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Litigious Rambus Wins Again
After Rambus's settlement deal with Samsung earlier this week, an anonymous reader writes with this snippet: "Memory technology company Rambus rounded out the week with another legal dispute ending in its favor as it fights to defend its patent portfolio. On Friday [the] US International Trade Commission ruled that graphics chip maker Nvidia infringed upon Rambus patents, according to statements released by the two companies on Friday. Rambus has been filing lawsuits against various technology companies for the past decade, claiming they violate patents held by the memory chip designer."
Indeed. And Rambus has been losing all of their patent suits in court.
Though they have been winning all the suits involving anti-trust (both those filed against them, and those filed against the memory makers who did engage in illegal trust behavior).
The enemies of Democracy are
They seem to have come up with some ideas so critical to memory that everyone else in the industry can't seem to make a product without tripping over the patent law. Do we praise the inventors, or hate them because we hate patents?
I guess you don't know/remember the real story behind RAMBUS. These "innovations" that they patented were obtained by attending multivendor conference meetings and then filing patents on the ideas discussed before anybody else got to them. They didn't come up with them, they just filed first!
But to make matters worse, they "submarined" the patents, filing changes for years so that nobody knew about the patents until AFTER the industry had pretty much committed itself to the designs that Rambus was eventually awarded patents to.
Rambus is a horrible patent troll, in the fullest sense of the word. In terms of evil, they are right up there with Antivirus vendors and spammers.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Its not so much that it wasn't a good idea, but that they negotiated in bad faith. The background is that a group of many manufacturers got together to make a memory standard that they could all use. They each chipped in ideas, and didn't patent them. Rambus steered the standard towards something that would include things they had already patented, and hoped no one would notice the patents. No one did. They then did not immediately sue, but waited until the standard was widely used by many of the original group, and others, so that paying the settlements would be preferable to the cost of switching standards. This is not simply patent trolling per the usual standard. This is an example of fraud. The company should get dissolved to pay remunerations towards those it defrauded, all patents released into public domain, and its board charged with felonies.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.