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Court Decision Favors Rambus
RoscoeP writes "This story from News.com: "A federal judge has overturned two counts of fraud against chip designer Rambus...". At least Rambus can't pursue litigation against Infineon for SDRAM though." See our previous stories about Rambus for far-too-much background.
IANAL, but will go out on a limb to say that the job of US courts is to interpret according to US laws, not laws of other countries, or the EU. US courts do not fall into line behind the decisions of other EU courts, unless the judge is senile.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Aside - if it had been a DMCA violation, we would have been executing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprosecuting employees by now.
In my mind, at least, it's going to be very hard to maintain that their patents are bogus if they are not fraudulent. I don't know much about how our appeals system works (never had to use it, thank gods) but I expect that the higher court to whom they appeal cannot effectively re-open the investigation of fraud without Infineon also appealing.
That means the next case is (probably) going to go like this:
These your patents? Yup. This their RAM? Yup. Pay 'em. Case closed.
AFAIK there is no viable way for the court to assert anything else without a _major_ break from precedent.
Remember, though. IANAL. I really hope I'm wrong.
They believe what they are doing is protecting their inventions. I mean, to them, SDRAM is just an extention of RDRAM (incorporates such things like Delay Gate technology), which is why they should extend their claims to SDRAM. Infineon then claims no, they invented it first, and shouldn't have to pay for anything. At the end, it will just rely on prior art, and in that case, Rambus seriously believes that it can win (at least, for DDR DRAM). This is what I hear from a bunch of Rambus employees.
There you go ...
You got a patch for known problem and you applied it.
The only difference from commercial products is that it was source patch as opposed to binary one.
I fail to see any advantages here. I mean what is so superior about performing recompile instead of simply downloading patched kernel?
512 MB 800 mhz Rambus RDRAM - $380
256 MB PC133 Micron SDRAM - $25
512 MB PC133 Micron SDRAM - $77
Remind me why I need this stuff? If you want to see the future of RAMBUS, reference "microchannel" expansion slots. It seems you can only strongarm an entire marketplace if you make software....
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
When rambus cranks up the fees... 10, 20, 100% on DDR so that it subsidies their own RAMBUS memory and raises the DDR prices to higher that RAMBUS, you WILL care... but by then it'll be too late.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Memory of all types continues to get faster and cheaper at an astonishing rate. Is this decision really going to have any effect on that?
Just up on Yahoo news: Shareholder suit filed in US District Court of Northern California on charges of fraud in representing their patents on SDRAM.
There's some serious blood in the water here. Could this be the beginning of the end?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But the court granted Infineon's request to prohibit Rambus from pursuing further litigation regarding Infineon's SDRAM memory and ordered Rambus to pay $7.1 million in Infineon's legal fees.
OUT
It's nice to see a judge standing up against large companies, to stop them from throwing lawsuits around against smaller companies who cant afford great legal defenses. Maybe this will (*cough ADOBE cough*) stop (*cough ADOBE cough*) from suing smaller groups over trivial (or perhaps nonsense) items.
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