Appeals Court Throws Out Rambus Patent Ruling

angry tapir writes "A US appeals court has ruled on two patent lawsuits that pit Rambus against two competing DRAM makers, sending both cases back to district courts for reconsideration. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a lower court ruling requiring Hynix Semiconductor to pay Rambus damages and fees totaling US$397 million for the use of its patents in DRAM chips." Here's the issued opinion (PDF) in Hynix v. Rambus. The opinion in the other case (PDF), pitting Rambus against Micron, contains this juicy snippet: "On August 26, 1999, Rambus held the 'shredding party' it had planned as part of its third-quarter intellectual property litigation readiness goals. Rambus destroyed between 9,000 and 18,000 pounds of documents in 300 boxes."

Re:The real reason for all the litigation

[Sun]

This case is about hardware patents, not software ones. The economics controlling those are difference.

For one thing, the costs of producing chips is so high, that if you can afford those, you can afford to go to court over patents. The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement (which amounts to about $70K if you count lost wages, less if you just count the food and lodging you consume) to produce a decent, market worthy software product. Compare that with the ~$5 million it costs to defend against a patent suite, and you see how that is a problem. It costs $1 million just to create a tape-out for ASIC production, which is just one part of the production chain, and does not include the development and testing costs.

This particular case is not about "dummy" patents. It is about a party signing RAND and participating in a committee that develops new technology, while at the same time discreetly patenting that very same technology. This is a simple case of misdirection and theft. The patents in this case are just the tool with which this misdirection took place.

Shachar