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Rambus Patent Claims Dismissed
Gogo Dodo writes "The patent infringement claim by Rambus, the SCO of the chip world, against Infineon have been dismissed by a judge in Virginia due to Rambus destroying documents relating to the lawsuit." Of course, Rambus is already planning an appeal, so this may not be over just yet.
I think after Enron and Arthur Andersen, if you touched the documents you're gone.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
It is about damn time that Rambus got punished for this. They have been deceiving the court since the beginning. They also lied about pending patents. They should have all of their patents (even the ones unrelated to this case) revoked as punishment for their abuse of the patent system.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
yeah, they shred documents only when litligation is brought about...but it's all just coincidence. so none of it should be taken into consideration.
well well, rambus is so not square?
Chip's Ahoy !!
Rambus faces a patent infringement suite from SCO for using their business model and becoming the "SCO(tm) of the chip world"
I don't think the USPTO has granted that one yet.
Last time I checked M$ and SCO were both engaged in fierce competition over it, but so far neither had provided all of the requisite slush money to the appropriate people.
I, for one, think it's about time the slash overlords created a Legal section. This really doesn't have anything to do with online rights. Similar to the Politics section, a Legal section would hold stories like these, SCO's machinations, and any other article where it's two companies duking it out in court and where my rights aren't affected.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You would think that when a company destroys evidence they lose the right to appeal. These are the times in which we live.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
no, not priceless, just $699
To be fair, it's really an unfair comparison.
SCO is a IP litigation company which purchased a company with many valuable copyrights (IE: Code) to sue others into oblivion.
Rambus is a technically adept company with many valuable patented technologies, which squandered what advantages they had by trying to lock everybody into their tech and sueing anybody who competed...
I think that consumers who own systems with rambus rimms should file a class action suit for damages incurred due to non-upgradability.. I have a buddy with Dell Systems stuck with 128 mb of ram 'cuz local vendors (dell included) no longer ship rimms...
Sue the Fockers...
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
512MB R-DRAM RIMM - $120
Legal fees to enforce your patent - $350000
Being left out in the cold and compared to SCO - Priceless.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Man, I really hope they win the appeal. I'd hate to see them lose their ability to innovate.
Come on, Nobody hates Rambus that much.
I wonder, did they register word "SCO" in relation with "evil"? SCO can sue this poor guy for writing this kind of stuff!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Wrong. I hate RAMBUS with a passion.
...if they were, their shares would have gone up on this news.
SCO is not just IP litigation company, they started out as a UNIX porting and consulting company.
The analogy is very similar IMHO.
From the site of the devil himself: http://www.sco.com/company/history.html
1979 SCO founded as The Santa Cruz Operation by Doug and Larry Michels as a UNIX® system porting and consulting company.
1983 SCO delivers the first packaged UNIX System (called SCO® XENIX® System V) for Intel® 8086 and 8088 processor-based PCs. It provides small businesses with the first affordable business-critical computing system.
I know that this is slightly offtopic, but am I the only one that is getting sick of all the appeals? I am beginning to think that an appeal should be an automatic thing. After all, everybody else does it, why not just make it mandatory?
My $0.02
It's about time. The courts need to begin to seriously sanction deceiptful and fraudulent behavior, otherwise, Chaos. This is a minimal sanction. Surely the judge recognized the previous fraud conviction, tossed but..., as well as clear document destruction makes this a no brainer. At all levels - Court of Appeals, Supremes, GWB, Congress - I think Rambus' credibility is SCO'd. Busted Rambus! Stick to your own inventions next time please.
he thinks people who constantly complain about dupes are dumb.
Oh really?
I think dupes, especially ones posted within the space of a day, are an indication that the editors are not even reading their own site. There have been numerous recent examples of editors failing to check for working links and at least ensuring a hint of accuracy in submission text, along with proper attribution, before posting. If they're going to take the time to post something on a page viewed by millions, they can take a few extra minutes to make sure it isn't crap, or posted two hours earlier and three items down the page. Otherwise, wtf are they doing all day?
Really, if the editors/authors can't live up to their self-granted titles, and can't give the viewing community--which is helping pay for the site either through ad views or subscriptions--a greater degree of oversight that they won't do themselves, I see no reason to ever subscribe. As it is, I'm pretty close to mapping slashdot.org to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and staying away for a while.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Rambus basically sat in on industry meetings, then pre-emptively patented the technologies which were under proposal. Their methods were no more than extortion toward companies which implemented the (supposedly open) standards the industry had agreed upon. As far as I know Rambus doesn't actually employ many (any?) engineers, they are primarily in business to make money from "intellectual property."
I'd be scared if I was the judge...Oh wait sorry Rambus not Rambo's. Silly me.
This post patent pending.
I have to post anonymously, because I actually KNOW something about this. I was a Rambus licensee, and did a Rambus-based design. I have been to Rambus headquarters. I also know people who were at the JEDEC meetings at the time in question.
IMHO, your first two sentences are absolutely true. The third is/was false.
At the time I dealt with Rambus, they had competent engineers and really did have some decent IP. When I was there, I saw a 50-50 mix of engineers and managers, but on my way through the building saw a decent number of CAD-equipped cubicles.
IMHO, all the litigation is based on what WAS a decent patent application. They just extended it and drew claims on it that they had no business doing.
Caldera was previously best known for buying Novell/Digital Research's anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for the numerous abuses Microsoft made against DRDOS. Once Caldera won that one, they spun off what was left of the DRDOS development team in the form of Lineo.
It's fair to say they are, for the most part, an IP litigation company. They've had some good people (good in the sense of not evil) people running them for the times they've been Caldera + Some Company With Something Real For Sale, but they keep returning to a theme, spinning off the companies that do the real work and keeping the lawsuit material.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Argh they tricked me!
Actually, to be fair I don't mind dupes. If a story was up a week or a month ago sometimes it gives us a chance to discuss it fresh. However, all dupes are not created equal. Having a dupe story created within one day/hour of the original just shows laziness, and double-duping (a dupe of a dupe) is even more annoying.
So I guess the "RIMM JOB" is over and done with?
>:D
"The patent infringement claim by Rambus, the SCO of the chip world, against Infineon have"
The patent infringement claim HAS not HAVE.
I think Rambus has the prior art.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As much as I dislike Rambus, they really don't deserve to be in the same category as SCO. Rambus at least creates something themselves, even if they don't produce what they create.
Rambus tricked a standards organization into accepting its patent-pending technology. While that is a dirty trick, Rambus did put in a lot of the work in creating the technology.
OTOH, SCO is attempting to claim the work of thousands of others as its own by deliberately misreading a few ancient contracts. Neither they nor any of their supposed predecessors in interest had anything to do with the enhancements to Linux and AIX that IBM created that SCO now purports to control.
Both companies are trying to use their "IP" to wring money out of other companies, but really SCO is so much worse.
or the second?
or the third?
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becoming the "SCO(tm) of the chip world
Wow. I read that as SCrO(tum) of the chip world". Apt.
Technically, Caldera v. Microsoft was settled out of court. However, Microsoft had *badly* lost (IMHO, IANAL) the pretrial arguments and it was not looking good for them.
I actually felt that in 1999, Caldera v. Microsoft was the most potentially damaging antitrust suit facing Microsoft at the time. It was also very clear from doing any reasonable research into thinks like the AARD code, that Microsoft had engaged in inexcusable and predatory behavior.
Note that at the time I was temping at MS. As I began to read the judicial rulings and documents, I was really truely sickened. I guess it didn;t really affect me because I later went to work as a full-time employee of Microsoft.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
So, other than ebay, where do I find these phantom $125 sticks of 512 Meg?
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Given that judge Robert E Payne has decided that Rambus is guilty of non-disclosure, it follows that Rambus IP is non-existant and therefor cannot be infringed upon.
I believe the Whyte judgement is in great risk of being overturned in an appeal, based on this decision.
As for Rambus hatred, if you really are new here, then you should know that any playground bully is a normal target for loathing. Rambus most definitely qualifies, since they tried to hijack DDR with baseless accusations and after the fact. Rambus also forged a deal with Intel to shove RDRAM down everyone's throat (the "technology of the future"). The thing that irked us geeks to no end was the fact that RDRAM was a possible contender to DDR only in its most expensive variant, detail that was thoroughly hushed by Intel and Rambus alike.
Unfortunately, benchmark numbers were published in too many reviews to allow people to ignore the fact that RDRAM was a lame duck. When the realization finally dawned on the industry, Rambus made a big mistake and accused Intel of not knowing how to make motherboards. That was a big no-no, and Intel promptly pulled out the rug from under the deal. After two years of touting RDRAM as the way to go, Intel switched all its boards to DDR faster than you could blink.
Add to that the irritating behavior that Rambus executives displayed all over the world, being smug and superior, and attacking anybody who wouldn't kowtow immediately with outrageous license fees, and you get a strong following of geeks who simply cannot stand the board's behavior.
Add to that the fact that Rambus demonstrated how to become a (moderately) successful IP litigation industry, example which SCO promptly followed, and you get the perfect item for focalising hatred from any truth-loving geek.
Have I been clear enough ?