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Rambus in Violation of Monopoly Laws
surfingmarmot writes to tell us that in a recent ruling the Federal Trade Commission declared that Rambus had unlawfully monopolized four computer memory technology markets. From the article: "In an opinion by Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, the Commission found that, through a course of deceptive conduct, Rambus was able to distort a critical standard-setting process and engage in an anticompetitive 'hold up' of the computer memory industry. The Commission held that Rambus's acts of deception constituted exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act and contributed significantly to Rambus's acquisition of monopoly power in the four relevant markets. The Commission has ordered additional briefings to determine the appropriate remedy for 'the substantial competitive harm that Rambus's course of deceptive conduct has inflicted.'"
How many years have we been following this travesty? Seems like 12, but my own (non-SDRAM) memory is a bit fuzzy with age. I recall battles on many fronts, in Europe some shopping for courts in Italy by Rambus while pursuing Infineon, suits in the USA in Virginia which were found against Rambus for the very activity of submarining the patents at JEDEC (Keeping their traps shut while JEDEC members adopted technology standards which played directly into their hands, in violation of the spirit and agreements with JEDEC), then fines against Rambus reduced, then overturned and years of watching Rambus very nearly pull the whole thing off. Finally, the FTC arrives at a decision. Of course, all players in the SDRAM game have been a bit dirty for years, with price fixing and such (isn't it a wonder someone actually makes money on this stuff?) I suppose the bottom-line question is: Will the FTC revoke the patents? (In any case, you know by now that Rambus is actually an Intellectual Property company which is chiefly legal teams, and anything will be appealed.)
A Pro-Rambus site is here
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
With RAM pricing swooping up and down almost as often as Oil does, I'm suprised something like this hasn't come along sooner. Hopefully folks will start "playing nice" now.
Their absurd pricing has already sent them out of the market...I actually threw away a decent computer because the cost of getting more RAM was too high a percentage of what getting a better computer would have cost. Rambus was always so expensive, that it was installed in such small quantities...All the computers I've ever used with rambus seemed crappy because they generally had half the ram of their non-rambus peers.
This is just icing on the cake 'o suck they baked for themselves with their crappy behavior.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
FINALLY has come around.
This could be the knife to the heart for RAMBUS, as I'm fairly certain a number of DRAM makers are going to be lining up to take shots at them.
Think "Hysterical Passenger" from Airplane!.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The Slashdot front page is filled with crimes holding up progress in the field of computing.
- Vista tries to pretty up the PC case to shove DRM down our throats, by requiring the purchase of new DRM ready hardware like PVP screens.
- Rambus conspired to muddy the RAM providing market, so motherboards are made obsolete sooner rather than later, since we have to settle on one RAM standard to upgrade. If we don't have it, then we have to change the whole motherboard and probably CPU too. If it's in a mass produced computer, the consumer has to pitch the computer to upgrade.
- Apple's DRM found to be hindering customer use of media.
I wish we'd stop letting companies plan to build in failure mechanisms in their product. I'd pay 20% more for a computer that I knew would have new parts available in 5 years when it starts to legitimately wear out. That extra money could go to the collection of old computers and reusing or recylcing the materials in them in an ecologically sound way.
Oh You POS
What, didthey collect $200 for passing "Go" when they landed on the "Go To Jail" square or something?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Rambus: When I went to jail I passed GO! I want my money! FTC: You have like 4 hotels anyway, get over it! *Rambus throws the game onto the ground* FTC: Hey! That's Unlawful!
So on one hand we have memory manufacturers who have colluded to maintain high prices of memory, on the other hand, we have Rambus which has used submarine patents to gain humongous royalties subverting JEDEC process.
Surprisingly in this case apparently the FTC and the governements appears to do the right thing (if very slowly) and will (hopefully) punish all these crooks.
Of course in the meantime consumers have payed more that they should have and the punishement will not change this..
Since Monopoly recently started using the Visa swipe cards instead, they can just put it on their credit until the whole thing blows over.
They probably hope they don't land on the Policeman. It's very hard to roll the dice just right so you can land on the "Just Visiting" space.
Besides, a lot of people throw out the rules or just make up new ones as they go.
(I recommend playing as the Top Hat)
Of course nobody buys Rambus memory anymore. However, they were successful in extorting licensing fees from a number of other memory manufacturers for "infringing on their IP". So you're indirectly paying Rambus through higher prices for memory. Hopefully, this means the extortion will stop. Rambus can then go back to attempting to sue their potential clients (a la SCO) in order to scam additional licensing revenue. Stick a fork in Rambus if this ruling holds up.
American markets are divided, prices are fixed, supplies are intentionally constrained by global competitors without any punishable Sherman Act violation. They simply do the negotiations in a country that looks the other way. American office doesn't ever know.
Rambus got penalized because they abused the priviledge. Period.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Rambus invents brilliant technologies and global MM's rip them off and all you Slashdot bandwagonites think that Justice has finally been done and Rambus now gets what they deserve.
If you believe the old story about how a company of 100 super smart engineers "Tricked" JDEC into using their technology and then sticking them for $$$ later, you are a total sucker!!!!
Read rambus.org and open your eyes and reconsider your position. Of course, most of you have such inflated egos you will never admit that you were wrong.
Rambus is an incredible story of American ingenuity. A super small company with big brains and ideas up against the world's largest and most corrupt memory manufacturers.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=RMBS
*haha*
It has been clear for many years now that Rambus lives by patent fraud. They steal ideas thet are being formulated by others and patent then. They then pressure companies with threat of lawsuits.
This works because
a) Patent law is broken. It urgently needs repercussions for fraudulent patents. It urgently needs easier ways to overturn fraudulent patents. It urgently needs to be harder to file a fraudulent patent than to overturn one. And filing a fraudulent patent urgently needs to land the perpetrator in prison.
b) The lawsuit process is broken. If somebody like Rambus can create a real danger to other businesses with their morally reprehensible and most likely illegal practices, then there is something fundamentally wrong. There have been other instances of this abuse of the legal system recently. Blackberry and SCO come to mind. This kind of abuse urgently needs a risk for those conducting it to land them in prison.
All in all, the US legal and patent system now seems to be a primary factor in hindering economic growth and innovation. Please fix that system now.
Side note: If this continues and the EU does not follow this stupidity (a possibility but not a certainity), then the US might just find its place in the global scheme of things adjusted to a place they will find rather uncomfortable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Rambus has been a non-entity in PC memory market - seems largely due to most major manufacturers colluding to put Rambus out of the scene, and they had to pay the fines as a result. The only result of substance I'd want to see from this ruling is putting Rambus outta business for good, and/or impose fines on the corporate officers - the officers and board members - in 7+ figures. Intel was a douchebag/scumbag for pushing Rambus, but they had to write off their stake in Rambus.
With how cheap it is to buy synchronous ram these days, rambus can't be charging giagantic licencing fees or anything. I commend them for being slimey weasels that were in the loop. At least they were smart enough to abandon thier own architecture when they knew it was destine for faliure. Im not knocking on rdram, just the fact that a slight memory bandwidth improvement would end up costing 30% more on a system purchase when both technologies were in infancy.
Five seconds later, Rambus throws a fit and kicks the monopoly board across the room!
Oh, wait....
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Rather than strip them of their patents, remove the right to decide who can or cannot license the patents, and take away all royalties. If you make it so that all parties using their patents simply notify them in writing, then they still retain their works and derive future patents off of them. However, they will be constantly reminded of yet another product that they will never get royalties from because of their past behavior. Stretch it back to when the comittee first started meeting at which point Rambus started their deceptive practices and end it at the time that the lawsuit was filed on the anti-competitive behavior. Anything before and anything after are unrelated and could be tied to a change in management attitude, be it for the better or worse.
So PJ got married to some Mr. Harbour and went from noted paralegal blogger to FTC commissioner in one fell swoop? And now she's writing opinions on Rambus... Interesting.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
One of the markets in "Intellectual Property" in which it claims to hold monopoly power due to rightfully issued patents is "clocking technology", specifically for synchronous DRAM busses. Before the Chief Administrative Law Judge appointed by the FTC they made argument of their specific ownership of "source synchronous clocking technologies".
Does Rambus have any valid patents on source synchronous clocking methods, systems or devices to accomplish that practice?
I also know what clocking method is employed in Rambus' commercial RDRAMS. Does Rambus have any patents on that?
Here's what Rambus has patents on:
"FIG. 8b illustrates how each device 51, 52 receives each of the two bus clock signals at a different time (because of is propagation delay along the wires), with constant midpoint in time between the two bus clocks along the bus. At each device 51, 52, the rising edge 55 of Clock153 is followed by the rising edge 56 of Clock254. Similarly, the falling edge 57 of Clock153 is followed by the falling edge 58 of Clock254. This waveform relationship is observed at all other devices along the bus. Devices which are closer to the clock generator have a greater separation between Clock1 and Clock2 relative to devices farther from the generator because of the longer time required for each clock pulse to traverse the bus and return along line 54, but the midpoint in time 59, 60 between corresponding rising or falling edges in fixed because, for any given device, the length of each clock line between the far end of the bus and that device is equal. Each device must sample the two bus clocks and generate its own internal device clock at the midpoint of the two."
Ok, so the Rambus devices that are patented generate clocks that are aligned in phase with each other along the extent of the bus.
A source synchronous clocking system would have clocks that vary in phase along a bus in a fashion nearly equal to the phase variation of the data that are transmitted with the clock.
Here's what H&F patented:
"In the preferred embodiment, two sets of these delay lines are used, one to generate the true value of the internal device clock 73, and the other to generate the complement 74 without adding any inverter delay. The dual circuit allows generation of truly complementary clocks, with extremely small skew. The complement internal device clock is used to clock the `even` input receivers to sample at time 127, while the true internal device clock is used to clock the `odd` input receivers to sample at time 125. The true and complement internal device clocks are also used to select which data is driven to the output drivers. The gate delay between the internal device clock and output circuits driving the bus in slightly greater than the corresponding delay for the input circuits, which means that the new data always will be driven on the bus slightly after the old data has been sampled."
So they use the SAME clock to operate both the input samplers and output drivers in the system they "invented" in 1990 and that everybody and their cat infringes on? Or do you claim otherwise? Did they claim otherwise before the USPTO and in Federal District court?
Interesting.....
"One important part of the input/output circuitry generates an internal device clock based on early and late bus clocks. Controlling clock skew (the difference in clock timing between devices) is important in a system running with 2 ns cycles, thus the internal device clock is generated so the input sampler and the output driver operate as close in time as possible to midway between the two bus clocks."
So "clock skew" is the difference in clock timing between devices? Hummm. They're not suggesting that clocks have no skew from device to device along their Rambus, are they? But that's stupid, because the data that they're trying to latch with their "input samplers" does have timing skew from device to device"
A source synchronous clocking scheme would have a timing skew due to time of
If you don't want to pay for licensing, stop paying MS. Rambus will continue to make IP for the computer field and companies will continue to try to steal it. Rambus will continue to attempt for over 6 years to convince OEM to pay for the IP before suing them. Why do many of you think that every other company in the industry can make you license their IP but Rambus, who Intel wanted to steal their IP for the price fixing memory cartel, is wrong for licensing theirs?
I don't know what you're doing, but if you're going through computer equipment so quickly that everything is less than 24 months old, that's one expensive hobby that you've found for yourself.
There's no reason why most equipment shouldn't last longer than that. Heck, I have a Netgear wireless router that's been running continuously for more than five years now (MR314, released in 2001; it's had the same uptime as the power company since then). I have a keyboard that's vintage 1994 (Apple Keyboard II) and until I finally upgraded about six months ago when I ran into a bit of money, a reasonably-well upgraded computer from 2000 was doing me just fine, and that includes for stuff like DV and audio editing work.
There is absolutely no reason to replace things that quickly, unless you're in the business of reviewing hardware for some sort of publication, or doing testing. It's just plain wasteful -- but hey, it's your money.
I'd much rather have more stuff, that lasts longer, than have to re-buy the same crap every 24 to 36 months. By not getting a new CPU for five years, I could afford stuff like a better camcorder, film scanner, data projector, and audio system. All of them are going to last years, and will let me do more than I could if I had just had some brand-new desktop and nothing to hook up to it. A computer to me isn't very much by itself, it's really only valuable when connected up to other stuff (or at least more valuable that way). Wasting all my income on new CPUs just seems limiting.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The PS3 uses Rambus memory. This is probably the only design win keeping them afloat. If you really want to bury Rambus then boycott the PS3 and get a 360 or Wii.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I alaways thought Rambus sounded more like a brand of condoms.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Allow me to explain. In the USA, the legal system views a public corporation as a person -- in, for example, a civil suit filed against the company. Civil penalties are generally levied against the company even if the management team which originally made the decision to commit corporate fraud have already left the company. The penalty will not be levied against the original management team. The corporation is a person, and that person is viewed to be responsible for the fraud.
Returning to Rambus, the FTC will likely levy a financial penalty against Rambus. Yet, the current employees may not be, in any way, affiliated with the managers who made the original decision to deceive JEDEC (the standards body defining electronic components like memory).
The only fair way for the FTC to levy the penalty is to file a civil suit against the original co-founders of the company. They are Professor Mark Horowitz (at Stanford University) and Dr . Michael Farmwald. The FTC should also insist on the immediate termination of royalty payments from other companies to Rambus if those payments are for any of the disputed memory patents.
However, I doubt that the FTC will pursue this course of action. The co-founders reaped their billions of dollars in an IPO, and the current employees (who are likely unrelated to the original crime) will get the shaft.
If anyone wants to throw their 250 or 500 Mbyte sticks away, let me know. I was ignorant when I bought the motherboard. Please help.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
literally.
target the legal teams take them out
90% of the chip counts in the Cell Broadband Engine is Rambus technology and is properly licensed. Cell BE also uses Rambus XDR Memory. Rambus has been driving memory technology forward for the past 16 years. Almost everyone else just steals and copies it from them. I thought the tech people in slashdot would know better. DDR is a cheap copycat of RDRAM. How can you explain how PS2 has been running on only 32MB of RDRAM all these years. Do you think PS2 could have run on 32MB of DDR? The DRAM cartel have slowed computing progess by decades just because they don't want to pay for revolutionary ideas on how to make DRAM and chip to chip communications better. Understand the situation first before mouthing off on what you don't know about.
You said: "I wish I could pick the ear of a billionaire and make this a reality."; but maybe by making this a reality, you could become a billionaire... or, at least, a thousand-aire (not a word, but it should be) or millionaire.
DEC started as a "small company", and C was developed for their PDP-11 series, and we still use the stuff with minor modifications... by "small company", the article I read mentioned sales of only 5 million dollars a year. Possibly no-one at DEC made a million personally for several years after, but the potential was there since they were shipping products and generating revenues.
Since you have the idea and see the benefits, you could make a start at making it a reality and see how far you get.