Appeals Court Throws Out Rambus Patent Ruling

angry tapir writes "A US appeals court has ruled on two patent lawsuits that pit Rambus against two competing DRAM makers, sending both cases back to district courts for reconsideration. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a lower court ruling requiring Hynix Semiconductor to pay Rambus damages and fees totaling US$397 million for the use of its patents in DRAM chips." Here's the issued opinion (PDF) in Hynix v. Rambus. The opinion in the other case (PDF), pitting Rambus against Micron, contains this juicy snippet: "On August 26, 1999, Rambus held the 'shredding party' it had planned as part of its third-quarter intellectual property litigation readiness goals. Rambus destroyed between 9,000 and 18,000 pounds of documents in 300 boxes."

Comments

Good

[jheath314]

Senior Judge Ronald Whyte's ruling in the Hynix case was bizarre anyway... I'm glad it got overturned. (He had concluded that Rambus wasnâ(TM)t anticipating litigation when the shredding took place.) Under Whyte's ruling the bar for being convicted as a spoilator of evidence was set impossibly high.

Re:As Caruso would say...

[Alex Belits]

This brings up some...

bad memory.

YEEEAAAHHHHH!

Does it even matter anymore?

[overshoot]

If you had ever done any standards work in the past ten years, you wouldn't have to ask.

And, yes, I speak from painful experience -- I worked on the JEDEC committees that Rambus abused.