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BusinessWeek Examines the Rambus Legal Saga
An anonymous reader writes "Now that three companies have admitted to colluding to fix DRAM prices in what has turned out to be a global conspiracy BusinessWeek takes a look at the why. The most recent to admit guilt was Samsung and no one, as yet, knows precisely why they did it. The short answer seems to be because they didn't want Rambus' memory technology, DR-DRAM to succeed in the market. The more complicated answer is that now that Samsung, Infineon and Hynix have all admitted to fixing prices, they're now lawsuits from Rambus alleging that their motivation was to "kill Rambus" by making it too expensive for it to be attractive for PC manufacturers. Today in San Francisco, lawyers for Rambus are going to argue for the release of a set of documents currently under seal, that they think could go a long way toward proving their case. If nothing else, the timing of the price-fixing, which ran from 1999 to mid-2002 is suspicious, because that was about the same time that the DRAM companies would have been resisting pressure to adopt Rambus."
This article just scratches the surface of a story that is reminiscent of "Tucker" and how Pan Am (airlines) went after TWA. There are incredible connections between Rambus' adversaries, US Congressmen, the FTC and a whole cadre of politicans, judges, government officials and law firms working in concert against Rambus. It's the story of a $30 billion dollar industry of multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations out to steal the assets of and destroy a tiny 200-person startup. Rambus' legal bills fighting this mess have been a quarter-billion dollars, far more than their total annual revenue. Rambus has managed to fight this battle while prospering and remaining profitable the entire time, but it's a sad tale of corruption and power politics at their very worst.
Please mod me only (+) Underrated or (-) Troll
well rambus wanted such high amounts to license its technology that it was effectively using patenting to work against ram manufacturers to ensure they paid rambus lots of money as opposed to all the ram manufacturers getting together to make sure rambus and their expensive (to the ram producing companies) licenses for their dr-dram would fail.
to me the first situation is abuse of the patent system to pull cash out of everybody and the latter is just a democracy decision by many ram manufacturers to ensure rambus didn't succeed in the greedy cash grab.
I'll take democracy thanks
Rambus has taken a lot of heat for allegedly inserting their IP-protected technology into the JEDEC process and has suffered under that yoke for years. Now it comes out that the companies wailing the hardest were actually out to destroy the "pure IP" company.
I think that in this case there really isn't any good guy because all the parties involved are apparently bad guys.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Price fixing sucks. But this is Rambus we're talking about. Remeber RDRAM? Remember Rambus trying to hold JEDEC (and DRAM manufacturers) hostage through patent claims on DDR?
Greedy Bastards
"The most recent to admit guilt was Samsung and no one, as yet, knows precisely why they did it"
What I find more interesting is why Samsung admitted its guilt. Isn't this negative publicity bad for them?
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
The lawyers of course!... "A quarter of a billion dollars in legal fees"?.. and that's from the Rambus side alone. Obscene. Imagine if that money was invested in R&D, instead of this pathetic sleazy game of vile deceit?.
Rambus hasn't been playing by the rules either. They've been penalized for destroying documents, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050302-4664 .html
and are suing Samsung immediately after revoking their liscence.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5734443.html
It seems as if the entire industry is corrupt.
Someone save me from this sanity.
Rambus is the reason why I built my first computer AMD. Back then (2001), Pentium 4s forced you into using RDRAM, which was far more expensive than DDR (I guess I know why now). The extra price of ram more than tipped the price/performance to AMD's side. I have never went back to intel because I know AMD well, and I still think the price is right.
Well, at least the sharks do something useful, which is more than I can say for the lampreys.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
For years has there even been any discussion on /. about major innovation in enterprise-level server hardware? If so, it passed by quickly ... things are certainly not percolating like seven (or even five years ago) during the innovation wars between Compaq and Dell.
/. discussion topics are on a par with the tabloids, except that instead of aliens from Mars we read about some slightly fresher Linux flavor. I used to come here to get the industry bleeding edge, and now I get reports about the latest revision of five year-old video games.
... the way IT budgets are going). Is this a main streaming, or what?!
Now,
My point? Stick with the video games, guys. Don't bother with Rambus shannanigans. Your caring public is gone. Whoever can hang onto an IT job now will have that same job for the next twenty years. (And they'll still be working with the same equipment, probably
More like a rigor mortus, actually.
It seems the whole story does not contain clearly good or bad guys. But it seems that everyone involved is at least ugly ;-).
Regards, Martin
There's talk of Rambus 'abusing' the patents -- but that doesn't make sense to me. I thought that was the whole point of patents; for a limited time (17 years?) you get to be the only one to do whatever it is that you've patented.
If Rambus really patented the stuff, it doesn't really matter whether or not they manufactured anything; that's not how patent law works. But, if you force me to be Talmudic -- I'm sure Rambus can quote a single RAM part at a price of $100 million.
Were their patents crap? If their patents were valid, why shouldn't they've gotten paid? It sounds like they actually developed the technology, unlike some firms (the vultures that just buy up the patents of failed companies and then start suing).
I'm all for chaning the law to suit public policy better, but assuming we've got the laws that we've got, I don't see how "Rambus is bad" translates into "ignore their patents." If you do that, they may as well vanish, as they don't do anything but make IP.
Also, just so you don't think I'm a member of the Rambus Anti-Defamation League, I don't have a dog in this fight: I don't work for them, knowingly own their stock, etc.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Samsung, Infineon and Hynix have all admitted to fixing prices, they're now lawsuits from Rambus They ARE? Wow, what a transformation! I knew confession was good for the soul, but ... wow.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Intel wanted everybody to move to RDRAM, and tried their best, in their quiet, shy retiring way, to get all the motherboard manufacturers to switch. It was the high-end motherboard buyers (you know, the type who read Tom's Hardware every day) who refused to have anything to do with RDRAM, and cost was the least of their considerations. That's why DDR won, even as the prices were rising.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I was wondering the same thing! I am guessing that it happened this way:
That is the danger of using contractions everywhere.
There still is a US DRAM manufacturer. Micron is still alive and kicking (and has been continuously in business since 1978), selling to consumers via the Crucial brand. There was price-fixing (which Micron doesn't seem to be completely innocent of, either), but one thing to keep in mind is that RDRAM, even if it weren't patented, required approximately 5-7 extra mask steps to create, as compared to DDR DRAM. In the cut-throat world of DRAM manufacturing, where every penny counts, this is a deal-breaker. Samsung was able to make money off RDRAM only because it was so expensive. Was it illegal for these companies to team up and kick down RDRAM? Yes. Am I sad to see it go? No way.
So to my mind the errors made by the DRAM companies were:
Pining for the fjords
This is what happened in brief. The four companies got together to pick a next standard. Rambus pushed hard for one in particular, and the others went along. As soon as the ink was dry, Rambus pulled out a patent. Generally talks like this include a clause that disallows using a patented standard, but there was no such clause on these talks.
So the other three firms got together without rambus and said screw this we aren't paying obscene licensing fees. They chose another standard. They sued rambus for pulling the dirty patent trick. Rambus sued because the other three wouldn't deal with rambus.
The price fixing scheme just happens to be at the same time. That is the third lawsuit going on in the dram industry now. They all had fixed prices sometime ago, it was this falling out over standards that got Hynix to squeal to the DOJ on the price fixing.
There now you don't have to RTFA.
You have it reversed. It's the story of a tiny 200 person company created by US lawyers to steal the profits of a foreign $30 Billion dollar industry and a whole cadre of US politicans, US judges, US government officials and the US Patent office working in concert with Rambus against the "foreigners".
The funny thing is that Rambus purposefully destroyed the incriminating documents that showed that the company had a strategy of submarine patents, and the US Judge at the first trial (and subsequent appeals) let them off.
Rambus has a proven record of joining committees that required the disclosure of patents to steer standards into the said Rambus patents. Rambus used the worlds worst Patent office (US)to patent flimsy/obvious progressions of current technology - often stolen right from other companies at the standards meetings.
Given that RAMBUS has destroyed all the documents that incriminated themselves, why should they have any access to the documents of other companies defending themselves against RAMBUS's illegal actions?