Decades-Old Rambus Litigation Against Micron For RDRAM Tech Reaches Settlement

An anonymous reader writes "The decades-old Rambus litigation against Micron for RDRAM tech finally reached a settlement. RDRAM tech has already been licensed by NVidia and Broadcom and has been used in game consoles such as the Nintendo 64. The preliminary deal is to last 7 years and net $280M for Rambus and Micro to gain access to patent licenses defining the technology."

Comments

Now I feel old.

[Naatach]

Can you remember when this started?

Re:Now I feel old.

[t0qer]

Statute of limitations only applies to when a case can be filed. A trial can go on for years past the statute.

Re:Now I feel old.

[icebike]

Exactly,

Join a consortium to develop a standard, sneak out at a quarter to four and patent the whole thing behind everyone's back and start throwing sue balls at everyone. They never had an original idea, or a working product.

Re:Now I feel old.

[icebike]

The Rambus debacle actually pre-dates Slashdot.
The patent cat fight started in 1990, and slashdot started in 1997. It was old news by the time it was first mentioned on Slashdot.

Re:Now I feel old.

[Ralph Wiggam]

This particular debacle started in 1990. In 2000, Rambus filed lawsuits against every memory manufacturer in a much larger debacle. That's the debacle that dominated Slashdot for months and contributed to a huge influx of users.

Re:Now I feel old.

[ArbitraryName]

I read the article. The article is wrong. I was around when they started suing, as your UID shows you should have been. Here is a contemporary article in EE Times about the first lawsuit in 2000, against Hitachi. The article's wording makes it clear that this is the first lawsuit. This was big news on Slashdot in 2000, where an article from 2000 whose wording (and comments) also make it obvious that the lawsuits had just begun. Here is a slightly earlier Slashdot article about Samsng and Rambus whose comments also make it obvious that no lawsuits had begun yet.

Re:Now I feel old.

[saleenS281]

They absolutely had both an original idea and a working product. Just because they didn't have manufacturing facilities doesn't mean they didn't produce a product. Does AMD not have a working product because they spun-out and sold-off Global Foundries? Does Sony not have a product because they use AMD CPUs? RDRAM was absolutely rambus's product, that was never up for debate. What was up for debate was whether DDR memory infringed on their patents - it did, and they won just about all of their lawsuits.

Re:Now I feel old.

[saleenS281]

First off, it wasn't bogus - which is why micron lost. I'm no lover of RAMBUS but they absolutely had valid patents, and they did sell product. They lost the battle because their product was ultimately inferior and more expensive, but that doesn't change the fact the core technology behind DDR memory infringed on their ideas. As for how it's still valid - it doesn't matter. If you infringe a patent, get sued, and the patent runs out before the court case finishes, you aren't magically exonerated from all the years you infringed on the patent while in court. Doesn't work that way champ.

Re:Now I feel old.

[radarskiy]

You are assuming that the final manufactured product actually matched the Rambus design, rather than being a different design that just happened to be patent encumbered.

I only have hearsay from people that worked on this stuff, but it all agrees on the fact that Rambus did not have a working design.

Re:Now I feel old.

[bhcompy]

Let's talk about goalposts, then. What you're saying is that the NFL doesn't have a product because the products are the teams that are NFL licensed franchises and the NFL itself is just a logo without a product. I don't think the billions being paid to the NFL support that statement. Products don't have to be tangible to be products. A product can simply be a license to a design. A better statement would be that Rambus never manufactured the product(then again, many hardware companies pay other companies to manufacture their products)

Re:Now I feel old.

[Solandri]

First off, it wasn't bogus - which is why micron lost. I'm no lover of RAMBUS but they absolutely had valid patents, and they did sell product. They lost the battle because their product was ultimately inferior and more expensive, but that doesn't change the fact the core technology behind DDR memory infringed on their ideas.

You're badly misunderstanding people's gripe with this whole thing. Of course the patents were valid. The whole point of the consortium was to come up with a non-patented standard, so when Rambus went behind everyone's back and patented the whole shebang of course there was no prior art. The other memory makers had gone out of their way not to patent it.

And FYI, JEDEC won against Rambus in their lawsuit - Rambus was guilty of patenting stuff which was being discussed in secret at JEDEC. The problem was Rambus was only guilty of violating the terms of membership for JEDEC. The lawyers who drafted the membership agreement neglected to put in any penalties for patenting stuff behind everyone else's back, and as a result the only recourse JEDEC had was to kick Rambus out. There were no federal or criminal charges because they didn't break government law, they broke JEDEC's rules. The patents were still valid though, even though Rambus effectively stole them, because the there was no prior art and the USPTO decided it was patent-worthy.

Speaking of which, do you really think DDR is worthy of a patent? Counting a clock tick not just when the voltage goes up, but also when the voltage goes down? That should be obvious to a 5-year old.

This is horrible news

[RelliK]

This is absolutely disgusting. Rambus is the ultimate patent troll. For those not familiar, here is some history.

Back in the 90's, Rambus became a member of JEDEC, an industry consortium of RAM manufacturers. JEDEC rules require members to disclose any patents that are relevant to the technology being discussed. Rambus didn't. It sat in on the meetings, listened, and modified its pending patent applications to cover DDR RAM. After the new RAM standard was adopted, Rambus surfaced its submarine patents and started suing everyone left and right.

Add to that the fact is that Rambus itself does not manufacture anything -- it's a technology licencing house that has a few engineers and an army of lawyers -- and you get a perfect example of a patent troll.

Re:This is horrible news

[RelliK]

Because US patent system effectively legalizes extortion. Some manufacturers rolled over and paid "licencing", but others, like Infineon decided to fight. The jury in Infineon v. Rambus ruled in favor of Infineon, but then Rambus appealed to the federal circuit and got that decision overturned. PJ, of groklaw fame, put it thusly: "federal circuit has never seen a patent it didn't like".

This is just a short summary, you can find more info if you like. Rambus extorted money from pretty much everyone who has so much as touched RAM.

Re:This is horrible news

[Pinhedd]

Add to that the fact is that Rambus itself does not manufacture anything -- it's a technology licencing house that has a few engineers and an army of lawyers -- and you get a perfect example of a patent troll.

ARM Holdings PLC is an R&D company that doesn't manufacture anything. They generate all of their revenue through licencing IP to third parties whom in turn do the manufacturing. I do not see anyone calling them a patent troll.

Rambus Inc. is definitely a shady corporation but simply failing to manufacture products with IP that one owns and initiating litigation against those who infringe upon it does not automatically make one a patent troll.

Consider it a test you only have to pass once.

[VortexCortex]

You'd think for the amount of money they steal someone would just shoot them in the head or hire someone to do it.

With what?! Ballistic weapons? Oh, that's rich! Consider that if any aliens exist there's at least a 50% chance they're more advanced than humans. If the aliens can manage interstellar space travel then they've already mastered the warp drive. Imagine all the technology they must have. You think they'd care about being threatened with micrometeors? Ooh, how terrifying!

One answer to the Fermi Paradox could be that the aliens can't visit you because they'll invalidate every damn patent on Earth with their prior art and destabilize the world economy humans built upon laws that create artificial scarcity of information and ideas. If only humans could extract their craniums from their rectums and stop treating infinitely reproducible information and knowledge as if they are physical things... Until human laws agree with the basic Universal truth that symbolic configurations of matter and energy are not matter and energy themselves, the Drake equation will never be solved.

Think about it. Economics 101 says that as supply tends towards infinity, price tends towards zero regardless of demand or cost to create. The elements that make up sand and water were forged in a huge expensive furnace: A 1-A supernova, yet sand is cheap, you just pay for hauling it, not the sand itself. You wouldn't sell Ice to Eskimos, as the locals say, but selling infinitely reproducible information to humans possessing "sentient" brains and digital information replicators is acceptable? The world economy of ideas and information can't even grok economics 101. It's the work to create new configurations that's scarce, not the 1's and 0's or ideas. You have no evidence that patents and copyright are beneficial -- Not a single one of you tested that damn hypothesis!

The Patent Trolls are what you pre-information-scarcity races deserve. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is. Imagine yourself in their shoes! Imagine that you risked being re-assigned as an overseer of primordial ooze for the next billion years just to directly tell the humans via world wide neural network of their folly, and they STILL didn't get it?! Imagine how you would feel if you went through the trouble to do all that, and the Humans STILL sided with the moronic laws?! If you travelled 23 light millennia just to stop in for a spot of tea and solve every problem human science will face for the next few centuries, but you discovered the "Best and Brightest" humans embracing an economy that's incompatible with the nature of information and is based on Untested Hypotheses would YOU trust them with a Warp Drive?! I wouldn't!