Appeals Court Throws Out Rambus Patent Ruling 36
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."
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Senior Judge Ronald Whyte's ruling in the Hynix case was bizarre anyway... I'm glad it got overturned. (He had concluded that Rambus wasnâ(TM)t anticipating litigation when the shredding took place.) Under Whyte's ruling the bar for being convicted as a spoilator of evidence was set impossibly high.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, so the penultimate ruling (the one before this one) was in favor of Rambus?
Also, I thought the courts were supposed to view a party as guilty by default if they destroy evidence.
Yes to your question.
No to your destruction statement. They are not "Guilty" by default unless they were required to retain the
documents. Rambus would be required to retain these documents and the 1200+ email backup tapes
if they were planning litigation, or where a reasonable person could forsee litigation.
Since they were clearly planning litigation as early as 1998, they can't come along in 2006
and say that litigation was unanticipated.
Still, you have to wonder why this company was in such a rush to flush.
Does it even matter anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
And, yes, I speak from painful experience -- I worked on the JEDEC committees that Rambus abused.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, it was around that time when my own company started pushing more on records retention. Probably one of those general management trends of the day - probably some companies got creamed in discovery (consider that this wasn't long after the whole Microsoft email fiasco).
Love all the conflicting management recommendations that this led to. Legal would send out emails like "meet in person, rather than using email" and finance would send out "use electronic tools like email instead of having expensive in-person meetings."
I think the way it ended up shaking out is that most bottom-line employees use email, and most high-level managers that make the kinds of decisions that get companies sued tend to do it all in meetings without minutes.
Legally it is best for a company to have a policy and stick to it - what gets you in trouble is when one division shreds on a perfect schedule, and another doesn't. Then if the first gets sued the second gets used as an example to suggest that the first was planning something nefarious. That may or may not be true.
I almost wonder if this is something that should be the subject of government guidelines. I know that in many industries particular types of documentation have a retention schedule mandated by law (almost always short compared to most litigation). When you think about technology - is there really any reason to ever throw out a document? You could probably build a machine that sits next to a photocopier and which coverts a document to PDF, does OCR, uploads it to a server, and then dumps into a shredder. The server could then do deduplication and index everything (where it originated, where it was tossed, etc). Your document management system would send clean electronic PDFs to the same server, so in the ideal case where the document was printed and then tossed the scanned version never gets retained unless it has writing on it.