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."

Comments

A patent troll with a win streak?

[LostCluster]

This one's a tough call... the have been one of the most litigious of the tech companies, but on the other hand they seem to keep winning in the courts. Doesn't the definition of a patent troll include suing people with nonsense lawsuits? 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?

Re:A patent troll with a win streak?

[jmv]

The term patent troll has nothing to do with the fact that a company wins or loses. It's used to describe a company whose sole (or main) source of income is patent litigation.

Re:A patent troll with a win streak?

[bky1701]

When an idea is so critical to something it cannot be worked around, it is far too obvious to be deserving of a patent. As a problem gets bigger, the amount of ways to solve it grows proportionally. If memory makers can't get around them, there is no doubt in my mind they're nothing but patent trolling scum who deserve to be beaten down in court.

Re:A patent troll with a win streak?

[DrMrLordX]

RAMBUS, Inc. is the very definition of a patent troll. They're just smarter, and more brazen, than most. It will take years to undo the damage they did to JEDEC memory standards, and by then, who knows how else they will infect memory standards with their patents?

Re:A patent troll with a win streak?

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:Just to clarify....

[Chris Burke]

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).

Geek Logic

[westlake]

When an idea is so critical to something it cannot be worked around, it is far too obvious to be deserving of a patent.

That's nonsense.

If there is no work-around you have pretty much proven that the solution to the problem is not obvious and that the patent is legitimate.

Re:Geek Logic

[Chris Burke]

What they patented were ways to make fast memory, cheaper.

Nothing about Rambus' technology was every about "cheaper". Their memory technology was inherently more expensive than others because it required additional serialization logic chips.

It's pretty easy to say "Why didn't I think of that?" after the fact. It is the one who gets there first that gets the patent. That IS innovation.

You mean the one who gets to the patent office first? "Why didn't I think of that?" is what Rambus said when they overheard the discussions at JEDEC, but then they realized it didn't matter that they didn't think of it first, since nobody else thought of patenting it first. Yay Rambus?

Re:Not a troll

[Chris Burke]

They're kinda a troll and kinda not. They were awarded patents for their inventions... and they were awarded patents for what they overheard at JEDEC and then ran off and patented (and no one else did first because the whole point was to devise a patent-royalty-free standard).

Rambus vs. JEDEC

[azrider]

To all of you:

Before commenting (especially if you are defending Rambus) you might want to do a search on "rambus jedec spec". The google search is:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rambus+jedec+spec&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a/

One of the results is:
http://www.abanet.org/antitrust/committees/intell_property/june21.html/ (FTC Charges Rambus With Abuse of Standard Setting Process).

In a nutshell, Rambus participated in the standards setting process for SDRAM technology without informing any of the other members that they were actively pursuing patents in the technology used to implement the standard. Once the standard was finalized, they disclosed the patents and demanded royalties.

Methinks that Rambus was in the wrong. So does the FTC.

Bad faith

[nten]

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.