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FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus
swordboy writes "A federal judge just threw out the FTC lawsuit against Rambus. This has been discussed at length here before but this changes the landscape yet again. An interesting, possibly coincidental item is that Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether."
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs.
Nice, if it were true. The reason the JEDEC members were sueing was that Rambus was writing down the other companies ideas that were brought up at the JEDEC meetings and having their patent lawyers apply for patents on those ideas the next day. The other companies were not patenting those proposals that they were putting forth at JEDEC while establishing the SDRAM standards, due to a agreement between all members that the SDRAM standard would contain no patent-encumbered technology. When other JEDEC members caught wind of this and complained, RAMBUS left JEDEC, but their patent applications on SDRAM technology continued to change to cover new aspects of the SDRAM spec after each JEDEC meeting! They had a spy (codename: Secret Squirrel) in the meetings who was forwarding the tech to them while the spec was still being determined, and when the spec was published, most of the SDRAM spec was subject to Rambus patents on tech developed by the other members.
Rambus ripped off the JEDEC members and the courts are saying that this is OK. WTF? All is fair in love, war, and business (I guess).
Read, L
Actually, I think you might not be aware of the manner of Rambus' actions. First of all, they're not seeking licensing for the RDRAM designs, but for patents that are infringed upon by the DDR RAM implementation.
The reason other members of the hardware community are so upset, and the reason that Rambus has been the target of so many lawsuits, is that they were on the design commitee which decided upon the spec. for DDR in the first place, and they presented their technology to the standards working group conveniently without mentioning the fact that they owned patents on the implementation.
That's why they deserve the title of 'litigious bastards'-- because that's pretty 'bastardly' behavior.
Depends on what you mean by "RAM". FRAM and MRAM are rewriteable, random access memory technologies that are also non-volatile. Densities and price points today don't make replacing your current RAM cost effective, but give 'em a chance.
Hard drives will still be around for bulk storage. Dollars-per-bit counts, too.
decide for yourself.
The point is that you may ammend a patent application after it has been applied for and before the decision has been made. They originally filed applications on a rather generic implementation and adjusted it to fit the spec while JEDEC was still in the process of writing it.
At least that's what the other members of JEDEC alleged, and RAMBUS, rather than deny it outright, admitted that it was receiving emails (from someone calling themselves "Secret Squirrel") advising them on how to ammend their technology (and their patent applications), but that they did not know who they were from, and did not know that the information was the same as was being discussed at JEDEC.
Read, L