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Rambus Wins Patent Case
Blowfishie writes "Rambus has won a major case they've been fighting since the late 90's. Rambus worked its technology into the standards for SDRAM and DDR data transfer, then waited for the major players (Hynix, Micron and Nanya) to be heavily committed before revealing that it had patents on the technology. 'At issue is whether the developer of a speedy new memory technology deserved to be paid for its inventions, or whether the company misled memory chip makers. "I think they (the jurors) misapprehended what the standards-setting organizations are about and the absolute need for good faith," said Jared Bobrow, an outside attorney for Micron. Wednesday's verdict comes after a judgment against Hynix in 2006 that resulted in a $133 million award to Rambus, Lavelle said, and potentially clears the way for Rambus to collect on that verdict.'"
... oh, you're serious.
Please don't post actual news on April Fool's Day. It's really confusing. Only because I looked at the date on the article did I not think this was a joke.
Seriously guys, what percentage of the Slashdot community reads the article and checks the date on the article?
What? I stayed up for an hour waiting for something about PATENTS??? Come on man, if you're going to make me wait that long, it'd better be something like, "Three-Headed Man Forms A Capella Group" or "ETs Land at Verizon HQ to Phone Home." Now I'm pissed off. Thank's for nothing Zonk!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is called patent troll..
Afterwhich Rambus was never trusted in a standards committee again...
For all its faults, Rambus is/was staffed with very smart people who were actively working on memory designs in an effort to create licensable blueprints. They weren't just sitting around grabbing at every obvious idea, but were actually trying to provide a service to hardware vendors.
They totally fucked themselves by becoming a pariah in the standards push, but their technology is real and substantial. Their big problem (aside from the obvious bad choice to torpedo the standards committee) was that they didn't actually produce their own RAM for a long time. This gave the impression that they were just another patent bottom feeder when in actuality they were bringing good technology to the table.
Considering that Rambus is still around and they obviously haven't been selling RDRAM, are they still relevant in the consumer market place for memory?
The only products listed on their website are:
# XDR
# DDR
# RDRAM
# Custom Solutions
From their press releases, XDR seems like the only thing they're really selling.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Micron and other corporations are already appealing this decision...
omgNOTponies!
As in, surely it's an April Fool's joke! Except it's not!
Depends. If the chip companies win on appeal (unlikely) and establish case law that standards-bodies should act in good faith (very unlikely), then that could cause Microsoft problems. Most likely, the appeal will fail and trust (together with the economy) will collapse. The economy? Well, if acts of lawless corruption and deception are ruled valid instruments of commerce, who would you do business with? If Rambus can sell Micron one thing when it is something totally different for the purpose of plunder, all entirely legally, anybody can sell you anything and hand over nothing equally legally.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think Rambus will lose on appeal. The case is about business practices, which the common jury may not really grasp. They may in fact have gotten lost in the whole "it's our invention" thing. It's not really about the technology itself, which means that people don't really need to know what Rambus' invention does, just that Rambus used it to sabotage the standards. Appellate judges should know enough about trade laws that they can overturn the decision with confidence.
April Fools... surely.
No court would be stupid enough to let Rambus get away with this, right?
I am waiting, waiting, waiting for something interesting. Like the Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/ now changing into BeOS journal. Or the Google's plan http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html to send us all to Mars. I am waiting.
Computers can reverse entropy.
Mod me up.
on April 1 at /.
Two hours now and no PinkDot. No jokes. Is this the April Fools' gag itself? That there is no spoon?
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
Hynix, Micron, and Nanya should sue the standards committee over this. Maybe that would force all standards committees to proactively get every participant to sign over all patent rights to participate in the standards process. Those companies that want to not do that would have to sit out.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
seems to be very popular lately. Does someone have a patent on in yet?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Look at the articles date its for real. Also http://www.micron.com/about/news/pressrelease.aspx?id=0D8D6CD8EFA2B68E
Sad but true.
This case, where company pushes for standards, waits for everyone to implement them, and THEN reveals that it has the patents on parts of the standard...
Or the MSXML case, where they're pushing for a standard that has been SHOWN to be riddled with patented parts (such as MP3, I believe), with a "promise" that they won't sue anyone who issues the (full) standard, which even their own product doesn't do.
> "I think they (the jurors) misapprehended what the standards-setting organizations are about and the absolute need for good faith,"
This is a poor portent for standards bodies generally. Microsoft (like Rambus) perfectly understood what these bodies are about and have sought to subvert ISO for their benefit. Unlike Rambus, they aren't seeking to collect extortion payments, merely to cement their monopoly. Both distasteful though.
It's called a submarine patent. They call it that because it lurks there and lets you get all confident before it surfaces and torpedos your business.
Another company did this with .gif, and another with .jpg. In fact I doubt there are many accepted standards that lack these traps. The companies that participate in standards do their best to ensure their patented technologies are included in their standards.
The standards bodies have a term for this. They require not that the standards contain no patented content, but rather that licensing is available under terms that are "RAND": Reasonable and non discriminatory.
There can be no better example than the current hot topic, OOXML. MS has offered their "promise" that they won't sue people for using their specification for non commercial use under certain (unlikely) conditions. They won't even call it a license.
It's all a lie, of course. A corporation does not buy something so expensive as a submarine unless they have a plan to use it.
That's not the same thing as patent troll. A patent troll has no other business than patenting the obvious and suing people who follow the simplest path. While these patents are one clear answer to certain technical problems they are not the only obvious answer. Also, Rambus does have a legitimate business (or did).
Therefore it's not a patent troll, it's a submarine patent. I'll agree that it's despicable though.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, you put the jury in the courtroom, you live with the vote of the jury. Me, I'm not sure what to think of verdicts which don't include a written explanation of the evidence and the reasoning. I know this sounds like heresey to common-law natives, but in my line of work, if you can't produce a coherent written (or at least, oral) account of your reasoning, then it can be presumed that your opinions aren't reasoned.
I hear there's a new rambus memory tech in development for servers. It would be incredible except that rambus is a spinout of Intel. Read up on the Rambus history if you want to understand this.
Several companies do this. Executives from a group spin out in an entrepeneurial venture. Then they build their businesses on technologies they worked on in their parent companies.
Eventually the spinout gets bought back in for huge profits for the executives involved.
For HP this has evolved into an unofficial executive retirement plan. The benefit for the corp is deniability. They didn't submarine the patents - their newly acquired subsidiary did.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1. Let anticipation build up over April fools. /. community get used to getting regular news.
2. Don't deliver.
3. Let the
4. at about 12 noon... 5. OMGPONIES!!!
6. ???
7. OMGPONIES!!!
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Because we all know who will end up paying for this, don't we? Hint: It won't be the tier one manufacturers.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Damn, this article is like a reverse April Fool's joke. I could've sworn it was one, targeted towards the early adopter Slashdot readers for whom this saga is a classic. But no, it's real. :(
Wow. I remember the day in 1999 that this would have received a firestorm of comments.
Go Los Altos Eagles!
whats that you say? a large company many years ago sought to corrupt the standards body and use the system for its own nefarious profit schemes? Thats outrageous.
Thanks heavens you could not get away with it these days!
Is anybody realized surprised that a panel of jurors could not understand the purpose and nature of a standards body? - if you treated it as a straight patent dispute Rambus were always going to win all the way. In fact I find it hard to see exactly what laws they were alleged to of broken, maybe something on bad faith or misrepresentation? Don't get me wrong - I am NOT defending those weaselly SOBs, that was a dirty trick - but they clearly saw a loophole and exploited it.
more on the whole sorry episode here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits
I would like to say that their name is MUD and their profit will be short lived - but we all know that the corporate ecosphere does not work like that and money talks.
So people will cheat if given the option. Big surprise. I have some good prime real state to sell those companies. There is a thing called due diligence. It was so difficult to ask for a waiver of all possible patents, when developing the standard? Or have a look to the patent portfolio of the intervening companies? Probably next time they will do that. There is no excuse for shoddy practices like these, and they are rightly punished.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
What I don't get is why the big RAM producers don't just get together to buy them and bury them. Hell, nobody like a patent troll, and it would probably be cheaper than paying them(although it would have been smarter to do a buy and bury before the judgment)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
if this has a real impact, i predict a new memory technology in the near future.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Yup, aptly named company. They're Ramming it to us.
Submarine patents were possible in the US due to, frankly, stupid rules where, IIRC, the patentor could continually tweak the patent to stop it being granted until they felt the time was right. It then had a life of (again, IIRC) 17 years from the date of grant.
Thankfully, the US caught up with the rest of the world a few years ago and changed their rules to match. Now a patent application will automatically become public 18 months after filing and (IIRC) it also expires 20 years from filing.
You managed to convince an international standards organisation to integrate our patented technology into a standard without them (or our competitors) realising that we had filed a patent application which was published in the public domain before the standard was set?
You're hired!!
Because thats not how the world works. Who should own the patent afterwards? You can't as a corporation go out paying heaps of dollars for something that you won't end up owning.
Typical ignorant Slashdot reaction. You guys need to stick to stealing and rationalising... oops I mean "file sharing" in your mom's basement.
I have yet to see even one poster who can correctly describe what Rambus was accused (and found innocent) of doing wrong - ie remaining silent about patent applications over technology that others were proposing into the standard. Note Rambus was never accused of pushing or proposing their technologies as widely stated here.
Juries generally get it right and they have seen and heard the evidence, unlike Slashdotters. In a price fixing involving some of the participants here, the jury called it as they saw it.
Hung Jury in Chip Price-Fixing Case
Finding government's star witness not believable, jurors vote 10-2 for
acquittal
Dan Levine
The Recorder
March 7, 2008
After 11 trial days, the first thing jurors talked about when they
could finally discuss the price-fixing case before them was the
government's star witness, foreperson Phyllis McCaughey said
Thursday.
And she was blunt about their assessment of Micron executive Michael
Sadler, who testified in the high-stakes DRAM antitrust prosecution
against his counterpart at Hynix, defendant Gary Swanson: "Mr. Sadler,
we all felt, was a lying sack of shit."
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1204804010871
when RAMBUS first announced their first RDRAM patents.
RAMBUS tried to get a lot of companies, including Micron, to sign expensive licensing agreements. Micron make a strategic decision to find another way to produce fast RAM without having to pay licensing fees, thus their big push into DDR.
This is not the first time that companies have attempted to, or succeeded at getting their patented technology into an industry standard.
The nasty thing about this dirty trick is now RAMBUS gets to say what the license terms are instead of having to negotiate them. And they are setting them high.
IMHO, there ought to be some rule of law, that any company that participates in a standards committee and fails to mention that they happen to own the patents that cover the standard out to lose their licensing rights to that patent because of fraud.
I thought heat spreaders area good idea even for those that do not over clock at all? Most of the DDR2 memory that is available has heat spreaders on them. There are some without the heat spreaders, but most do have them on. Isn't getting rid of the heat in a computer a good thing?
RDRAM is/was way over priced. 2GB of RDRAM cost more then a whole new computer with 2GB of DDR2 memory. And that was when 2GB of DDr2 cost like $400. I have to look up the RDRAM prices now. We decided to replace all the RDRAM RAM computers. Upgrading just the RAM wasn't worth it when you could replace the entire computer for less with a faster one.
Rambus came out with a technology and then attached tonnes of $ onto that technology - so the industry did what it does best, developed a competing technology with lower licesning fees (see firewire vs USB as a good example of a wonderful tech being maimed by its own creators). In reality, not only did rambus create a tech that turned out not-to-be-so-crash-hot-after-all, they priced themselves out of the market to a large degree (or at least made intel go "oh f**k, AMD's ram is sooo much cheaper to implement than ours, how do we get out of this bloody contract??" - or something like that).
Sure, rambus did some good things but its a pity they charged an arm and a leg for it... an even bigger pity that the resulting competing tech used tech patented by rambus.
I wonder if USB would ever suffer the same thing from firewire?? Now if you think RAM could be a problem from a patent troll, consider what that would mean if USB2 impacted a patent covered by firewire - that would cause serious damage to the industry..
Keep in mind, also, that RAMBUS didn't make ram, in their own words (paraphased) "we only make high-speed busses that access RAM, not ram itself". Thats right, all they were responsible for was an interface.
Rambus is scum.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When you see the memos and emails circulated amongst the big RAM players on the JDEC saying stuff like "in the future all memory will be made this way, but we won't pay royalties to RAMBUS" (or along similar lines) you realize RAMBUS isn't the evil patent troll they get made out to be.
The fact is that modern DDR/DDR2 DRAM uses much of RAMBUS' original design elements. Hynix, Micron, Samsung... they all colluded together in an illegal fashion to keep RAMBUS scarce (and thus more expensive) and to steal the technology to implement the next DRAM standard. They were all convicted on criminal charges related to this and DRAM price fixing and most of the companies not only pled guilty, but paid huge fines for it. I think most of the ill-will for RAMBUS comes from the Intel agreement, which was rightfully maligned as a bad thing but has nothing to do with the patent infringement case.
Let's say you are a small inventor who has come up with a new RAM technology. Now let's say you join the standards committee and offer up your new technology for the next standard under RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing) terms. Instead of accepting your tech for the standard, the big players all rip it off and tell you to go get a lawyer if you don't like it. What would you do? Sit back and take it? You don't have the resources to open up a fab and make it yourself. You did all the research and hard work, you own the patents, but the big boys don't care - they're using your tech anyway. Not a good situation to be in and I don't blame RAMBUS one bit for doing what they can to get some justice.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
If you do an April Fools joke after noon, then you are the fool. Since Slashdot editors are in the USA, and wake up in what most of the world considers the afternoon, then this probably explains a lot...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's the way I see it too, although I would have mentioned Microsoft's MARID fiasco that nearly destroyed SPF as a technology and sentenced every email user to an extra ten years of spam emails with spoofed sources addresses.
Implement DKIM today, so we can get the nasty MARID nonsense behind us. And be sure to openly laugh at anyone implementing the totally useless Microsoft-style SPFv2 pragma shite (typically Exchange admins, who will also give you plenty of other laughs).
Actually, when Slashdot editors wake up on April 1, most of the world population considers it April 2. But thanks for the bigoted Euro-centric view.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The rambus story is an easy one. Here it goes: company creates a high bandwidth DRAM device that no one wants. It's too expensive, and the bandwidth comes at the expense of latency, which turns out to be more important. The product fails in the market at the hands of an open standard. The company isn't done, though: they learned about the open standard when they attended the standard's group meetings, and they use loopholes in the patent system to morph what they invented into where the industry was headed. So even though their product fails, they can leech royalties off of the successful product the industry created.
I like this story; it feels right to me. It appeals to me on several visceral levels: the patent system is broken, open standards that work are superior to proprietary ones that don't, sometimes everything works out and bad things happen to bad people.
Here's my problem, though: I'm an athiest. I make an effort not to believe things just because I want to and because it feels good. That's either arrogant or ignorant, and I don't want to be either. When I decide to believe something, I try to prove it first: this code is better than that code because it _works_ better, not just because I don't like that code or the person who wrote it. Works for me; maybe too much Ann Rynd when I was little.
So here's my problem with the rambus issue that I've been watching off and on most of this decade: I can't prove what I want to believe. Worse, millions of dollars of investigation and litigation can't seem to prove it either. Hundreds of thousands of documents, emails, depositions, a 3 judge appeals court, an adminstrative law judge at the FTC, and now a jury with some actual technical people in San Jose, and ... nothing. What
I want to believe cannot be proved.
I have several choices: I could choose to feel good, believe that what I want to be true is simply true. But I suck at that. I could blame the system, which is broken in so many ways that it becomes definitional: when the outcome is opposite of what I want, it's proof that the system is broken. Or, and flame away if you need to, I have to ask if what I want to believe just isn't so. Sometimes even people I dislike turn out to be telling the truth.
-jk
I made the mistake years ago of buying a desktop with 1600 RDRAM in it. It doesn't have enough RAM in it and RDRAM is still ridiculously priced (256 meg of 1600 RDRAM is still almost $200!). Screw Rambus.
the affected companies will feel "RAMMED AND BUSTED"... from behind in behind up behind
("UP BEHIND" IS a valid US Navy command to deck hands working lines or involved in Underway Replenishment operations.... I know, because it was used as late as 1984-86 when I was in the Deck force)
http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/commands_order.htm\
I just wonder if those companies will be able to "Walk Back Handsomely", hehehe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Um, did you read my post? The ram producers would own the patents, thus allowing them to cross license them to each other for free while making the lawsuits go away. And it isn't like this trick hasn't been pulled before-Creative bought out Aureal- Nvidia bought out 3DFX, etc. If those patents are required to make your core product(RAM) it would make sense to buy them out and not have to keep licensing for eternity rather than to cut checks forever. If I was the big manufacturers I'd get together and buy them out. Just makes better sense to get something for your money rather than pay out judgments in the hundreds of millions. But as always YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And in what way is April 2 not after noon on April 1?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
but it happend 8 years too late for me to care about. It was the customers who were really bent over and RAMBUSed by this whole ordeal. I just replaced my old desktop simply because i couldn't upgrade the Rambus RAM as it was going for a hefty $180-$250 on ebay for 1 GIG!
I have a really close friend who was a senior engineer and worked on the rambus technology. I am sure I remember that he took stock instead of a salary in hopes that the good technology he was crating would become a major mover. It is absolutely not his fault that things were handled the way they were, and if they were just a troll, they wouldn't have been smart enough to invent a key technology. To the best of my knowledge he is still alive, but not in the best of health and he could really use some payback at this point. IF you are listening, I miss you Jim H.
Your examples provide single entities buying out the competition, your post however suggested multiple competitors somehow could manage to spend heaps of cash on something which only has value by removing cost.
That will never fly with investors. Economics has no use of logical thinking, what matters is the black number on the bottom of the sheet.
Would it be the nice thing to do? No, but neither was the price fixing that helped to kill the Rambus products in the first place. By owning that patent portfolio they would get rid of hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit payouts and licensing while combined with their own patents would make them the only ball game when it comes to RAM for the foreseeable future. But you are right in one thing: With our totally fucked up "screw everything but the share price" mentality you'll never have anyone smart enough to see the big picture. Just look at Creative royally pissing off their core consumers just to force a few extra upgrades. While I'm sure the "force them to upgrade or else" route helps the quarterly report, ultimately it will torpedo the company. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The price fixing is a separate issue that I do think the DRAM companies engaged in. The patent issue, however, happened differently than you are saying.
JEDEC has strict rules that everyone involved must disclose any patents that may be relevent to the standards they are working toward so that those issues can be dealt with before a standard is decided on. Rambus had some memory patents that had been filed but not issued. Rambus disclosed none of those. Then, as they attended and gathered information about the technologies being discussed, they were adding amendments to their existing applications with those specific technologies. Therefore, it would still have the earlier filing date to look like they had the patent before JEDEC decided on it. Rambus was actually found guilty of this fraud against JEDEC by a European court.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
I should have put the links in there to begin with. I'll give you half-credit because I did have my locations mixed up. The European cases I was thinking of were in London, England and Mannheim, Germany, where Rambuses cases were dismissed when Rambus' patents were ruled invalid by the European Patent Office. The conviction of fraud in the JEDEC process was ruled by judge Robert Payne in federal court in the U.S.
There ya go, links, information, etc.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds