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Rambus Found Guilty of Fraud 157

Posted by michael from the Justice-is-blind,-but-uses-SDRAM dept.
Joby Walker writes: "The jury in the Rambus v. Infineon case has found Rambus guilty of fraud in regard to their actions within JEDEC. Infineon was awarded $3.5M in punitive damages, but that has been reduced by the judge due to Virginia Law." Rambus says they'll appeal.
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Rambus Found Guilty of Fraud More

Rambus Found Guilty of Fraud

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  • Minding the store (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Rambus played an underhanded slimeball trick. Everyone who hears the story knows it. Now a jury has heard it, and Rambus is going down in flames. Justice is almost served. That's good.

    But I have a question: HOW could a standards organization allow this to happen in the first place? How difficult is it to have all involved sign a binding agreement releasing all IP embodied in the standard to the public domain?

    Most standards organizations I know of do this religiously. Most ad-hoc industry groups do it. What happened here? NOBODY thought this was necessary? ALL these companies were asleep at the wheel?

    You'll excuse me if I don't show the proper amount of sympathy. In an industry where full knowledge of IP ownership is life or death to a company, SOMEBODY at each of these companies should be fired for not minding the store.

  • The FUD is laid on thick (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ``I attended the whole trial and continue to believe that Infineon's JEDEC charges are completely baseless. Rambus abided by JEDEC's rules despite the fact that these rules have been shown to be confusing, conflicting, poorly communicated and generally not complied with by other JEDEC members. Today's verdict, if allowed to stand, poses a serious threat to all technology companies that try to protect their inventions through our intellectual property laws. It puts innovators at risk of forfeiting their intellectual property rights by simply attending meetings of a standard setting committee.''
    -- Rambus CEO Geoff Tate, quoted from the Yahoo article

    The emphasis is mine. It's amazing how once you start paying attention to what these corporate criminals say, they always bring up how making them responsible for their actions is going to hurt the industry. I swear I've seen this phrase (or will see it) dozens of times, from dozens of different people. "Baseless" doesn't necessarily mean "not true". Notice how he doesn't ever say, "we did not commit fraud" -- rather, he spends most of his time trying to spin everything into FUD.

  • More detailed discussion about this... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... is available on here [kuro5hin.org] on K5

  • Re:There's a difference (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wrong. It's about patent law being pervasive and powerful enough to make this sort of action a worthwhile business risk. As it sits, patent law is bad.

  • Re:wtf michael? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Somehow, I don't think he'll be responding to any of this. That would be consistant with his behaviour detailed in the essay.

  • Re:michael (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now that's interesting... if you will look at the Slashdot homepage, check out how all but two stories are posted by michael. This seems to be more and more the case. Draw your own conclusions.

  • Re:michael (Score:3)

    by shogun ( 657 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @03:28PM (#233670)
    The link in trhe comment above deserves a thorough read before you start hitting it with your mod points.
  • That suggests that Rambus really grovelled to get a license signed with Samsung. I imagine the payments have already stopped.

    Heck, I would have stopped payment as soon as the original decision was handed down. The fee was for licensing patents, and invalid ones aren't. And after today's fraud ruling, heck, a contract obtained under fraud is invalid and I would stop paying, letting Rambus decide if they think they can sue us to get the money.

  • In the long run, I hope that the Patent system "smartens up" in the patents that they actually grant...

    Hope all you want, but our government has seen to it that the PTO has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to stop granting silly and frivolous patents. They get paid for them, and the courts get stuck sorting it all out. There is no accountability on their end. If you want them to shape up, you have to work to change the system.

  • Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent.

    You're not likely to find many CS grads working for peanuts at the PTO. Since the PTO has to support itself (and is used as a revenue source by the government), they have every incentive in the world to grant every patent that comes through there if it hasn't already been patented, regardless of how obvious or silly it is. They are not held accountable for their decisions. They get paid regardless of whether it gets overturned later or not. They also have every incentive to start granting patents in new areas where patents may not even promote innovation (business methods, software, genomics, etc.).

    First of all, we need to take the money out of the equation. If we want patents to be screened well and objectively considered, we need to remove the financial incentive to sell patents like Big Macs. The PTO should be funded by our taxes and it should offer examiners wages commensurate with what they would make working for a commercial company in their chosen field. Otherwise, we will always end up with unqualified or underqualified examiners who won't know what is obvious to one of normal skill in the field of the patent they are examining. If we want the patent system to work properly, we had better be prepared to pay what it costs to make it work properly.

    Second, we should seriously reevaluate the effects that patents really have on innovation in various industries. I can pretty much guarantee that a 20 year software patent does not have the same benefit to that industry that a 20 year pharmaceutical patent or biotech patent might have in those industries. We should rethink term lengths for the various types of patents as well as whether certain types should be granted at all.

    Until these things happen, the patent system will continue to be a mess that siphons resources off to the lawyers that could be better spent hiring more people in the various industries as well as doing more R&D in order to produce real innovations rather than just patenting every silly incremental improvement that someone thinks up.

  • Easy, look his/(her) user info:
    http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=wu rk

    1.-Posting the same accusation 5 times counts as trolling, isn't it?

    2.-It's the only thing he posted. Maybe the account was made solely for the purpose of accusing Michael.

    3.-All the web references come from a single, biased source.

    4.-It's childish and ridiculous to be washing dirty laundry in public like this. If this is an example of they teamwork, this pitiful end is what they went after and deserved :( Sadly, because the cause was -is- noble.

    5.-Yes, Michael must take his time to write a better explanation in the censorware site, and all the other guys would be better ushing their energy and time in the fight aganst censorware instead of fighting Michael, it's more whorty the former.
  • Patent laws ENCOURAGE Innovation because it ensures that people can reap the rewards of successful R&D, and can recoup the money they invest.

    Yes they are very useful, but only when the patents are legitimate and are used to their intended purpose. These days anything under the sun is patentable (assuming it runs on a Sun, hehe, owww, bad joke...), business methods, code... Patents were also meant to encourage development and innovations, where people can build devices and other ideas (possibly patentable as well) on top of your patents, they're not supposed to be used by huge corporations to club their competition when the going gets tough.

  • You're right. Patents should help real innovations but that means a company has to have a REAL innovation. :-)
  • Rambus got into this trouble by ignoring the simple rule that if you're on a standards committee, it's your job to tell that committee if any standard being proposed -- whether by yourself or others -- is a technology you are in the process of patenting.

    Quite simply, there are only two possibilities here: Either (a) YOU are fraudulently encouraging others to adopt your technology while patenting it behind their backs, or (b) other people came up with the idea independently -- which really kind of blows that 'obviousness' thing in patent law out of the water, doesn't it!
  • The judgement that Rambus had committed fraud will almost certainly be used by another judge in a patent dispute. I'm no lawyer, but I'm fairly sure that if a patent was obtained thorugh fradulent means, that may be grounds for invalidating it.

    Patents aren't evil at all - they're absolutely necessary, when properly applied, to protect the individual inventor. Without them, it would be completely impossible for most small manufacturers/business to remain in business. Sure, the system has problems, but patents are inherently good, just, and valuable.
  • It just seems like a funny tech song that has the same phrase at the bottom of every Chorus:

    "and RamBus says... ...they'll appeal."

  • There's a difference (Score:5)

    by unicorn ( 8060 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:14PM (#233680)
    between the laws being bad, and the laws being badly applied.

    Personally, I don't have any problem at all, with companies being able to patent, and profit from their inventions.

    This case was all about a company suckering an entire industry into using their ideas in a standard. Then after the standard is widely adopted, and prohibitively expensive to back away from, the pop out with a patent that everyone is now in violation of. It's not about patent law being bad, it's just about sleazy business practices.
  • Seems a pity noone completely mirrored the website so they can tell Michael to just fuck off. Michael appears to be extremely childish according to the account in the article. It would be nice to hear an account from Michael in response to this article but it's quite possible (probable? hope not) that the childish behaviour is true and only abuse of the /. moderation system will happen instead.

    --
    Delphis

  • Re:Why a damages Cap? (Score:5)

    by Samrobb ( 12731 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @05:35PM (#233682) Journal

    Looser pays winner's court cost? No, thanks. Big Hairy Corp would probably consider it a small investment to spend that additional 100K intimidating you by keeping you in court for a year or two. Yeah, you get your money back... but you've lost time, sleep, and gained nothing but stress over it.

    Also... heaven forbid that you are the one to bring suit against BHCorp... you had better be damn sure you will win, because you sure as hell can't afford to pay their legal bills.

    "Looser pays" only works if the two litigants have roughly the same assets. Once you get into a huge disparity, the side with the most money wins, because they cn afford to litigate in order to gain advantage, whether or not they win.

    Now, if the proposal was "looser pays winners court costs, up to the amount that the looser spent in court", then you've got something that might work. If BHCorp spends $10,000,000 suing me, and I spend $1,000 defending myself and loose... well, I owe my lawyer $1,000, and BHCorp $1,000 towards their court costs. If I win, they have to shell out an additional $1000 to cover my court costs.

    Overall, I think this is a better solution... the more you spend to try and win a case, the more you risk loosing.

  • Now, if the proposal was "looser pays winners court costs, up to the amount that the looser spent in court", then you've got something that might work. If BHCorp spends $10,000,000 suing me, and I spend $1,000 defending myself and loose... well, I owe my lawyer $1,000, and BHCorp $1,000 towards their court costs. If I win, they have to shell out an additional $1000 to cover my court costs.

    Nice! I like it. When I become dictator of the world, I'm going to adopt what you just proposed.


    ---
  • I got 1.17 billion. Neat. Hopefully they are shelving this stuff on the top floor of their building, so it will eventually crush them into the ground.

  • Patents not a "right"... (Score:5)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:27PM (#233685)
    Companies have got to realize patents are not a "right", they are a favor granted by goverments.

    Not so they can get rich by extorting others who are actually innovating by pushing a lot of paper.

    And rambus pushes a TON of paper. For Q2, Rambus's legal bill was $7.3 million! I leave it to you to imagine the amount of paper that buys.

    Rather, patents are a favor granted to benefit we the people with better products at lower rates.

    Companies screaming about being robbed and having their "rights" violated (in this case by members of a jury of americans) should remember, those rights are there to serve us, not you.

    Legit companies should be getting in to stop patent insanity, lest we (and crazy hippy protestors) throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    This ruling does me good. Any way we can contact the judge and send him chocholates?

  • and also bumped into RMS in the .org pavillion. Doesn't that qualify?

    When you and RMS were "bumping", where you fulling clothed and/or horizontal? Then it might count as better than sex.
  • True or not, RAMBUS managed to get busted. Think of it this way... the speed limit on most US freeways is 55 or 65 mph. Most people get off scot free. The most flagrant violators tend to get caught more often. The average speeder occasionally gets caught (depending on the time of the month due to "non-existent" quotas) and/or how much the local police need the cash.

    RAMBUS got caught with its hands in the cookie jar. Is RAMBUS the average "Joe" company bends the rules just like everybody else, or the FLAGRANT bully in desparate need of a smack down... you decide.
  • You're not refering to the unified memory model are you? The concept was valid but only a small portion of people would use streaming video continuously. Given that latency caused issues in the other 95% of tasks (compilation etc), then the trade-offs was not worth it.

    If you wanted to process video off a server or have continuous video streaming overlay on textures, an O2 was perfect ... but not otherwise.

    LL
  • RAMBUS is going to appeal? Heck, Infineon ought to appeal the Virginia limitation of damages cap - shouldn't the cap be {damages + legal fees(trebled)} just to keep these bozos from frivolous suits?
  • "Looser pays" only works if the two litigants have roughly the same assets.

    this is only true if your legal system is up for sale.

  • I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!

    Not so unexpected. All one had to do was read the answer and summary judgment motions. Those arguments survived through trial for a reason.
  • You are objectively wrong on this point, as wrong as can be. It is a matter of record that the jury made no finding that the patent was invalid. Period.

    Even if the judge were to hold Rambus' conduct (which the jury DID hold to be fraudulent) sufficient to give rise to a declaratory judgment of unenforceability, AND even if the Federal Circuit were to reverse existing precedent on unenforceability, this would not support the preceding remark suggesting the patent should not have issued.

    A patent is issued, or not, based solely on the state of the prior art. Period. The patent office can determine invalidity of a claim, but not unenforceability of a claim were a patent to be granted. The patent office is without statutory and constitutional authority to make determinations that any ancilliary conduct would give rise to unenforceability.

    So, sorry, you're just wrong. The patent system worked fine.
  • Yeah, the legal system sucks. Its the worst system on Earth for resolving commercial disputes, until you consider the alternatives.

    I agree that there are few things dumber for two brilliant CEO's to do than to conclude that their high-tech disputes must be resolved by six random people off the street.

    But these CEO's reached that conclusion. There were mediations, arbitrations, all sorts of efforts made to help the parties find some middle ground. None was to be had.

    One competitor thought the other had engaged in fraud, the other thought the first had stolen their property. Rather than hiring soldiers or private police, they hired lawyers.

    Here the patent system did the right thing. Rambus appears entitled to the patents they had, and the defendants appear not to have infringed those patents. The legal system, apart from the patent system, found certain commercial conduct to be fraudulent. This may ultimately feedback to limit the enforceability of the patent, maybe not.

    The system worked because it answered the parties questions after a fair process; questions they couldn't resolve any other way.

    If you know a better way to assure these results are properly and fairly adjudicated, I'd love to hear what you have in mind.
  • If you say so. For the record, this case has nothing to do with software patents. Reasonable people may disagree, but the broad consensus for hard science patents is that the patent system has superbly aided the flow of capital to technology intensive projects, and facilitated the broad disclosure and use of the same. Yes, of course, ANY RIGHTS AT ALL, tangible or intangible, property or personal integrity, will lead to disputes, and some plaintiffs are supposed to have lost -- one way to deter litigation is to adopt the simple rule:

    All plaintiffs lose.

    or its converse

    All plaintiffs win.

    Either rule leads to grave injustice. The absence of rights altogether leads to anarchy.

    As I said, we have the worst system in the world, until you consider the alternatives.

  • Re:Well, finally! (Score:5)

    by werdna ( 39029 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @03:48PM (#233695) Journal
    It's been beaten to death on /. but the stupid patent laws have to go! This is at least a step in the right direction. I hope the trend continues.

    Seems to me that the consensus here is that the patent system and courts worked just fine in this case.
  • I too see the ideals of patent theory as being valid. However, patents must not be issued for trivial inventions, as has been done far too much lately, and companies that abuse their patents should lose their rights to them. For example, RAMBUSt w.r.t. JEDEC and Unisys w.r.t. LZW compression.
  • If, as the article implies,
    > Samsung Electronics Co. can stop paying SDRAM and DDR royalties to Rambus if a court in any geographic region of the world determines that any company does not infringe the synchronous patents.

    ...then I'd love to have a tap on RMBS's phones first thing tomorrow morning, when Samsung's landshark comes a-callin'.

    Going back to my other comment [slashdot.org] on this issue, I'd wager 500 quatloos that the phrase "flying fuck through a rolling doughnut" is uttered.

    Any takers?

  • > Someone invented sex, or had it, or did it or what ever you want to call it. The Karma Sutra extened it. I want to meet the guy working on what's better than sex.

    I saw Linus do a keynote address at LinuxWorld, and also bumped into RMS in the .org pavillion. Doesn't that qualify?

  • > 3.5% royalty for DDR? That's a mighty big incentive for companies to fight back.

    No, that's a mighty big incentive for companies to build RDRAM instead of DDR.

    Getting SDRAM royalties would have been icing on the cake for RMBS - their goal all along was the elimination of DDR, whether by hook ("All your bus are belong to us!" infringement suits) or by crook (punitive royalty fees on anyone who falls for the "hook"). Frankly, I'd see the 3.5% royalty on DDR as an action bordering on antitrust.

    But it's all moot, thanks to this ruling.

    RMBS has a right to royalties on RDRAM. They invented RDRAM and can license the tech.

    RMBS can go take a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut when it comes to royalties on SDRAM and DDR.

    If the market decides that DDR provides better performance over RDRAM, then RMBS goes bankrupt. They invented a technology that the market decided not to adopt. Tough tittie for them.

    Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of shitweasels.

  • don't forget - OJ was not guilty of murder, but still lost the civil trial and had to pay $$$ - he was financial responsible for the murders, but not guilty of them....

    ----
  • BTW...

    That's German for, "The, Rambus, The!"
  • All the companies who wimped out to Rambus must just be seething right now...

    *can just see their law offices right now*

    "what do you mean we couldn't win???!!!"
  • You forget that the price of extortion is not constant.. it increases.

    Had a nice little code chunk.. but the lameness filter wouln't let me post it.. oh well..

  • Re:Why a damages Cap? (Score:3)

    by JoostT ( 88174 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @11:25PM (#233704)
    In the Netherlands you do get court costs awarded, only they are not the real costs but a statutory amound depending on the number of court meetings and how complicated the case was. A typical court case will cost (in court costs) about $ 1000. No way you can pay a lawyer with this. It stops people from bringing lawsuits and gives negotiating a much bigger appeal.

    Joost
  • Actually, the claim is true, but what you fail to realize is that this is the motto of their legal department, not their technologists.
  • Hey luser^WDude, next time you fire up vi or type a shell command, try using ^W to erase the last word. Saves counting letters.

    Sheesh.

    p.s. GAT: E+++

  • Rambus RAM (RDRAM) is not all that bad. As a technology, it's pretty good. It's not something i would choose for my workstation, but for high bandwidth uses it's very good. I, for one, would like to see an Athlon RDRAM chipset for scientific computing.. or an Alpha one. When you're not making enough money and decide that you're going to try and blackmail everyone else in your marketspace instead of building a better competing product, then you lose all of my respect. Rambus got what it deserved.
  • M-CAM's Patently Obvious report on Rambus discusses a lot of the patent issues going on with Rambus and their intellectual property position (or lack thereof):

    http://www.m-cam.com/patentlyobvious/20010223_ramb us.pdf [m-cam.com]

    An interesting thing is that this report was issued back on February 23rd. Rather interesting reading it now, in light of what has happened recently.

    M-CAM also has other reports that they have posted (for free) on high profile patent cases. There's a list at:

    http://www.m-cam.com/patentlyobvious/contents.html [m-cam.com]

    Companies discussed include: IBM, Qualcomm, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Priceline.com, and British Telecom.

    Some of these reports are favorable for the companies/patents involved. However, a lot of them question the validity of specific patents, and suggest potental prior art problems which could be used to challenge the patents involved.

  • Has anyone considered a new model for patents whereby the length of the patent would be proportional to the amount of research time/money expended? And/or inversely proportional to the hobbling effect of said patent on society? Saying, in effect, 'you can make a profit but you cannot get filthy rich and you cannot impose an undue burden on society'?
  • >Seems to me that the consensus here is that the patent system and courts worked just fine in this case. Erm, are you posting under the wrong story or something? The only reason that this issue is a hot-spot is because the patent system didn't work in the first place, by granting a patent on an invention already commonly in use (sending data on the up and down cycles of memory - in DDR-RAM).The patent system did not work and now the jury has spoken, invalidating the patent. The courts (under the direction of a jury, mind you, not a judge with stock options:) worked to prevail over one of the many flaws in the patent system.
  • The potential risk to lose a patent infringement case and end up paying HUGE amount of settlement money far outweighs the potential risk of winning said case. Therefore if you believe your company has a 70 percent or less chance of winning, you usually settle. That's because you have a 30 percent or greater chance of losing and having to shell out, take a hit on your quaterly numbers, take the bad press, take the stigma, and answer to your shareholders.

    However if you're smart, like most of the companies Rambus sued, you put a nice little "pending the patent challenge being upheld in court" clause that puts you back on the bargining table if things don't pan out for Rambus. That way you cover your ass in case the patent is upheld (cause you already settled), and you root for the company willing to take them on.

    .agrippa.

  • JEDEC Enforcement? (Score:5)

    by mati ( 114154 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:55PM (#233712)
    From http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-5878071.html [cnet.com]:
    Under the organization's rules, Rambus was required to disclose that it had patents that potentially entitled it to royalties for DRAM and DDR DRAM. It didn't. Rambus, however, defended itself by stating that the rules were unclear and not enforced by JEDEC. Evidence uncovered during the case showed that JEDEC's enforcement procedures were less than perfect.
    Some please explain, how is a standards committe supposed to "enforce" disclosure rules? Either you abide by the rules, or you break them and get sued later, right?
  • IANAL, but unless I'm mistaken, fraud is a criminal charge, not a civil matter. If I am found guilty of fraud, I go to jail or pay a heavy fine.
  • Looser pays" only works if the two litigants have roughly the same assets

    I think you could make this work. Modify it a bit though. Loser pays a ratio of winners court costs that is equal to the ratio difference in their net income? That probably still has problems because everyone tries to make it look like they made less than they really did to try to get out of paying taxes.

    It would also be interesting for companies like amazon that operate in the red. The looser could actually make money in this case :)

  • >>Whenever a plantiff brings a suit so laughable it's dismissed, they SHOULD have to pay out the ass.
    >Wow, that would actually be a shitload of money, right?

    No, the losing lawyers, company executives and shareholders should be forced to eat the settlement in the form of nickels, dimes, quarters, and loonies (a.k.a. dollar coin), and have the pleasure of paying out the ass.

  • I know this is from Rambus, but I found the following tidbit interesting:

    "Rambus abided by JEDEC's rules despite the fact that these rules have been shown to be confusing, conflicting, poorly communicated and generally not complied with by other JEDEC members."

    I wonder if that holds any water... perhaps Rambus is the only one that got caught, or at least the only one that has abused their JEDEC rules violations...

    --
  • That line of thinking does hold true when coupled with the strongly held opinion of corporations that its not worth doing if you don't get paid for it.

  • Innovation... (Score:5)

    by AMuse ( 121806 ) <slashdot-amuse@f ... m minus caffeine> on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @01:59PM (#233718) Homepage
    Did you notice in the article that they're citing that this law will slow innovation because people can no longer patent standards?

    It seems to me that companies in court these days are using the word "Innovation" like the boy who cried wolf. If it can't be used to churn a profit, it's stifling innovation. First microsoft bashing GPL and Open Source products, now Rambus.

    "Stifling Innovation" is the newest buzz-word for "We don't like it and we can't profit off it".

    Here, guys. Let me help you out.

    http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=inn ovation
    ----------------------------------------- ---------
  • and in the immortal words of Nelson, HA..ha!

  • RDRAM is also known as Rambus-DRAM. Can't get much more nom-centric than that.

    Except you can't buy "RAMBUS brand" RDRAM. I couldn't even find a link on rambus.com to any retailers selling RDRAM sticks themselves; the "Where to Buy" page [rambus.com] mentions only systems that use Rambus memory.

    A technology development company gains more credibility if it has a "house brand" of hardware. If Rambus wanted a credible claim on SDRAM technology (as opposed to a Lawsuit Company reputation), it could have sold "RAMBUS brand" DDR SDRAM.

  • Sure, it's nice to say that a company should "make things". However, the business model that Rambus (and Lucent, et al) uses is not necessarily flawed. A company dedicated to pure tech research can probably churn out ideas much faster than one also burdened with actually implementing those ideas.

    Well, if Rambus wanted not to have a perception of "a company whose product is lawsuits," it could have structured its business model more like Transmeta's. A company gains a lot more respect if its trademark is the PRIMARY trademark on a widely used product. Transmeta achieves this by contracting work out to fabs and then putting the TRANSMETA CRUSOE name, not some fab's name, on the end product.

    By licensing these patents to manufacturers, a Rambus or Lucent can focus on improving the technologies they already have and creating new ones along the way.

    But by putting its own name on the product, it potentially gains more street credibility with the "information wants to be free" crowd.

  • Re:Innovation... (Score:5)

    by sracer9 ( 126645 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:16PM (#233722)
    Well said. I can't say that I agree with all the companies citing evolutionary advancements as "innovations". It seems to me that the real innovations are getting farther & fewer between nowadays. One that I can think of, and I'm sure some will disagree, is Linux. Not just the kernel, but the kernel and all packages available for it and the whole way they came to be. Worldwide development over the internet of a free OS? With souce code available? No central company behind it? Nothing but a bunch of uber-geeks working on it in the spare time because they believe it? Must be something of a precedent.

    Just my .02
  • Maybe you are mistaken about their meaning of "innovation". Their meaning of innovation is that how they can manipulate the current legal/patents systems and layman perceptions for their own gains. Above all, it is for the innovative ways which they corrupt the word "innovation". Get a clue!

  • Well, there was this one trial in which a large, abusive, monopolistic software company was ruled to have violated anti-trust law, though the appeal is still going on in that one. Something about Macrosoft or Microhard, wasn't it?

  • I agree, and thought of the same thing a while back.

    The word you're seeking is "loser", not "looser".

  • In a separate count, the jury Wednesday determined that Rambus had not violated RICO anti-racketing law

    I suppose that means that they didn't ever discriminate based on tennis or squash or badminton. Or maybe it means that employees were not not forced to be quiet.

    Anti-racketing -- anti-racketeering. Whatever. Maybe anti-ratcheting means the same thing, too.

  • Lesson? Don't attend standard setting committee meetings. Set your own standards.

    This is only a problem if your business plan doesn't actually include making a product, as was the case with RMBS. If you do make a product, then sitting on standards committees is vital. Unless you're MSFT.

  • SGI tried something like this years ago. It wasn't RDRAM, but the memory system was optimized to move large chunks of data through quickly at the expense of latency. What they found was that most of their customers real applications simply didn't work that way.
  • You're not refering to the unified memory model are you?

    No, I'm not. The earlier "PowerSeries" machines had a memory makeup like this. The latency on the O2 was quite short compared to those machines. And actually the O2 was one of the first machines to use SDRAM (albeit on a different form factor). The latency on those systems wasn't all that bad, although it was definitely optimized for streaming video onto cubes. It also kicked butt (for its day) on GLQuake.

  • No doubt Rambus was trying to really rush through a royalty deal. But it would have been crazy for any company to sign without such a disclaimer, especially when there is a good chance of Rambus' royalty scheme being struck down.
  • Heh just a week after my message about rambus, I could rephrase it with lowering the price of the share :) lol

    -10% today, 16,800,000 volume... closed at $12.80 from a high near $120.

    I have one thing to say, SCREW you people who supported such a company, you diserve to be burned. It's not a flame, it's a fact. When it was flying high, it was clear that rambus's buisness practices were questionnable, and one reason this stock rocketed among others was that people thought they would have cash from any kind of memory sold (so a big cash cow). Sorry but other people developped memory as well and other companies spent $$$ into R&D and RAMBUS cannot just steal that IP away. You supported that by investing?

    People who actually bought that thing over 30$, just a rule of thumb, if you're buying a stock with a P/E of over 30-50, either you've got inside scoop on what's gonna happen or you've done serious Due dilligence. FYI, at 15$, the P/E is around 23. at 100$ heh, it's crazy... it's like the .com mania.

    The technology itself isn't all bad and I'd like to see the alpha with 5-channel rambus, that would just SCREAM. But I surely won't support a company who base it's buisness model on screwing it's competitors with self-claimed technologies that they didn't produce themselves at 100%.
  • It seems to me that the real innovations are getting farther & fewer between nowadays.

    So why innovate if you can just evoloute (get a patent, evoloute, get a patent...)? Lots less money to come up with a better way to hyperlink than to come up with the next thing to surpass hyperlinking at all.

    Someone invented sex, or had it, or did it or what ever you want to call it. The Karma Sutra extened it. I want to meet the guy working on what's better than sex.

  • NOT GUILTY!! (Score:5)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:25PM (#233738) Homepage
    This is a civil case. Guilt or innocence is a criminal standard.

    They were found to be liable.

  • If by "just fine", you mean already caused several other companies to cough up protection money in excess of the $350,000 Rambus has to pay now.
  • More than that. Linux would be completely pointless if it wasn't Open Source. More to the point, it wouldn't be Linux.

    /Brian
  • I'll say :-)

    You can't keep a business running like that. Eventually patent fraud will catch up with you, at least if the fraudulent patent is something significant.

    It's like that whole Magnaquench (sp?) thing that was posted earlier today -- they may have a legitimate claim on the patent, but it's suspicious because they're going for deep pockets instead of going after the persons doing the direct infringement. Rambus is going the magnet people one better, though, because they're actually trying to stretch the patent to cover something that it doesn't cover.

    Rambus actually reminds me of a lawsuit brought by a company called Imatec against Apple a couple of years ago over ColorSync. Imatec, as far as anyone could determine, was a one-horse operation that tried to pull a patent shakedown on Apple over color-matching algorithms. They lost, and I don't think they even exist anymore (their website is unavailable as I check right now).

    /Brian

  • Re:Remember...? (Score:3)

    by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @03:42PM (#233743) Homepage
    You realize that such a reasonable, well-thought-out post utterly blows away any aura of psychohood that you might have been working to achieve with a handle like Dancin Santa, don't you?

    RDRAM is interesting from a technical standpoint anyway, since it seems to represent the same philosophy that's leading to USB replacing paralell connections for printers and such: sooner or later, it doesn't matter worth a damn how wide your pipe is as long as you can slam data through fast enough to get where it needs to be. Whether back-burnering latency issues is a productive way to go I don't know; I'm not a sandbender. But it's not a bad idea technically, if you can get it to work. The real question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place; latency or not, you still have to slam the data through fast enough. The question thus becomes not whether it's a good idea, but whether it can be pulled off. So far, Rambus hasn't quite done it (it's all a blur above half a gigahertz anyway) and it doesn't look like they're going to have the chance to.

    /Brian
  • I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!
  • Rambus shares are now trading at 10% of their $127 peak, which occured almost one year ago. Rambus has lost over $10 billion in market capitalization since then.

    However, a number of Rambus executives had the good fortune of selling shares while Rambus was up and made a lot of money [yahoo.com].

  • Okay, while everyone is cheering, let's take a look at this. Only 3.5M? Rambus intimidates half the ram industry into royalties for over a year, and they get hit with a paltry little fine like that? And it's going to be reduced!!! I'd be interested in what their little deals cost everyone, and the ultimate hurt it put on the industry. Rambus should be thrown off a cliff. And have a crate of anvils thrown after. Followed by a stampeeding herd of elephants.

    I think I've made my point.

  • Samsung will be loving this (Score:3)

    by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:41PM (#233751)
    One of the more interesting revelations in this case is that the license Samsung signed includes an out clause (from the article):
    Samsung Electronics Co. can stop paying SDRAM and DDR royalties to Rambus if a court in any geographic region of the world determines that any company does not infringe the synchronous patents.
    That suggests that Rambus really grovelled to get a license signed with Samsung. I imagine the payments have already stopped.

  • Re:michael (Score:3)

    by ZeroConcept ( 196261 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @03:23PM (#233754)
    Where are those mod points when I need them? This accusation deserves an answer.

  • Re:Innovation... (Score:4)

    by sv0f ( 197289 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @05:47PM (#233755)
    The more jealously garded IP is, the less useful it is.

    Large US companies are starting to recognizing the truth of this statement. For example, I have it on good word that the Coca Cola company is about to GPL the formerly-secret recipe for Coke. The slogan will be changed from "ain't nothing like the real thing" to "free as in Coke".

    (The Escobar family is reportedly considering suing over copyright/trademark infringement, filing suit in the US because our court system is much more naive and easily influenced than the Columbian legal system.)
  • The ultimate loss may be the reduction of damages to 350K. This sum is likely too low to keep other companies from filing frivolous and possibly fraudulent patents and then conducting frivolous court action to protect the questionable patents.

    It costs a lot of money to defends oneself against a suit, and it has become quite popular of late to file suit merely to discourage certain activities of certain individuals. Capping punitive awards encourages such waste of the courts time by limiting the exposure to a counter-suit.

  • I think are planning on a new chipset for the Pentium 4 to support DDR RAM. Sorry I have no refrence for this.. Only that Intel is not known for sitting still while the competion does this.. http://www.ebnews.com/story/OEG20000718S0042. I am sure they will compete with this. Too much litigation gives one a black eye.
  • Don't you find it interesting that the punitive damages award, against Rambus, was $3.5 Million, which is 3.5% of the $100 Million damages requested?

    It's rather poetic, when you think about it.

    --

  • George Brett [sportsline.com], of the KC Royals, hit a game winning homerun. Billy Martin, manager of the NY Yankees, charged out of the Yankee dugout and claimed Brett had committed a foul, by having pine tar too far up the bat. The homerun was negated, the Royals lost, the umpire and Martin were vilified.

    There are moments in history when a preposterous defense like, "there was too much pine tar on the bat" or "the rules were confusing" will be summoned. Martin's responsibility was to charge the excessive use of pine tar before Brett hit the ball. Rambus' responsibility was in clearing up and misunderstandings of rules and disclosing their own activities regarding patents.

    --

  • In closing... (Score:5)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @01:54PM (#233771) Homepage Journal
    Rambus Counsel: "Ladies and Gentelmen of the jury, please do not let Rambus' patent applications on 'inhaling' and 'exhaling', and subsequent royalties each of you will be held to pay, sway you from your duty in finding my client free of any wrong doing."

    Excepting Ex-President Clinton, whom only pays half, as he never inhaled.

    --

  • I'll be damned! (Score:3)

    by HongPong ( 226840 ) <hongpongNO@SPAMhongpong.com> on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @01:58PM (#233774) Homepage
    Something constantly complained about on Slashdot actually got its just desserts! Perhaps MS will meet its end and the RIAA will dissolve into puffs of anti-trust legislation... Dream on, you crazy, idealistic nerds...

    --

  • Thank god... (Score:5)

    by Kasreyn ( 233624 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:06PM (#233778) Homepage
    Maybe this will set a precedent to help destroy the "frivolous lawsuits rather than honest work" business model.

    Awww, poor widdle Rambus. Couldn't sue all your competition out of business. Crap! Now you'll have to, like, commit yourselves to making quality products to increase market share. That's gotta suck. Competition is soooo unfair, right guys?

    -Kasreyn
  • >> "Stifling Innovation" is the newest buzz-word for "We don't like it and we can't profit off it".

    Well, of course companies seek to make a profit off of their "intellectual property". As an investor, would you support spending millions upon millions on R&D if you knew that the minute you launched a product, somebody could reverse-engineer it for almost nothing and put you out of business?

    Patent laws ENCOURAGE Innovation because it ensures that people can reap the rewards of successful R&D, and can recoup the money they invest.

    Without Patent protection, companies would be much more leary about investing so heavily in new technology development.

    However, I agree that there's limits... some of the patents that get granted are downright silly and obvious. There's got to be a limit to what's patentable, but there still has to be patents.

    MadCow.

  • Rambus, after failing to deliver a superior product or a better price with their RDRAM, proceeded to go after every SDRAM maker under the sun. 3.5% royalty for DDR? That's a mighty big incentive for companies to fight back.

    A slightly less predatory pricing scheme might have alienated less companies and given them a solid base of royalties for quite a while. Now, if other companies have contract clauses similar to Samsung, they stand to lose big money from companies they thought they had in the bag.

  • "I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!"

    "A Blaster is a fine weapon, but the barrel points both ways" -Salvor Hardin (from Issac Asimov's "Foundation", my all time favorite Sci-fi work).

    FINALLY, a plantiff bringing a groundless suit gets the shaft! It should be that way. Whenever a plantiff brings a suit so laughable it's dismissed, they SHOULD have to pay out the ass.

    Wonder how low RMBS will be tomorow :) Burn baby burn!

    Anyone who has followed this story since Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com) first revealed RAMBUST to be inferior to PC133 SDRAM on PC's, and his revalations about RAMBUST's JEDEC shennanigans shouldn't be surprised... Except by the rationality and competence of this judge and jury.

    Too bad this court didn't have the DeCSS case....
  • "One that I can think of, and I'm sure some will disagree, is Linux. Not just the kernel, but the kernel and all packages available for it and the whole way they came to be. Worldwide development over the internet of a free OS? With souce code available? No central company behind it? Nothing but a bunch of uber-geeks working on it in the spare time because they believe it? Must be something of a precedent. "

    If Linus had been Rambus or Microsoft, he'd have tightly copyrighted and patented his kernel...

    And Linux would have nowhere near the users it has today...

    The more jealously garded IP is, the less useful it is.
  • "t's worth noting that what Rambus got slammed for was lying to the JEDEC committee about whether it planned to patent the technologies it was proposing for the standard. Unfortunately, this does not touch on their right to sue everyone who ever manufactured a RAM chip for patent infringement."

    Au Contraire!

    This has a CHILLING effect on any future RAMBUST Goon tactics. This is a damming precedent. RAMBUS can now be called "that fradulent IP company".

    It doesn't stop them from FILING lawsuits, only because ANYONE can sue ANYONE for ANYTHING at ANYTIME in our wonderful (fucked up) US "justice" system.

    However, this case is precedent and "case law" that will erect a VERY high wall that RAMBUS will have to pole vault to get their cases heard and decided in their favor.

    This judge/jury must have been REALLY horrified by what RAMBUST was up to...
  • "The ultimate loss may be the reduction of damages to 350K. This sum is likely too low to keep other companies from filing frivolous and possibly fraudulent patents and then conducting frivolous court action to protect the questionable patents. "

    Could be, but there are still potential CRIMINAL charges that could come from this.

    However, this will have a far worse effect on RAMBUST... Now every company paying them royalties for SDRAM/DDR now has cause to STOP doing it..

    RAMBUST has been found GUILTY of fraud!

    Without license fees, the RAMBUST legal machine will collapse.
  • "Simple fix: the PTO shoud not get any money from granting patens, the fee shoud be the same no mather if it was granted or not."

    I like that idea ALOT... I'm all in favor of government services, IF, the users bear the brunt of the costs. Though doing this might in fact, end up lowering the average cost of a granted patent, it would take away any incentive for the USPTO to be biased towards granting patents because they'd make more money.

    Ergo, the middle-management deskbound chairwarming paper pusher types would be less inclined to pressure the worker drones to grant such-and-such number of patents so as to make the budget...
  • It's worth noting that what Rambus got slammed for was lying to the JEDEC committee about whether it planned to patent the technologies it was proposing for the standard. Unfortunately, this does not touch on their right to sue everyone who ever manufactured a RAM chip for patent infringement.

    I personally see patents as being a useful and even necessary evil in a capitalist world, but our own patent office has gone completely off its rocker in the last couple of decades. This bitchslap would have been much more satisfying if it had been for the fraudulent act of suing everyone in sight over something that obviously should never have been patentable in the first place since it was clearly described in prior art.

  • Remember what I said earlier [slashdot.org]? Uhh... forget it..

    Seems I was a little too irrationally exuberant.

    Dancin Santa
  • The main reason of my previous support for Rambus was because they still completely control RDRAM which may have become a much more popular RAM architecture some time in the near future. Even after the previous ruling, RDRAM didn't face any obstacles just because Rambus didn't have any control over DDR/SDRAM. However, with this latest ruling, Rambus has been shown to be the bad kid on the block, someone not to be associated with. Rambus itself has hence become the biggest obstacle to RDRAM.

    Dancin Santa
  • Sure, it's nice to say that a company should "make things". However, the business model that Rambus (and Lucent, et al) uses is not necessarily flawed. A company dedicated to pure tech research can probably churn out ideas much faster than one also burdened with actually implementing those ideas. By licensing these patents to manufacturers, a Rambus or Lucent can focus on improving the technologies they already have and creating new ones along the way.

    However, Rambus managed to ire the entire industry and will now suffer from the industry's lack of support. No support == no contracts == no money.

    Rambus was a smart idea that was implemented in possibly the worst possible way. They positioned themselves as the 'gatekeepers' to memory production, but through their actions completely turned the rest of the memory industry against them.

    Dancin Santa
  • Well, of course companies seek to make a profit off of their "intellectual property".

    It's not exactly that-- it's more things like Microsoft saying "Open Source will Stifle Innovation" or Rambus saying "Not Allowing Us to Break the Rules We Agreed To Will Stifle Innovation" that bug me. The original poster's right. Computer companies are beginning to use "innovation" the same way the government politicians use "national security" to justify so many of the silly things they do.

  • Cleaned up news... ;) (Score:5)

    by Obliqueness ( 321184 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2001 @02:37PM (#233814) Homepage
    The article's quote from Rambus' CEO...

    "Today's verdict, if allowed to stand, poses a serious threat to all technology {litigation} companies that try to protect their {obvious} inventions through our intellectual property laws {that we paid good money for}. It puts innovators {10^H, litigators}at risk of forfeiting their intellectual property rights {6^H, racket} by simply attending meetings of a standard setting committee {and misleading them about your technology, to sucker them into accepting it as a standard}.

    hehe, PR statements are fun to play with...

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