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."
Can be dealt with (Score:2, Interesting)
Open standards should be immune from patents, if anyone believes that their patent will be infringed they should bring it up during the standards process.
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:1, Interesting)
>>>RAMBUS became instantly evil in the eyes of many with the news of their misdeed.
I'm sorry but I don't see how RAMBUS did anything wrong. They developed a technology and collected royalties on it. That's no different than what HD Radio does when they collect royalties on every HDR digital radio sold, or when the DVD Consortium collects royalties on every disc sold, or when Sony/Philips collects royalties on every CD sold, or when JVC collects royalties on every VHS sold, or .....
What is wrong with companies collecting royalties on the products that invented?
I see why the FTC lost (Score:4, Interesting)
The FTC argued in court papers filed in Washington that Rambus âoewaited to assert its patent interests until the new standards had been widely implemented.â The agency said Rambus then âoedemanded stiff royalties from makers of the great majority of computer memory chips.â
I thought this case was about Rambus filing patents for ideas that were brought up during the committee planning of the memory standard. That would mean that their patents are invalid, and that they essentially stole them. But that doesn't seem like what the FTC based their case on. The article makes it look like all Rambus did was wait to assert their patents, which is jerkass but perfectly legal.
Am I confusing this with another case?
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is that they hid the fact that they had a patent on a part of a specification that they were a committee member in creating. While they had their own specification.
First of all, conflict of interest, though everyone knew RDRAM was dead in computers, because it was frigging expensive. *
Second of all, they tried to use said patent to mess with the common standard, by driving prices up to the same level.
A patent is by definition a monopoly, and thus it's even more clear cut, IMO than the Microsoft anti-trust case.
*They can probably be forgiven, most standards have had pre-standards developed by the companies, numerous engineering standards, experiments, tests, etc. Prior to this, it would be assumed that you weren't some bunch of assholes like that. Even Microsoft didn't do it then. They just ignored standards, or implemented what they wanted which is different (And frankly more honest.)
The fact that this shit wasn't squashed, has probably inspired other companies to be patent trolls.
Re:A Hard Lesson Learned (Score:4, Interesting)
I have the tar. Did you bring the feathers? Good. Let's roll.
Aside-
Ever wonder where common citizens got the tar for their "tar and feathering"? Simple. Tar, which is basically "sticky oil", used to occur naturally. There were lakes of oil/tar just laying-around in random locations, because nobody had a good use for it. Then the industrial revolution happened in the late 1800s, and we burned all the oil/tar in our factories and cars. No more black-colored lakes.
This is why I find it funny when they say "dumping oil is bad". In a natural environment, without humans, oil and tar bubbles out of the ground constantly. Oil is part of the environment. It's as natural as manure.
Re:Old (Score:3, Interesting)
Because, apparently a lot of the design specs in DDR are patented by Rambus (and were part of the old Rambus ram, which is what made it so fast). Rambus was involved in the creation of said design specs, or at least the over-arching standards that led to DDR, and didn't tell anybody that they had patents on these things.
If this is the case, then anybody who has ever sold or will sell DDR ram owes Rambus cash money. This will cause the price of DDR to skyrocket (probably about the same as the old, now defunct Rambus memory), negatively impacting anybody who buys ram in the future.
If that sounds dirty to you, then your Scumbag Tactics Detector(tm) is working within normal operating limits. The FTC's detector is working as well, which is why they brought the suit. Unfortunately they used a weak, and frankly confusing, argument and that is what has been struck down.
The courts don't seem to be saying Rambus is right, they seem to be saying the FTC is a little dense.