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Rambus Loses $4B Antitrust Case
UnknowingFool writes "In a vote of 9-3, a jury found that Micron and Hynix did not collude to manipulate DRAM prices in a violation of California anti-trust law against Rambus. The jury also ruled that the Idaho based Micron and the South Korea based Hynix did not interfere with Rambus' relationship with Intel. On the first point, Rambus argued the two chip makers conspired to keep Rambus RDRAM prices high while artificially keeping their SDRAM prices low. Micron and Hynix countered that high RDRAM prices were due to technical problems of the design. On the second point, an Intel manager testified that Rambus contract stipulations soured the relationship. The clause that Rambus insisted and would not waive was that to use Rambus RDRAM, Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently. Rambus initiated the suit and the $4B was how much Rambus calculated it lost in profits."
The leech that used the courts.
No hard feelings, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
it has been well-established that Rambus ran off to patent a developing industry standard in RDRAM, stealing what was to be a public standard. they can rot in hell with 640K, they have it coming. got all the morals of Darl McBride and his little troll company.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Rambus is or was pretty evil.
Didn't they go out of business? First they attended the sdram IEE conferences where the design of SDRAM was discussed and how all the memory chip makters would make it back in 1992. Rambus immediately called the headquarters and patented the whole spec on purpose to sue everyone out of existence to force their own proprietary design.
Then they gave away 25% of their shares to Intel below market value in exchange for using only Rambus ram. Intel woudl get billions in kickbacks if SDRAM went out of existence and gave a financial incentive.
Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god. We would be stuck with $200 512 meg ram chips today with just rambus existing and probably no flash drives.
They were worse than MS in my opinion and filled with greed.
http://saveie6.com/
Please, MS has NOTHING on Rambus when it comes to using the courts.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
And there was much rejoicing.
Unfortunately RIAA/MPAA has a lot better claim to what they enforce against, mainly because are society is stupid and allows someone to own their cultural contributions much longer than they deserve to. 20, 30 years, okay. I can see that. In perpetuity? That's wrong.
At least the motion picture industry is getting smart and releasing movies cheap. There are DVDs available retail new for $5, Blu-ray for $10. The RIAA doesn't understand that so much music is pirated because people don't want to pay more for the movie soundtrack than they do for the movie itself. It's a lot easier to put up with the MPAA when the cost to attempt to thwart is just about as high as the cost to just buy the damn disc, if one factors time into account.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
an Intel manager testified that Rambus contract stipulations soured the relationship. The clause that Rambus insisted and would not waive was that to use Rambus RDRAM, Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently.
Wow. I'd have told them to F off too...
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block shipments of Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently
Summary gets confusing when you leave words out.
Rambus must have some sort of war chest for suits and appeals. They've been at it for over a decade. By appearance it seems they're developing Lawyer Technology rather than memory technology.
While the potential of a $12 billion or even $4 billion pay off might be considered mouthwatering, they'd probably have made that kind of money by now if they were putting all their money into R&D, manufacturing and licencing of revolutionary technologies.
It may look like thinking bit, but it's really very negative, thinking small.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You've described it pretty well. One of their earliest cases was in Richmond, VA and I sat in to videotape a lot of the depositions. (That's how long it's been going on -- VHS and SVHS were still in use when they started suing everyone. That was around 2000-2001.)
They admitted in depositions they were in on the meetings when the standards were drawn up and had no reason for not objecting to designs that were supposedly theirs.
I have to admit, the Rambus lawyers were polite and easy to work with. The lawyers for the other company (a German firm) were mostly from one New York office and were just plain rude and nasty.
I remember one deposition in particular where there was a top memory expert giving testimony and they asked him about flip-flops and if they were memory. They (the Rambus lawyers) were trying to get him to say a flip-flop was a one bit memory and he kept saying, "Under certain conditions." The lawyer was stumped and started getting worse and worse (the only time I saw a Rambus lawyer start to get nasty) because he not only couldn't get him to give the answer they wanted, but the lawyer had no understanding of what any Electronics 101 student would know. I had a hard time not laughing and shaking the camera during the time that topic was being covered. It was pretty clear to me that lawyer had not fully prepared and didn't know at all what the topic was with flip-flops. I would have loved to have stayed in that one all day, since I figured it would only get more technical and confuse the lawyer even more, but someone took my place so I could finish some editing.
They helped to advanced the industry by patenting once-public ideas ? I cannot agree with that statement on any level.
If anyone should be accused of articially maintaining high RAM prices, it's Rambus. Their trolling and subsequent royalty racket has cost the world far more than 4 billion, not to mention the costly and frustrating period where Intel boards exclusively supported Rambus. That move alone set the SDRAM industry back a few years.
Rambus is the perfect example of how NOT to run a tech company. Leave IP theft to the Chinese, at least they don't patent the stuff they steal.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
> Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus.
It was not just AMD which used SDRAM. Other companies made chipsets and motherboards which worked with Intel CPUs and used SDRAM.
As RDRAM failed to match SDRAM technically and price-wise, Intel was saved by their competitors selling Intel-compatible chipsets, for otherwise few people would have bough Intel CPUs. Because Intel was contractually obligated to only ship RDRAM-compatible motherboards.
I was just starting in the IT industry when Rambus came out. Part of my quiz as a low-level tech for my first IT job was to ID some pieces of hardware. I had been building PCs using AMD & SDRAM for quite a while, due to how cheaper they were vs. Intel. I was handed a Rambus chip, and my exact response was:
"It's memory, and it has a heatsink. Either it's high-performance, or very inefficient"
Got the job, and I soon learned it turned out it was the latter. I saw how much Rambus sucked firsthand, and was glad when regular DDR RAM started to take its place. Farewell, it wasn't nice knowing you.
Guess that depends on which court ruling you refer to. The article you mention describes repeated appeals with different outcomes in each case. Neither the courts nor the regulatory bodies have shown themselves capable of grasping or even caring about the technical history of the RAM business. Rather than wikipedia, you might want to check out old issues of EETimes or read postings from the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware newsgroup in the 1999-2001 timeframe.
I remember looking at the Rambus approach back in the nineties, and it didn't look practical. High latency, high power consumption, high cost, high complexity (which implies lower yield, which drives cost) and my most favorite of all, a single vendor. I didn't see why anyone would buy their stuff. Yes, they had the fastest throughput for awhile, but throughput isn't everything.
Does this mean they're finished as a company? Does anyone still buy Rambus devices?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If SCO can last nearly a decade I'm not surprised Rambus's lawsuits would last as long if not longer.