Samsung Settles With Rambus In Patent Dispute 71
Tackhead writes "After almost a decade of legal wrangling, Samsung has settled with Rambus over the antitrust case, regarding allegations of price-fixing for DDR and SDRAM memory, that was scheduled to proceed this month. (Here is a half-decade-old summary of the twists and turns of the case.) As part of the settlement, Samsung agrees to purchase $200M in Rambus stock, pays $200M in cash to Rambus, plus $25M per quarter for the next 5 years in licensing fees. No immediate word on the implications for Micron or Hynix."
Missing a detail (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, where's my check for having to pay for all of this crap in the form of higher memory prices? So we have some elephant mating going on between Samsung and Rambus -- that's cool and all, I'm sure it'll be great for... innovation... or... something, but if there is evidence of price fixing then why is the government not asking for the terms of the settlement as proof of conspiracy to defraud and prosecuting? This isn't "self-regulation" of the market -- this is "let's get out of here before mom gets home".
Re:Missing a detail (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at it another way.... Perhaps Samsung gets some access to the patents of Rambus. Don't forget Rambus was a serial memory protocol. Everything in the x86 architecture is going serial, be it USB or PCIe. It's simpler to manage for interference. It might lead to better memory technology and if Samsung isn't being a bitch, it might be for the better of all of us.
The only Rambus machine I ever had was a dumpster diven P-IV 1.9GHz with 512Meg RAM. No way to upgrade the RAM because even on eBay RD-Ram was out of price. It's relegated to server duty at a proto-geek friend of mine. However, it was a rock-solid machine.
Perhaps, just perhaps, if Samsung plays this right (and has the patents), memory technology might take a significant advance....
Probably just dreaming... *sigh*
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But going forward, will it matter?
I can't imagine rambus being welcomed in any group developing memory standards ever again. They are likely to be frozen out of any cooperative industry projects. You can not take community work product and run to the patent office more than once without people getting wise.
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Re:Missing a detail (Score:4, Informative)
Rambus had a lot of limitations - like needing "terminator" modules in empty slots. Memory had to be installed in pairs, and it generated a lot more heat than SDRAM - even low-end modules required heatsinks.
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yea but people used scsi
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This isn't surprising, since Rambus's only real product is patent-trolling. Their products have always been shitty, so they make up for it by litigating. This company could not die soon enough.
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I'm not convinced putting a complex interface chip on every module is a good idea. They tend to result in memory modules that are power hungry (read: a pain to cool) and expensive intel have tried this twice (though the second time they only did it with the server/workstation stuff), first with rambus then fbdimm, both times they backed down (the latest xeons have on-die memory controllers that work with plain ddr3).
Plus every extra stage you add to the path between CPU core and memory adds latency, memory
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The only people that get any money are the attorneys. And we consumers get soaked a second time to pay them.
Re:Missing a detail (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, where's my check for having to pay for all of this crap in the form of higher memory prices?
Clearly you misunderstood how the system works. You, the consumer, want to buy an item. The price is set by them, the corporations, at whatever they want. They can try and work together to raise the prices to eff you in the ay, making you pay more. If anyone rats someone else out, or if they are merely discovered, they go to court. They end up paying royalties to another corporation, not you. The government is already making money off HAVING the lawsuit in the first place, so they have no desire to investigate any further. Since profits are down from the lawsuits the ones prices naturally go up. And the winner can raise his prices to match.
Thus, the money stays within the corporate circle, and their falace goes further into your rectum.
Welcome to corporate America.
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Clearly you misunderstood how the system works.
Nah, I understand it just fine. I'm just disappointed.
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Yeah I know.
Look at it this way, you could have been born Hutterite.
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falace
Not even close.
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I believe the federal government did sue Samsung for price-fixing and received some $300 million in fines and prison terms for a handful on Samsung execs. Separately, 40 states attorneys general also sued them. So I believe the answer to your question is that 'your check' went directly to your state/federal government (assuming you are U.S.)
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/case/samsung-dram-settlement.html
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...but if there is evidence of price fixing then why is the government not asking for the terms of the settlement as proof of conspiracy to defraud and prosecuting?
I remember how much more RAMBUS cost, maybe the price fixing was in the other direction, in order to drive them into the ground.
Hey, if that's the case I hope in don't have to send anyone more money for RAM I already bought...
The cake is a lie.
It's OK, I eat it with the spoon that is not... Hoping for net negative calories.
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That's precisely what RMBS alleged.
It's also what the prior AC pointed out: The Feds charged Samsung and settled for $300M [lawyersand...ements.com], and some Samsung suits went to jail.
I loathe RMBS's submarine patent and JEDEC fuckery as much as the next guy, but the DRAMurai were no better. When the judge at the current trial said "Yeah, we pretty much have to let the jury know about the $300M in f
Bah, why couldn't it be lose-lose? (Score:5, Informative)
RAMBUS *spit* used deception to get a global DRAM standard encumbered by their bullshit submarine patent.
The Dramurai fought back with price fixing and collusion to lock RAMBUS out of the market.
They both suck, and the only outcome I'd be happy with is one where they both lose. Don't ask me to explain it rationally, but I'd have even been happier with one where only RAMBUS loses. I guess I just hate the patent bullshit they pulled and what they tried to do with the DRAM market more than what Samsung et al tried to do.
Rambus is still around?? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we correct this error?
Re:Rambus is still around?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the parent was trying to be funny. RDRAM was notoriously prone to errors, and had to use ECC all the time in order to be usable.
So what is the body count? (Score:2)
What I want to know is, how much the lawyers made vs how much these companies actually made, what the court costs paid by our tax dollars were, and if there were any winners in all this!!!!!
If this is innovation at work, then I'll be damned.
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and if there were any winners in all this!!!
The lawyers of course. Whoever else wins or loses is academic, the lawyers *always* get their pound of flesh.
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It's been rumbling on since the start of the last decade. For a time, it was as heated as the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit.
Insane (Score:5, Informative)
The patent system needs major reform to prevent things like this from happening. For those who don't know, Rambus is a patent troll. The short summary of this long saga is as follows:
For years it sat on the board of JEDEC, just as the standards for SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM were being set. It made no suggestions but kept notes. JEDEC rules require that all members disclose their patents. Rambus did not disclose that they had related patents pending. Instead, it tweaked the patent applications to make sure that the upcoming standard would definitely infringe. Never mind the fact that it did not invent anything and the DDR RAM was merely an application of existing inventions to RAM production. But Rambus was granted the patents anyway and went off trolling RAM manufacturers.
It is absolutely disgusting that the system allows people who produce nothing to extort those who actually make things. The best line of business is a patent troll. If you win, you win big. If you lose, the shell company has no assets anyway, so there is nothing to lose.
Re:Insane (Score:5, Interesting)
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail. They paid the largest antitrust fines in the history of the USA. We also have documented proof that they admitted (in regards to RAMBUS) that "all memory will be made this way ... hopefully without the royalties going to RAMBUS".
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3. They just haven't necessarily played nice or avoided doing shady things. That doesn't make them an IP holding company that snaps up patentns with the goal of trolling larger companies.
Re:Insane (Score:5, Informative)
You should dig into the details of the case in depth, more than what you've read on slashdot. RAMBUS did do some shady things, but let us not forget that all the major memory makers plead guilty to price fixing and collusion. Some of their executives went to jail.
No, I don't forget what assholes the DRAM manufacturers were, but it doesn't change one bit what Rambus did either and the OP's summary of rambus' actions is completely correct.
Perhaps it is likely that RAMBUS was not really welcome on JEDEC because the major memory makers knew their patents applied to the technology and wanted to avoid paying royalties.
They didn't apply until rambus changed them in the middle of the JEDEC discussions. "Welcome" or not they were there and did not disclose their patents as required. You'd think that if rambus was on the level and wanted to make sure their royalties were paid, they would have mentioned their patents. But then jedec might not have used that technology, and what good would that do rambus? "Perhaps" (in the same sense as "I imagine") the memory makers knew about the patent; it's 100% certain that rambus did and yet said nothing.
Whatever the truth is, RAMBUS is not a patent troll by any means. They do real R&D to develop legit memory technologies, which is legitimately licensed by manufacturers. And in fact without the use of techniques RAMBUS pioneered, we would not have DDR/DDR2/DDR3.
Oh PLEASE. Chip-to-chip interfaces were already using both edges of the clock and it was obvious DRAM was heading the same way, the "techniques" for doing so were already well established. If not for rambus, we'd still have DDR and successors, because that's what jedec was going for despite rambus' contribution to the committee, which was nothing.
Rambus may not be a perfect example of a patent troll who just buys up other patents, but their behavior of sitting quietly on their patents until years later when products that violate them are ubiquitous then suddenly leaping up and crying foul matches the rest. "Patent submariner" is almost as bad as "patent troll" to me. They're both flagrant abuses of the patent system.
They didn't do as much quality R&D as you may think they did, either. It was Intel who actually did most of the work on figuring out how to make rdram actually work.
Then the memory makers showed they could be even bigger assholes, and got their just deserts. Again, why this should improve my opinion of rambus, I don't know, because it doesn't change anything they did.
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The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; Nintendo isn't the only one either.
Again, I am not saying RAMBUS' hands are entirely clean here - w
RDRAM isn't DDR (Score:2)
The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology?If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; N
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So either Rambus could have disclosed immediately or they could never have sued. Either way that stops the submarine.
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From the press release: "Rambus is one of the world's premier technology licensing companies." It seems to me that even they see themselves as a licensing company, not an R&D company. They did develop stuff in the past, but it doesn't look like they plan on doing much in the future.
I think my hatred and position on this matter can be summed up quite easily: I dislike pricefixers, but I really hate people who abuse the standards systems. And Rambus definitely abused the standards system - they sat on the
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There are two sides to every story. The Rambus side is that everyone else (Micron, Hynix, Infineon, etc.) tried to get Rambus to disclose its patent-pending stuff in JEDEC so they could all say it was public-domain and use it royalty-free. There's the infamous bad-faith memo [rambus.org][1] with the quote from the Infineon guy (pg 5 in the linked PDF): "One day all computers will (have to) be built like this, hopefully without royalties going to Rambus."
To me, that's like the definition of "in bad faith." I'm sure at
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"RAMBUS is not a memory, it is a memory system including controller, bus, interface, protocol and memory. One day all computers will (have to) be built like this, hopefully without royalties going to Rambus."
"Like this" to me refers to the very generic description of a fully integrated (in the sense of 'designed together' not 'integrated on a piece of silicon) memory system. A straightforward statement on the direction the industry was going. That's very different from saying "all computers will have to
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The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves. Rambus made it evolve faster under the assumption that they could get some money by licensing it, but they got nothing (until now). Without the promise of patents and license agreements, maybe
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The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves.
No, it's the fact of the situation that the industry was headed there at the time of rambus' participation in jedec, without rambus' input. Because they didn't give any.
RAMBUS' technology, as desc
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I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on. Rambus surely did sell some crappy memory, but that wasn't the point - the point of their company was to license their tech to real memory manufacturers because it was good and it was at least a year (probably more like 3 in terms of what was needed to actually implement it) ahead of anyone else. If you're saying t
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I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on.
Have you at least been following the case for all these years? Rhetorical question, obviously not. The issues I'm informing you of involving the JEDEC meetings all came out in the lawsuits years ago. See Infineon vs rambus. Rambus never denied that they failed to disclose that they were filing patents related to the
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I followed the case briefly. Rambus allowed JEDEC members to see what they were doing under NDA years before anyone at JEDEC mentioned it.
Holy shit. The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR! Do you understand that these are not even close to the same things?!
So despite your repeated assertion that everyone else had "already thought" of SDR and DDR, no one knows if that is true or not because the NDAs are, well NDAs.
Dude those NDAs are long expired, and information about what
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The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR!
What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR! Your whole post makes no sense because while you seem to know everything about the case, you know nothing about the actual technology!
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What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR!
LOL, seriously? You think "uses both edge of the clock" is the definition of DDR [wikipedia.org], and that means RDRAM [wikipedia.org] "is" DDR? Who the hell told you that? I'm guessing nobody, and this is just your imagination posing as an informed argument again.
No, fool, DDR is "defined" as an entire specification for a memory technology based on SDRAM that encompasses a hell of a lot more than just how many data beats pe
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Did you read past the first fucking line of the WP page, or would that go against your philosophy of not actually learning what you're talking about? Did you notice how nowhere on that page does it suggest that any memory that uses a double-pumped buss is "DDR", and how every specific instance of a DDR memory is one of the DDR SDRAM specs and how no part of the description other than being double-pumped applies to RDRAM? LOL of course you didn't.
Yes it's a "class" as in there are multiple specs. I.e. DDR
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They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you? As far as I know, the courts first said it didn't, then they overturned that, and it went back and forth about 10 times until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
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Wait, I think we agreed on something. My post:
Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
Your post:
They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
So yes, I do understand, since we both said the exact same thing. DDR SDRAM is not RDRAM and it plenty different, but Rambus says that it still uses their tech. What is the problem?
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No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you?
No, like I just said RAMBUS decided that. Not every patent RAMBUS holds is an RDRAM patent. I hope that is simple enough to understand.
As far as I know
You mean, of course, as far as your imagination takes you in a swirling void of ignorance.
until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
Yeah well on the off chance if you get the sudden and unfamiliar urge to educate yourself, maybe you could
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Litigation Access Memory (Score:1)
Really? A *Billion Dollars* for Rambus? Fuuuu! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rambus invented the memory technology in your computer nearly 20 years ago and tried to sell it, but was not able to make any money on it because bigger memory manufacturers a) ripped off their technology and incorporated it into SDRAM and DDR without giving Rambus anything for developing the ideas and technology, and then b) sold SDRAM and DDR below cost for years to prevent anyone from adopting Rambus's own products.
This is an example of the patent and anti-trust system *working as designed*, and all anyo
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You do realize it is bad form to either cite yourself for support, or to cite one party in a fight as an authoritative source? You managed to do both. Congratulations.
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Troll? Really? Someone from Rambus must have gotten mod points. As far as I can tell, Rambus just got one billion dollars from litigating a situation that arose because they sat on patents that they knew were going to be infringed by the new standards being developed. And they knew about the new standards being developed because they sat on the standards board. As for their products, they sucked. No one outside of stupidly rich people, or people with very specific needs who were willing to deal with the Ram
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So their memory may suck, but they're used in two easily available products today.
Well it only sucks for mainstream general-purpose computing.
For embedded applications, RDRAM is actually quite nice, because it gets good performance with a small number of motherboard traces, and in something like a game console having fewer traces and thus maybe being able to have fewer layers on your mobo makes a big difference.
The savings in traces doesn't make much difference in a PC, so the tradeoff there isn't worth it.
Haha (Score:2)
This looks like one of those cases were they are really saying, "Yeah, we screwed you, but please please please take this money so a court doesn't award you nearly as much AND open us up to further suits by consumers or other companies we screwed, since open discovery and an official finding that we did what we did would be very, very bad for us, and will del
Shakes head (Score:2)
This is so sad. Samsung should have *buried* Rambus for their invalid submarine patent.
And then dug them up and nailed them to a very tall building as a warning for other companies that might try making a buck on IP litigation instead of actually having a relevant product.
documenting it on swpat.org (Score:1, Troll)
To build the case for excluding software from patentability, it's important to document the fact that antitrust doesn't offer a solution. If someone can help document this, here's the page on the public swpat.org documentation wiki:
Thanks.
More proof the world has gone insane (Score:2)
Most of Rambus' SDRAM and DDR patents were lifted from the early SDRAM discussions at JEDEC without disclosure as required by JEDEC. They then made a monopolistic deal with Intel to try to shove their overpriced flaky RAM down consumer's throats. Meanwhile, they tried to sue Micron, Infineon, and Hyundai for royalties, in some cases on their own IP. By the time RAMBUS and Intel actually got RDRAM to perform decently, DDR was coming out with inherently cheaper prices, helped by the fact that the manufacturer
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Multiple court rulings since 2000 say you have this reversed, and that is was the memory makers who tried to use a standards setting organization (JEDEC) to capture Rambus intellectual property without paying for it. They conspired to drive RDRAM from the marketplace, then colluded to jack up prices on SDRAM and early DDR. They were convicted in the largest antitrust case ever brought by the US Department of Justice and executives from Samsung, Micron and other companies went to prison while the companies
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You've obviously drank the kool-aide. Did you get all that directly from Rambus.org? Sure looks like it. First off, their record in court has been mixed at best, and while there have been multiple settlements, a settlement is not the same thing as a win, and the settlements would not likely have occurred if not for the illegal willful destruction of evidence. Second, if they are so undeniably the innocent victim, why did they destroy evidence? It was a travesty of justice that just the Micron lawsuit was di