Supreme Court Sides With Rambus Over FTC 143
afabbro writes "The US Supreme Court rejected the FTC's bid to impose anti-trust penalties on Rambus. Without comment, they let stand an appeals court decision favoring Rambus. The FTC had found that Rambus undermined competition by getting secretly patented technology included in industry standards, but the Supremes evidently didn't agree."
Re:The Supremes (Score:3, Informative)
It's a song reference. You are probably too young to remember. learn more here [wikipedia.org]
How the Court Works (Score:5, Informative)
The FTC had found that Rambus undermined competition by getting secretly patented technology included in industry standards, but the Supremes evidently didn't agree.
Actually, the Court's decision not to hear the case only implies that a majority of the judges did believed that there was a compelling reason to hear the case. Quoting from here [wikipedia.org]:
The Court grants a petition for certiorari only for "compelling reasons," spelled out in the court's Rule 10. Such reasons include, without limitation:
Which of these reasons would have justified the Court to hear this case?
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not really immediately clear on why, but this case was litigated on a different ground than everyone here is discussing (as of the time I am posting this comment).
JEDEC is a standards board that requires members to disclose their patent holdings. With proper disclosure, JEDEC could either adopt a non-proprietary standard, or require reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing. Rambus was a member, but failed to disclose its patents, and then convinced the standards board to adopt its patents as standards.
Rather than litigating on fraud, like most people are assuming, it seems that at least at the appellate level, the FTC proceeded on an anti-trust theory. In order to succeed in an anti-trust case under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it has to be shown that your conduct reduced competition. If a company already has a monopoly, under this law, simply using it to charge higher prices isn't illegal, it's using it to quash competition that is, and it must be shown that but-for the deceptive conduct another standard would have been adopted. Now Rambus' actions are a lot of things, but it's not immediately apparent they reduced competition simply by increasing prices, and that's what the appellate court found. I don't really understand at first glance why this wasn't a fraud case.
The Supreme Court didn't actually side with anyone. They declined to review, like they do for more than 90% of cases, and this decidedly does not mean they side with either side. It simply means they're very busy and decided this wans't one of the 100 most pressing cases facing the United States in this year. Therefore, the appellate level decision stands on this case.
Source on most of what I'm saying on Rambus:
link [intellectu...awblog.com].
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:5, Informative)
After more digging, I think I get it now.
A fraud action actually was brought by those injured by Rambus' purportedly fraudulent actions, i.e. the other memory manufacturers. The FTC wanted to also punish Rambus, so it brought a separate anti-trust case against Rambus, which was decided for Rambus by an appellate court, and that is what was just turned down for review by the Supreme Court.
The fraud actions failed after juries decided that Rambus had been showing off these technologies before the standards board meetings, and that the JEDEC standards board rules don't clearly require disclosure of the patents. Source:
link [cnet.com].
For what it's worth though, Rambus seems to be having difficulties enforcing its patents. Apparently, it destroyed key documents related to them.
Source:
link [theregister.co.uk].
Re:How the Court Works (Score:4, Informative)
Believe it or not, the court system is pretty good at throwing out crappy lawsuits. The courts cannot just declare a company assholes, they can only rule upon the proof of assholeness brought before them. The FTC screwed up the case.
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:4, Informative)
RDRAM may not be widely used, but the technologies they claim patents on have, which include stuff like DDR and QDR signalling, which are used everywhere.
And let's not forget that one of the world's best selling consoles uses RDRAM as well - Playstation 2 has 32MB of RDRAM. Its successor also has 256MB of RDRAM as well.
As for the memory manufacturers forcing prices down - given the price discrepancy between DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM, there was no way the memory dumping could've easily forced RDRAM prices to be significantly (4x-8x) higher than the equivalent DDR-SDRAM. A better part of a grand for 128MB of RDRAM (while the DDR version sold for under $200) around 10 years ago? DDR prices were much in line with old SDRAM pricing in the days - while RDRAM prices were really out of this world.
Re:A Memory manufacturor (Score:5, Informative)
Rambus makes RAM.
Rambus essentially stole trade secrets / patented info and jury rigged them into various standards, thus making them no longer a secret and the patents unenforceable.
The people behind those secrets and patents got pissed and sued Rambus.
The lawyers have been slapping their cocks together for about 17 years, several of which have been in relation to this case.
There were decisions, there were appeals, and now the end of it is the Supreme Court ruling that lets Rambus get away free and clear.
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:4, Informative)
the government forced lenders to make bad loans
Yeah, unrestrained greed and lack of accountability had nothing to do with it. Banks like PNC, who avoided the feeding frenzy and were laughed at by their peers for not cashing in on the FotM, were substantially penalized by- no, wait, they've actually come out stronger and gobbled up some of their gambling competition....
Re:Secretly patented? (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite. Under some circumstances, a US patent application can remain unpublished for up to eighteen months after filing. See here [uspto.gov].
So it's possible for someone to file a patent application, then choose not to disclose the application for a period of time. I am not sure if this happened in the RAMBUS case - I am just pointing out that patent applications are not always immediately made public.
Re:A Memory manufacturor (Score:3, Informative)
Really? I thought it was more like:
Rambus makes RAM.
Rambus has some patents on some RAM technology, and got this technology included into various standards - without telling anyone that they held the patents.
When everyone started making RAM to meet said standards, Rambus suddenly started asking for royalties on the patents that they hadn't mentioned earlier.
Everyone else got pissed off by this and got the FTC to agree that that's not cricket, but the courts apparently don't agree with the FTC.
The lawyers have been slapping their cocks together for about 17 years, several of which have been in relation to this case.
There were decisions, there were appeals, and now the end of it is the Supreme Court ruling that lets Rambus get away free and clear.