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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..
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.
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.
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