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Rambus Found Guilty of Fraud
Joby Walker writes: "The jury in the Rambus v. Infineon case has found Rambus guilty of fraud in regard to their actions within JEDEC. Infineon was awarded $3.5M in punitive damages, but that has been reduced by the judge due to Virginia Law." Rambus says they'll appeal.
Wrong. It's about patent law being pervasive and powerful enough to make this sort of action a worthwhile business risk. As it sits, patent law is bad.
Somehow, I don't think he'll be responding to any of this. That would be consistant with his behaviour detailed in the essay.
Now that's interesting... if you will look at the Slashdot homepage, check out how all but two stories are posted by michael. This seems to be more and more the case. Draw your own conclusions.
The link in trhe comment above deserves a thorough read before you start hitting it with your mod points.
In the long run, I hope that the Patent system "smartens up" in the patents that they actually grant...
Hope all you want, but our government has seen to it that the PTO has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to stop granting silly and frivolous patents. They get paid for them, and the courts get stuck sorting it all out. There is no accountability on their end. If you want them to shape up, you have to work to change the system.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent.
You're not likely to find many CS grads working for peanuts at the PTO. Since the PTO has to support itself (and is used as a revenue source by the government), they have every incentive in the world to grant every patent that comes through there if it hasn't already been patented, regardless of how obvious or silly it is. They are not held accountable for their decisions. They get paid regardless of whether it gets overturned later or not. They also have every incentive to start granting patents in new areas where patents may not even promote innovation (business methods, software, genomics, etc.).
First of all, we need to take the money out of the equation. If we want patents to be screened well and objectively considered, we need to remove the financial incentive to sell patents like Big Macs. The PTO should be funded by our taxes and it should offer examiners wages commensurate with what they would make working for a commercial company in their chosen field. Otherwise, we will always end up with unqualified or underqualified examiners who won't know what is obvious to one of normal skill in the field of the patent they are examining. If we want the patent system to work properly, we had better be prepared to pay what it costs to make it work properly.
Second, we should seriously reevaluate the effects that patents really have on innovation in various industries. I can pretty much guarantee that a 20 year software patent does not have the same benefit to that industry that a 20 year pharmaceutical patent or biotech patent might have in those industries. We should rethink term lengths for the various types of patents as well as whether certain types should be granted at all.
Until these things happen, the patent system will continue to be a mess that siphons resources off to the lawyers that could be better spent hiring more people in the various industries as well as doing more R&D in order to produce real innovations rather than just patenting every silly incremental improvement that someone thinks up.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It just seems like a funny tech song that has the same phrase at the bottom of every Chorus:
...they'll appeal."
"and RamBus says...
between the laws being bad, and the laws being badly applied.
Personally, I don't have any problem at all, with companies being able to patent, and profit from their inventions.
This case was all about a company suckering an entire industry into using their ideas in a standard. Then after the standard is widely adopted, and prohibitively expensive to back away from, the pop out with a patent that everyone is now in violation of. It's not about patent law being bad, it's just about sleazy business practices.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Seems a pity noone completely mirrored the website so they can tell Michael to just fuck off. Michael appears to be extremely childish according to the account in the article. It would be nice to hear an account from Michael in response to this article but it's quite possible (probable? hope not) that the childish behaviour is true and only abuse of the /. moderation system will happen instead.
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Delphis
Delphis
Looser pays winner's court cost? No, thanks. Big Hairy Corp would probably consider it a small investment to spend that additional 100K intimidating you by keeping you in court for a year or two. Yeah, you get your money back... but you've lost time, sleep, and gained nothing but stress over it.
Also... heaven forbid that you are the one to bring suit against BHCorp... you had better be damn sure you will win, because you sure as hell can't afford to pay their legal bills.
"Looser pays" only works if the two litigants have roughly the same assets. Once you get into a huge disparity, the side with the most money wins, because they cn afford to litigate in order to gain advantage, whether or not they win.
Now, if the proposal was "looser pays winners court costs, up to the amount that the looser spent in court", then you've got something that might work. If BHCorp spends $10,000,000 suing me, and I spend $1,000 defending myself and loose... well, I owe my lawyer $1,000, and BHCorp $1,000 towards their court costs. If I win, they have to shell out an additional $1000 to cover my court costs.
Overall, I think this is a better solution... the more you spend to try and win a case, the more you risk loosing.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Not so they can get rich by extorting others who are actually innovating by pushing a lot of paper.
And rambus pushes a TON of paper. For Q2, Rambus's legal bill was $7.3 million! I leave it to you to imagine the amount of paper that buys.
Rather, patents are a favor granted to benefit we the people with better products at lower rates.
Companies screaming about being robbed and having their "rights" violated (in this case by members of a jury of americans) should remember, those rights are there to serve us, not you.
Legit companies should be getting in to stop patent insanity, lest we (and crazy hippy protestors) throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This ruling does me good. Any way we can contact the judge and send him chocholates?
True or not, RAMBUS managed to get busted. Think of it this way... the speed limit on most US freeways is 55 or 65 mph. Most people get off scot free. The most flagrant violators tend to get caught more often. The average speeder occasionally gets caught (depending on the time of the month due to "non-existent" quotas) and/or how much the local police need the cash.
RAMBUS got caught with its hands in the cookie jar. Is RAMBUS the average "Joe" company bends the rules just like everybody else, or the FLAGRANT bully in desparate need of a smack down... you decide.
I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!
Not so unexpected. All one had to do was read the answer and summary judgment motions. Those arguments survived through trial for a reason.
You are objectively wrong on this point, as wrong as can be. It is a matter of record that the jury made no finding that the patent was invalid. Period.
Even if the judge were to hold Rambus' conduct (which the jury DID hold to be fraudulent) sufficient to give rise to a declaratory judgment of unenforceability, AND even if the Federal Circuit were to reverse existing precedent on unenforceability, this would not support the preceding remark suggesting the patent should not have issued.
A patent is issued, or not, based solely on the state of the prior art. Period. The patent office can determine invalidity of a claim, but not unenforceability of a claim were a patent to be granted. The patent office is without statutory and constitutional authority to make determinations that any ancilliary conduct would give rise to unenforceability.
So, sorry, you're just wrong. The patent system worked fine.
Yeah, the legal system sucks. Its the worst system on Earth for resolving commercial disputes, until you consider the alternatives.
I agree that there are few things dumber for two brilliant CEO's to do than to conclude that their high-tech disputes must be resolved by six random people off the street.
But these CEO's reached that conclusion. There were mediations, arbitrations, all sorts of efforts made to help the parties find some middle ground. None was to be had.
One competitor thought the other had engaged in fraud, the other thought the first had stolen their property. Rather than hiring soldiers or private police, they hired lawyers.
Here the patent system did the right thing. Rambus appears entitled to the patents they had, and the defendants appear not to have infringed those patents. The legal system, apart from the patent system, found certain commercial conduct to be fraudulent. This may ultimately feedback to limit the enforceability of the patent, maybe not.
The system worked because it answered the parties questions after a fair process; questions they couldn't resolve any other way.
If you know a better way to assure these results are properly and fairly adjudicated, I'd love to hear what you have in mind.
If you say so. For the record, this case has nothing to do with software patents. Reasonable people may disagree, but the broad consensus for hard science patents is that the patent system has superbly aided the flow of capital to technology intensive projects, and facilitated the broad disclosure and use of the same. Yes, of course, ANY RIGHTS AT ALL, tangible or intangible, property or personal integrity, will lead to disputes, and some plaintiffs are supposed to have lost -- one way to deter litigation is to adopt the simple rule:
All plaintiffs lose.
or its converse
All plaintiffs win.
Either rule leads to grave injustice. The absence of rights altogether leads to anarchy.
As I said, we have the worst system in the world, until you consider the alternatives.
It's been beaten to death on /. but the stupid patent laws have to go! This is at least a step in the right direction. I hope the trend continues.
Seems to me that the consensus here is that the patent system and courts worked just fine in this case.
I saw Linus do a keynote address at LinuxWorld, and also bumped into RMS in the .org pavillion. Doesn't that qualify?
No, that's a mighty big incentive for companies to build RDRAM instead of DDR.
Getting SDRAM royalties would have been icing on the cake for RMBS - their goal all along was the elimination of DDR, whether by hook ("All your bus are belong to us!" infringement suits) or by crook (punitive royalty fees on anyone who falls for the "hook"). Frankly, I'd see the 3.5% royalty on DDR as an action bordering on antitrust.
But it's all moot, thanks to this ruling.
RMBS has a right to royalties on RDRAM. They invented RDRAM and can license the tech.
RMBS can go take a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut when it comes to royalties on SDRAM and DDR.
If the market decides that DDR provides better performance over RDRAM, then RMBS goes bankrupt. They invented a technology that the market decided not to adopt. Tough tittie for them.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of shitweasels.
don't forget - OJ was not guilty of murder, but still lost the civil trial and had to pay $$$ - he was financial responsible for the murders, but not guilty of them....
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---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
In the Netherlands you do get court costs awarded, only they are not the real costs but a statutory amound depending on the number of court meetings and how complicated the case was. A typical court case will cost (in court costs) about $ 1000. No way you can pay a lawyer with this. It stops people from bringing lawsuits and gives negotiating a much bigger appeal.
Joost
IANAL, but unless I'm mistaken, fraud is a criminal charge, not a civil matter. If I am found guilty of fraud, I go to jail or pay a heavy fine.
I think you could make this work. Modify it a bit though. Loser pays a ratio of winners court costs that is equal to the ratio difference in their net income? That probably still has problems because everyone tries to make it look like they made less than they really did to try to get out of paying taxes.
It would also be interesting for companies like amazon that operate in the red. The looser could actually make money in this case :)
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
I know this is from Rambus, but I found the following tidbit interesting:
"Rambus abided by JEDEC's rules despite the fact that these rules have been shown to be confusing, conflicting, poorly communicated and generally not complied with by other JEDEC members."
I wonder if that holds any water... perhaps Rambus is the only one that got caught, or at least the only one that has abused their JEDEC rules violations...
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Did you notice in the article that they're citing that this law will slow innovation because people can no longer patent standards?
n ovation- ---------
It seems to me that companies in court these days are using the word "Innovation" like the boy who cried wolf. If it can't be used to churn a profit, it's stifling innovation. First microsoft bashing GPL and Open Source products, now Rambus.
"Stifling Innovation" is the newest buzz-word for "We don't like it and we can't profit off it".
Here, guys. Let me help you out.
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=in
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Sure, it's nice to say that a company should "make things". However, the business model that Rambus (and Lucent, et al) uses is not necessarily flawed. A company dedicated to pure tech research can probably churn out ideas much faster than one also burdened with actually implementing those ideas.
Well, if Rambus wanted not to have a perception of "a company whose product is lawsuits," it could have structured its business model more like Transmeta's. A company gains a lot more respect if its trademark is the PRIMARY trademark on a widely used product. Transmeta achieves this by contracting work out to fabs and then putting the TRANSMETA CRUSOE name, not some fab's name, on the end product.
By licensing these patents to manufacturers, a Rambus or Lucent can focus on improving the technologies they already have and creating new ones along the way.
But by putting its own name on the product, it potentially gains more street credibility with the "information wants to be free" crowd.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is only a problem if your business plan doesn't actually include making a product, as was the case with RMBS. If you do make a product, then sitting on standards committees is vital. Unless you're MSFT.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
SGI tried something like this years ago. It wasn't RDRAM, but the memory system was optimized to move large chunks of data through quickly at the expense of latency. What they found was that most of their customers real applications simply didn't work that way.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
No, I'm not. The earlier "PowerSeries" machines had a memory makeup like this. The latency on the O2 was quite short compared to those machines. And actually the O2 was one of the first machines to use SDRAM (albeit on a different form factor). The latency on those systems wasn't all that bad, although it was definitely optimized for streaming video onto cubes. It also kicked butt (for its day) on GLQuake.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
They were found to be liable.
Fight Spammers!
If by "just fine", you mean already caused several other companies to cough up protection money in excess of the $350,000 Rambus has to pay now.
I'll say :-)
You can't keep a business running like that. Eventually patent fraud will catch up with you, at least if the fraudulent patent is something significant.
It's like that whole Magnaquench (sp?) thing that was posted earlier today -- they may have a legitimate claim on the patent, but it's suspicious because they're going for deep pockets instead of going after the persons doing the direct infringement. Rambus is going the magnet people one better, though, because they're actually trying to stretch the patent to cover something that it doesn't cover.
Rambus actually reminds me of a lawsuit brought by a company called Imatec against Apple a couple of years ago over ColorSync. Imatec, as far as anyone could determine, was a one-horse operation that tried to pull a patent shakedown on Apple over color-matching algorithms. They lost, and I don't think they even exist anymore (their website is unavailable as I check right now).
/Brian
You realize that such a reasonable, well-thought-out post utterly blows away any aura of psychohood that you might have been working to achieve with a handle like Dancin Santa, don't you?
RDRAM is interesting from a technical standpoint anyway, since it seems to represent the same philosophy that's leading to USB replacing paralell connections for printers and such: sooner or later, it doesn't matter worth a damn how wide your pipe is as long as you can slam data through fast enough to get where it needs to be. Whether back-burnering latency issues is a productive way to go I don't know; I'm not a sandbender. But it's not a bad idea technically, if you can get it to work. The real question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place; latency or not, you still have to slam the data through fast enough. The question thus becomes not whether it's a good idea, but whether it can be pulled off. So far, Rambus hasn't quite done it (it's all a blur above half a gigahertz anyway) and it doesn't look like they're going to have the chance to.
/Brian
I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!
However, a number of Rambus executives had the good fortune of selling shares while Rambus was up and made a lot of money.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
I think I've made my point.
Where are those mod points when I need them? This accusation deserves an answer.
It costs a lot of money to defends oneself against a suit, and it has become quite popular of late to file suit merely to discourage certain activities of certain individuals. Capping punitive awards encourages such waste of the courts time by limiting the exposure to a counter-suit.
I think are planning on a new chipset for the Pentium 4 to support DDR RAM. Sorry I have no refrence for this.. Only that Intel is not known for sitting still while the competion does this.. http://www.ebnews.com/story/OEG20000718S0042. I am sure they will compete with this. Too much litigation gives one a black eye.
The truth shall set you free!
It's rather poetic, when you think about it.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There are moments in history when a preposterous defense like, "there was too much pine tar on the bat" or "the rules were confusing" will be summoned. Martin's responsibility was to charge the excessive use of pine tar before Brett hit the ball. Rambus' responsibility was in clearing up and misunderstandings of rules and disclosing their own activities regarding patents.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Excepting Ex-President Clinton, whom only pays half, as he never inhaled.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Something constantly complained about on Slashdot actually got its just desserts! Perhaps MS will meet its end and the RIAA will dissolve into puffs of anti-trust legislation... Dream on, you crazy, idealistic nerds...
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--hongpong.com
Maybe this will set a precedent to help destroy the "frivolous lawsuits rather than honest work" business model.
Awww, poor widdle Rambus. Couldn't sue all your competition out of business. Crap! Now you'll have to, like, commit yourselves to making quality products to increase market share. That's gotta suck. Competition is soooo unfair, right guys?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Well, of course companies seek to make a profit off of their "intellectual property". As an investor, would you support spending millions upon millions on R&D if you knew that the minute you launched a product, somebody could reverse-engineer it for almost nothing and put you out of business?
Patent laws ENCOURAGE Innovation because it ensures that people can reap the rewards of successful R&D, and can recoup the money they invest.
Without Patent protection, companies would be much more leary about investing so heavily in new technology development.
However, I agree that there's limits... some of the patents that get granted are downright silly and obvious. There's got to be a limit to what's patentable, but there still has to be patents.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
A slightly less predatory pricing scheme might have alienated less companies and given them a solid base of royalties for quite a while. Now, if other companies have contract clauses similar to Samsung, they stand to lose big money from companies they thought they had in the bag.
"t's worth noting that what Rambus got slammed for was lying to the JEDEC committee about whether it planned to patent the technologies it was proposing for the standard. Unfortunately, this does not touch on their right to sue everyone who ever manufactured a RAM chip for patent infringement."
Au Contraire!
This has a CHILLING effect on any future RAMBUST Goon tactics. This is a damming precedent. RAMBUS can now be called "that fradulent IP company".
It doesn't stop them from FILING lawsuits, only because ANYONE can sue ANYONE for ANYTHING at ANYTIME in our wonderful (fucked up) US "justice" system.
However, this case is precedent and "case law" that will erect a VERY high wall that RAMBUS will have to pole vault to get their cases heard and decided in their favor.
This judge/jury must have been REALLY horrified by what RAMBUST was up to...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I personally see patents as being a useful and even necessary evil in a capitalist world, but our own patent office has gone completely off its rocker in the last couple of decades. This bitchslap would have been much more satisfying if it had been for the fraudulent act of suing everyone in sight over something that obviously should never have been patentable in the first place since it was clearly described in prior art.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Remember what I said earlier? Uhh... forget it..
Seems I was a little too irrationally exuberant.
Dancin Santa
Sure, it's nice to say that a company should "make things". However, the business model that Rambus (and Lucent, et al) uses is not necessarily flawed. A company dedicated to pure tech research can probably churn out ideas much faster than one also burdened with actually implementing those ideas. By licensing these patents to manufacturers, a Rambus or Lucent can focus on improving the technologies they already have and creating new ones along the way.
However, Rambus managed to ire the entire industry and will now suffer from the industry's lack of support. No support == no contracts == no money.
Rambus was a smart idea that was implemented in possibly the worst possible way. They positioned themselves as the 'gatekeepers' to memory production, but through their actions completely turned the rest of the memory industry against them.
Dancin Santa
hehe, PR statements are fun to play with...
The American Dream went to hell in a handbasket when someone decided that "The Customer" was King, and the customer beli