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USPTO Declares Invalid Third of Three Critical Rambus Patents
slew writes "This is a followup to this earlier story about 2 of 3 of Rambus's 'critical' patents being invalidated. Apparently now it's a hat-trick."
There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing." The linked article offers a brief but decent summary of the way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents.
It's not that a company's price fluctuates with the state of its patent portfolio. The problem is that 3 patents, which should have never been issued in the first place, terrorized inventors and suppressed innovation for multiple years. This is squarely an indictment of the USPTO and of the Congress.
Must we continually remind you that Rambus technology was never Rambus technology, but rather stolen technology?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I don't think anyone has ever made a particularly strong argument for eliminating hardware patents. The reason why people so very loathe Rambus was not the quality of their patents (although they did, as it turns out, happen to be invalid) -- it was that they went to the JEDEC standards meetings and encouraged the standards body to adopt their technology, without saying a word about it potentially infringing their patents, and then proceeded to sue everyone in the memory industry after the standard was set in stone and shipped on millions of motherboards.
It was the troll behavior that got everyone up in arms: Nobody whatsoever minds if you come to them and offer a license for your validly patented hardware technology before they ship it in their products. If the amount you're asking is less than the value of the technology to their company, you have yourself a mutually-agreeable deal. The problem is when someone (like Rambus, but unlike ARM) waits until you've unknowingly committed to ship several million infringing units before jumping out from under a bridge and flinging lawsuits in every direction.