gotten lately, Hyundai may have decided there's no money to be made in anything other than RDRAM. (And that there's therefore no money to be saved by trying to cut Rambus out of their SDRAM and DDR sales, since they may not be making money on these types of RAM anyways)