Supreme Court Sides With Rambus Over FTC

afabbro writes "The US Supreme Court rejected the FTC's bid to impose anti-trust penalties on Rambus. Without comment, they let stand an appeals court decision favoring Rambus. The FTC had found that Rambus undermined competition by getting secretly patented technology included in industry standards, but the Supremes evidently didn't agree."

Comments

A Memory manufacturor

[jellomizer]

Is it so hard to at least explain some of the details in the summary. Sorry Rambus isn't a well know brand name like IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun, HP... By reading the summary I had no Idea what the suit was about.

Re:A Memory manufacturor

[drinkypoo]

If you don't know who RAMBUS is then you should, they have been a big name in computing technology for a lot longer than this RDRAM shit has been around. And if you can't use google then you don't deserve to Slashdot. And no, I'm not kidding this time. Every time someone cries about a well-known company not being detailed in a Slashdot summary, this site gets a little dumber.

Re:A Memory manufacturor

[drinkypoo]

You act like everyone should be aware of a computer hardware manufacturer, so I hope you hold yourself to the same standard and are aware of all the big names in all the other fields covered by slashdot news.

Actually, I just know how to use google. If I don't know something I can look it up. I have lost count of the number of times I'm sitting in someone's living room and they say "I wonder blah blah blah" and I say "have you googled it" and they say "no" and the answer is on the first page. Fuck, that applies to about half the "ask slashdot" questions, if you can just come up with a decent set of search terms - 99% of the time you can pick them right out of the summary.

If not, you are a whiny hypocrite.

Slashdot needs a CAPTCHA which restricts posting to people who are able to pass a reading comprehension test. It would certainly have prevented you from proving to the world that you are a big idiot.

Re:A Memory manufacturor

[steelfood]

You act like everyone should be aware of a computer hardware manufacturer, so I hope you hold yourself to the same standard and are aware of all the big names in all the other fields covered by slashdot news.

There are things that are other people's responsibility, and there are things that are your responsibility. Then there are the occasional things that aren't so clear whose responibility it is. But this falls into the, It's so fucking trivial, why are you making such a big fuss over nothing! category.

A Hard Lesson Learned

[erroneus]

Not that anyone in this day and age learns from mistakes any longer -- following the economic crash, people are seeking to get back to "business as usual" failing to appreciate that "business as usual" is what caused the crash. (Interestingly, the great depression spawned all kinds of lessons and wisdom that carried for generations... it wasn't really until most of the great depression survivors died that this crash occurred.)

But I seem to be getting off-topic but not truly. The idea here is that RAMBUS got away with a very serious and ugly misdeed. They got away with it. Their reputation has been harmed but not enough that they would be shamed out of business. But industry standards people are well aware of what happened and I should hope that they will be able to prevent that sort of thing from happening ever again. They should include provisions that says things like "by providing your specifications or designs, you agree that any associated patents or other rights will be licensed to all users free of charge" or "by submitting this information for approval, you also agree that you are giving up any claims on intellectual property rights where this specification is used."

RAMBUS became instantly evil in the eyes of many with the news of their misdeed. Likewise, Microsoft became instantly evil in the eyes of those interested in ISO standards approval. These should all be counted as lessons learned. I don't think anyone uses RAMBUS RAM do they? There is good reason for it -- they priced it right out of use. Microsoft is another story...

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[wisty]

Well, maybe standards should just stick to unpatentable things. Like solutions that would be "obvious" to an expert in the field. That way there can't be patents, right?

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[MiniMike]

Unfortunately, I think the lesson propagated here is that you should sneak your patents into standards you are supposedly helping with, as no harm will come to you from your misdeed. Rambus and Microsoft are not the first companies to do this, and thanks to the encouragement they received from the Supreme Court they probably won't be the last.

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[billcopc]

The difference is nobody actually knew they were going to owe Rambus a ton of royalties. Their IP was essentially "hidden in plain sight", and they waited until it had achieved critical mass before litigating the hell out of everyone to collect.

It's kind of like the W3C coming out of the clockwork and saying "Hey! I invented the internet! Remember all those RFCs ? Mine. CSS ? Mine. Now give me all your money before I smack you with this patent portfolio."

It's kind of like being retroactively billed for all the times you've slept with your ex-wife. IRL we call that divorce, but in business it's called fraud.

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[ShieldW0lf]

What is wrong with companies collecting royalties on the products that invented?

They participated in a consortium whose purpose was to create open standards so everyone on earth could benefit from commodity pricing, and they filed patent protection on processes secretly while leading the members of the consortium to believe that they were operating in good faith.

They didn't create new technology and ask people if they thought it was fair at this price. They held an industry hostage with lies and deceit. They're garden variety con-artists who belong hanging by their necks from a tree at a crossroads.

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[dunkelfalke]

actually, the memory manufacturers priced rdram chips so high (and ddr ram so low they made losses with it) as a revenge for rambus lawsuits and to drive rambus out of market.

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[R2.0]

Unfortunately, I think the lesson propagated here is that you should sneak your patents into standards you are supposedly helping with, as no harm will come to you from your misdeed. Rambus and Microsoft are not the first companies to do this, and thanks to the encouragement they received from the Supreme Court they probably won't be the last.

The only lesson to be learned here is that the FTC needs to mount a better case. The original 3 judge appeals panel ruled that the FTC basically did a poor job showing how Rambus violated the law. The full circuit declined to hear the case, and then the USSC declined. That generally means that the initial 3 judge panel got it right, and that the FTC didn't make their case.

What Rambus did was slimy and unethical, but that doesn't mean it was illegal. The activities may have been illegal, but the FTC didn't present a compelling enough case to prove it.

Re:A Hard Lesson Learned

[Truekaiser]

I thought everyone knew that in a system that expects everyone to act ethically, it's the unethical person that always wins.

An Underhanded Move by Rambus.

[purpledinoz]

I was really hoping Rambus would lose this case. This decision is a loss to everyone because it means that companies can now secretly get patented items into standards, which will really hinder the standards making process (which by the way, is a great benefit to the consumer). I hope everyone just refuses to do business with Rambus and let it go bankrupt.

Re:An Underhanded Move by Rambus.

[drinkypoo]

This problem is easily solved, although I agree it is unfortunate. All you have to do is require at the time of membership that those who join a standards group agree to waive any and all rights to any patents which cover the standard. This will reduce membership, which is a good thing, because those who would no longer be interested obviously want to control the process for their own ends anyway.

Re:An Underhanded Move by Rambus.

[commodore64_love]

Not really. In the future standards committees will simply require companies to sign a "full disclosure" contract, so that if a technology is owned by one of the companies (say Sony), then it will be revealed to all the participants. And if Sony does not reveal that fact, the company can be sued for breach-of-contract.

RAMBUS should have lost this.

[Benanov]

You can make a buck giving stuff away easily, Kevin. The trick is that the things you give away are complimentary to the things you make money on. Simple economics.

Take, for example, the Elphel cameras. All the software that runs on their cameras is under the GPL. They make money off the hardware--and they also make money off the fact that they don't really restrict their customers. You can pretty much do what you want with their cameras in terms of customizing it to your use--as long as you play by the terms of the GPL.

Standardization isn't good for innovators, perhaps. But the lack of it is very very bad for everyone else.

Most of the time, you're going to be everyone else.

The only reason Rambus will win

[imsabbel]

Is that it will force asian companies to pay money to an american company.

So the Supreme Court might have just a little bias there...