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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."
So the Supremes didn't say "Stop [bundling secretly patented technology] in the Naaaame of Love"?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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...
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.
Surely there are methods of dealing with this. One way would be to have all companies contributing, officially commenting on, or doing anything that could affect a standards decision sign a waiver of all patent rights applying to the standard.
Open standards should be immune from patents, if anyone believes that their patent will be infringed they should bring it up during the standards process.
*beep* *beep* *beep* *BEEEEEEEP*
The FTC argued in court papers filed in Washington that Rambus âoewaited to assert its patent interests until the new standards had been widely implemented.â The agency said Rambus then âoedemanded stiff royalties from makers of the great majority of computer memory chips.â
I thought this case was about Rambus filing patents for ideas that were brought up during the committee planning of the memory standard. That would mean that their patents are invalid, and that they essentially stole them. But that doesn't seem like what the FTC based their case on. The article makes it look like all Rambus did was wait to assert their patents, which is jerkass but perfectly legal.
Am I confusing this with another case?
The FTC had found that Rambus undermined competition by getting secretly patented technology included in industry standards, but the Supremes evidently didn't agree.
Actually, the Court's decision not to hear the case only implies that a majority of the judges did believed that there was a compelling reason to hear the case. Quoting from here:
The Court grants a petition for certiorari only for "compelling reasons," spelled out in the court's Rule 10. Such reasons include, without limitation:
Which of these reasons would have justified the Court to hear this case?
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.
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...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Interesting... this prompted me to go look for the In Re: Bilski appeal to the supreme court.
This Rambus decision has docket number 08-694, and Bilski has docket number 08-964. (Both about important patent issues affecting the computer industry).
What are the odds of me making a typo and finding another important patent case.
Don't forget that the SDRAM manufacturers Hynix, Samsung, Infineon, and Elpida were convicted of price-fixing. Their objective was to keep DDR RAM prices down so that RDRAM would fail on the market. It's not like Rambus is the only guilty party here.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Isn't Rambus old technology, that only lived for a short time on a few architectures, while everyone uses DDR memory today and even while rambus existed? If so, why even bother.
The declared purpose of patents is to put designs in public view, with the reward being legal protection for the patent holder to make the device or license it to others for a certain time.
If Rambus or any other corporation or person applies for a patent on a device, this is no longer "secret"
K.
Standardization is a trade-off where you give up some unique features you offer in order to grow the market as a whole and sell more of the basic unit than you could sell of the unique unit (which you can still sell anyway). It has nothing to do with open source software. It's a spreadsheet-driven decision by executives. You can also compete on your implementation of the standard, or the price (Mushkin vs. OCZ). I really don't understand what you're complaining about here. Standardization in the computer industry did lots to make computers more ubiquitous and allow everyone to sell more.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
This should not be a case of antitrust. The engineers that were on the standards council as part of RAMBUS should lose their right to practice engineering. I don't know how it works in the states, but in Canada it is unethical and against the code of conduct for an engineer not to disclose any benefit that their position might provide. What RAMBUS's engineers did easily demonstrates a breach of conduct. I think the fact that the patent is part of the standard indicates an even larger issue. Patents are suppose to protect an inventive design from being sold by competition. Patents for things like making a touch screen should not be patents. They do not indicate a design. A implementation for making a touch screen now that should be patentable.
Do you work for Rambus or something? That's the exact opposite of what Wikipedia has to say. Basically, if I read it correctly, they say that Rambus listened in on a bunch of the JEDEC meetings and secretly started writing up patents on what was discussed, presumably including other people's ideas.
Either way, it's a moot point. Fully 19 standards organizations supported the request for certiorari on this. I think it's safe to say that standards bodies are busy writing rules to ensure that this can never happen again, but I also think that no standards body in their right mind is going to let Rambus participate again after this little stunt. As soon as JEDEC et al have finished working around the Rambus patents and the royalties dry up, Rambus is likely to shrivel up and die. They screwed a lot of companies with their actions, and that will not soon be forgotten. Scratch my back, and I scratch yours. Kick me until I bleed, and I lock you out of the playground.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I was thinking about this yesterday, and came up with a bit of an idea about copyrights.
I think many of us here recognize copyright and patents are designed to serve a good, to protect an artist or inventor, for a limited period of time, and then release the work of art or invention into the public domain so that people may benefit from it without being held hostage by the creator indefinitely, but that the current time frame for both patents is probably too long.
My new recommendation for copyright is that anybody who wishes to maintain a copyright should have to pay every year to maintain the copyright. The amount paid has to be equal to n% of the accumulated lifetime revenue the work has generated, where n is the number of years since the item was created. For instance, with the movie, The Dark Knight, released last year, on the one year anniversary, Warner Brothers would have to pay 1% of the so far, 1 billion dollars of income, or 10 million dollars, to retain the copyright for one year. If the revenue for the next year is 20 million dollars, and the company sees the 2% bill of approximately 20 million dollars, and balks that they won't be able to make enough money going forward to justify maintaining the copyright, they don't have to pay it, and it becomes public property. They are of course allowed to sell it and make money off of it, just not exclusively.
The point of a patent, is to give the creator a head start over competitors by means of a temporary monopoly in order to develop name recognition, first mover benefits and so on. Once upon a time, it could easily take a decade for the creator get a product off the ground, like for a steam locomotive. Now days, that's no longer the case. We need to reduce the effective time for most patents to 3-5 years before expiration. Maybe a similar idea to my copyright idea. To maintain a patent, the company (or individual) would have to pay a percentage of the revenues equal to 5xn% of accumulated revenues for the invention, and it will expire after 3 or 5 years even if the inventor still would like to lengthen it further. In that much time, either the company will either be doing well, and should be ready to face competition, or the patent will expire, and the rest of us can take advantage of the technology.
With the shortened time frame, the company should have increased protection of the patent or copyright, in exchange for the loss of time.
As regards Rambus, I'm glad to see their efforts were in vain because they basically killed the technology with their actions. Too bad they won this case which might encourage bad behavior in the future.
Headline is "Supreme Court Sides With Rambus Over FTC". This is wrong. The Supreme Court did not take sides in the case.
Without comment, they let stand an appeals court decision favoring Rambus.
The Supreme court takes about 80 cases a year out of about 8,000 submitted. As for the 7,920 that aren't heard, the Court isn't taking sides at all.
They are staying out of it.
This kind of headline is a frequent journalism error in coverage of the court.
*post is insightful and informative, possibly redundant.*
It is not the opposite of what Wikipedia is saying. I would say his story is supported by the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus
And no I don't work for Rambus...
Yes, it made computing platforms more ubiquitous, but you could also say they would have been a lot less frustrating to use if a single vendor supported one incarnation really well. I believe the PC platform would have been better if it wasn't so ubiquitous and common, there would have been more demand for an easier to use machine, instead of a cheap one.
Take for instance the Macintosh brand. Very tightly controlled and proprietary, yet it is a great brand because they just work. Apple has worked hard to control it and I think the results have helped them (along with other well designed and carefully controlled products) be competitive and made them a very recognizable brand.
I can't tell you how many times a feature or other useful incarnation of an idea was plummeted by some standard that wouldn't allow it to happen because it's not 'standard behavior'
Standardization comes at a steep cost. I would rather see companies hold on to their designs and make them work and compete against other designs and ideas. Let consumers and users of a product decide, not a standards committee.
DVD and blue ray are another example. An industry (that means consumers, in my view) picked the winner, not a standards committee.
Kevin
You're right that Apple took the tightly-controlled, high quality route against PCs--and lost out massively on the money that Microsoft and Intel made instead. Bill Gates wanted Steve Jobs to license the Mac OS because he was sure it would become the ubiquitous computing platform; Windows is the result of Steve's adherence to Apple's course. Computers would be easier to use if they were all Apples, but they'd be far less widespread.
Even then, I'm not sure that Apple proves your point: it lost out on being the ubiquitous platform, but it no doubt benefits from the ubiquity of PCs insofar as computing devices in general are far more commonplace. Apple has been lifted by the rising tide of widespread computing. Even granting your point that PCs have been bad for usability overall and a marketplace full of Apple-like vendors would be better, Apple still exists, offering a superior computing experience. I'd say we have the best of both worlds now: the benefits of standardization while still having premium choices available.
HD-DVD didn't lose to Blu-Ray because the "industry" decided. Blu-Ray won because they were able to swing Warner behind them with a paid-off commitment to issue movies only in Blu-Ray. You can't consider Blu-Ray to be the considered choice of the marketplace in any pure sense where consumers swung one way or the other en masse. It was corporate dealmaking that won that format war.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.