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.'"

Comments

April Fool's Day...

[TFer_Atvar]

... oh, you're serious.

Re:April Fool's Day...

[CSMatt]

The article's dated March 26th. No joke.

Re:April Fool's Day...

[dgatwood]

If I were working for one of those companies, the first thing I'd do is declare bankruptcy. If all of the three manufacturers being sued all declared bankruptcy, the industry would plunge into chaos and the legislature would suddenly be getting tens of thousands of phone calls from everybody from Dell to Apple calling for patent reform, a huge government bailout, and a law invalidating Rambus's patents.

As for me, I will never, as long as I live, purchase any product manufactured by Rambus or any of its subsidiaries, and as soon as the dust settles and the industry has time to move to a Rambus-patent-free memory technology, that permanent blacklisting will be expanded to any products that license any technology from Rambus or any of its subsidiaries. I strongly urge everyone else on Slashdot to do the same. Let's send a message with our pocketbooks that we will not tolerate patent extortion from a technology manufacturer. Let's drive Rambus out of business with the largest boycott of a company's products in the history of the planet. All it would take would be the wrath of geeks burying a single company to ensure that other companies think twice before adopting such sleazy, deplorable tactics.

Re:April Fool's Day...

[cgenman]

Oh come on. Who would believe that a company would intentionally work soon-to-be patented technology into widely-accepted standards without telling anyone, then extract patent royalties at gunpoint? That would imply that companies behave in money-grubbing corrupt fashions, the patent system is broken, anti-fraud and anti-monopoly laws have no teeth, and we didn't have an exit strategy from Iraq.

oh. right. carry on then.

Re:April Fool's Day...

[qwert12345]

dgatwood, your joke is the *utmost* one I found today:

"I will never, as long as I live, purchase any product manufactured by Rambus or any of its subsidiaries" You won't because Rambus doesn't produce products that are sold on the market --- they do not produce.

"as soon as the dust settles and the industry has time to move to a Rambus-patent-free memory technology" The industry has been moving towards a Rambus-patent-heavier status, since SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. I hope given more time they will move even faster.

"that permanent blacklisting will be expanded to any products that license any technology from Rambus or any of its subsidiaries." You better giving up owning any product that uses DRAM legally and buying those product that infringing, given the outcome of the recent lawsuit --- really a nerd.

"I strongly urge everyone else on Slashdot to do the same." Doing what? sitting here LMAO about your posts?

Re:April Fool's Day...

[nguy]

If I were working for one of those companies, the first thing I'd do is declare bankruptcy.

You can't declare bankruptcy unless you're actually bankrupt.

As for me, I will never, as long as I live, purchase any product manufactured by Rambus or any of its subsidiaries,

You won't, since Rambus is just a patent troll company; they don't make products.

All it would take would be the wrath of geeks burying a single company to ensure that other companies think twice before adopting such sleazy, deplorable tactics.

Well, if you figure out how to destroy Rambus as a business, lots of people would like to know. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.

Re:April Fool's Day...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Easy - Reform the patent system so Patent Trolls cannot do business ...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fool me once...

[deranged unix nut]

Afterwhich Rambus was never trusted in a standards committee again...

Re:Fool me once...

[Gutboy]

It surprises me that after what Rambus has done, that standards orgs don't require that all patents, copyrights, whatever be donate to the public domain if it turns out that any member (or members org) has a patent, copyright, etc. on anything in the standard. If you don't want to lose your patent, you don't get to participate in making a standard.

Re:Fool me once...

[timeOday]

That could be the worst effect of this... undermining the standards bodies. Getting competitors to play nice is hard enough even when they aren't stabbing each other in the back. Now they're more likely to figure it's safer just to go their own proprietary ways, which would mean more expensive and incompatible gear for us.

Bad faith, but good tech

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Bad faith, but good tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Rambus wrote an early (and decent) patent on one of their designs, and that patent languished for years in the patent office, eventually being abandoned. Several years later, they wrote a continuation of that patent that was eventually granted, which covered their design.

Now the issue begins.

During the time that those two patents were hidden away in the patent office, Rambus attended the JEDEC committee meetings for standardizing SDRAM and DDR. They essentially sat there, silent, making the actively participating representatives nervous. Eventually there was a "put up or talk up" request issued to the Rambus people, and they walked out of the committee meetings.

Also during that time, they began writing continuations of the second in-office application, which was a continuation of the first application. With these continuations the examined the descriptive section of the first application (which isn't allowed to change on a continuation) and began extracting new claims which were precisely written against the emerging SDRAM and DDR standards.

Even though those features may have only been mentioned in passing, not taught in the original art.
Even though to one skilled in the art they were rather obvious.

The applications were granted, and that's the basis of the current mess.

Re:Bad faith, but good tech

[Abcd1234]

Umm, no. Not at all. Two people inventing the same thing just means that two very smart people had similar ideas. It doesn't make them obvious (Calculus being the most glaring example... both Newton and Leibniz built their work on existing efforts, but independently made leaps that none had before).

Re:Sigh

[jd]

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.

Re:bad..

[Spy der Mann]

This is called patent troll..

Not quite. First of all, this is a hardware patent. Second, Rambus was an actual technology developer. Turns out that Rambus' competitors did price fixing to prevent Rambus memory tech from entering the market.

Now, I'm not saying the Rambus guys are poor victims, IMO they're as guilty as the other companies, but I'm thinking that Intel and the others might be getting what they deserve. It's as if Rambus told them: you know the rules, and so do I ;-)

Sue the standards committee next

[Skapare]

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.

Subverting standards organizations....

[stox]

seems to be very popular lately. Does someone have a patent on in yet?

Re:Looks like it's time for a new tag

[i.of.the.storm]

!omgponies would be the preferred syntax, I believe.

Not really

[symbolset]

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.

juries

[l2718]

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.

Re:bad..

[Spy der Mann]

How exactly was the price fixing hurting Rambus' RDRAM?

From Wikipedia:

Few DRAM manufacturers have ever obtained the license to produce RDRAM, and those who did license the technology failed to make enough RIMMs to satisfy PC market demand, causing RIMM to be priced higher than SDRAM DIMMs, even when memory prices skyrocketed during 2002.[13] During RDRAM's decline, DDR continued to advance in speed while, at the same time, it was still cheaper than RDRAM. Meanwhile, A massive price war in the DDR SDRAM allowed DDR SDRAM to be sold at or below production cost. DDR SDRAM makers were losing massive amounts of money, while RDRAM suppliers were making a good profit for every module sold. While it is still produced today, few motherboards support RDRAM. Between 2002-2005, market share of RDRAM had never extended beyond 5%.[14]

In 2004, it was revealed that Infineon, Hynix, Samsung, Micron, and Elpida had entered into a price-fixing scheme .[15] Infineon, Hynix, Samsung and Elpida all entered plea agreements with the US DOJ, pleading guilty to price fixing over 1999-2002.[16] They paid fines totalling over $700 million and numerous executives were sentenced to jail time.

Rambus has alleged that, as part of the conspiracy, the DRAM manufacturers acted to depress the price of DDR memory in an effort to prevent DRDRAM from succeeding in the market. Those allegations are the subject of lawsuits by Rambus against the various companies.

So, yes, this is a massive litigation war.

(April Fools: How about adding a little twist to the current RickRolling tendency? :) )

Re:The big joke

[lilomar]

1. Let anticipation build up over April fools.
2. Don't deliver.
3. Let the /. community get used to getting regular news.
4. at about 12 noon... 5. OMGPONIES!!!
6. ???
7. OMGPONIES!!!

RAM, Bus, hot oil...

[BadboyGeek]

Yup, aptly named company. They're Ramming it to us.

A joke or not and all other things aside

[rabtech]

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.