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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.

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. ARM holdings? by bartoku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

    If ARM holdings licensing came into question it would probably destroy the company's stock. I am loving the way the ARM architecture is handled, a lot more competition than x86, and it seems to be advancing quickly now that it has becoming popular.

    I was trying to imagine today if ARM holdings could survive in a world without IP laws. I think yes it could. It seems that getting a hold of ARM holdings processor plans, from something like bittorrent, would not be super useful even to Texas Instruments, Samsung, or Nvidia engineers. ARM works with them to implement the design, so the payment agreement would probably just be altered slightly and ARM would have to protect its disclosure of ARM architecture details a little more closely. Perhaps ARM would morph more into a standards body and not be as profitable though? I am curious what someone with more info on the topic can share please!

  2. Re:Slashdot declares invalid split infinitive by MrHanky · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So you don't know what infinitive is, right?

  3. In other words ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents ...

    In other words, Rambus is nothing but a scam

    And the amazing part is that the America knowingly allows such a scam to exist for such a looooooooooonnng time !!

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    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
  4. Re:HP got it's money-worth of Rambus in Alpha. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not to mention when they weren't patent trolls they were frankly shitty at business. RDRAM sucked, it cost too much to manufacture, needed dummy chips to fill empty slots, didn't scale well, it just wasn't a great design. Frankly after even Intel gave up on RDRAM patent trolling was pretty much all they had left. Good riddance Rambus, all of us will be glad when you are gone.

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  5. Re:HP got it's money-worth of Rambus in Alpha. by MightyMartian · · Score: 1, Insightful

    No solution is perfect, and every change will make winners and losers. That's life. I fail to see why we should prop up a badly malfunctioning IP system just so ARM can keep making money.

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    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.