Decades-Old Rambus Litigation Against Micron For RDRAM Tech Reaches Settlement 82
An anonymous reader writes "The decades-old Rambus litigation against Micron for RDRAM tech finally reached a settlement. RDRAM tech has already been licensed by NVidia and Broadcom and has been used in game consoles such as the Nintendo 64. The preliminary deal is to last 7 years and net $280M for Rambus and Micro to gain access to patent licenses defining the technology."
Now I feel old. (Score:5, Funny)
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If it's "decades old" how the hell is the bogus patent even still valid?
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Informative)
Statute of limitations only applies to when a case can be filed. A trial can go on for years past the statute.
Dead Patents (Score:1)
How can Rambus now 'licence' dead patents? Surely now the company must be wound up and consigned to the trash can of history.
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Because they still have the pay the judgement of the case.
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Actually, it is in trouble these days - neither the PS4 nor the Xbone use RDRAM anymore. Before that, Rambus made a ton of money for RDRAM inside the PS2 (the best selling console in the world, period) and XDR-DRAM in the PS3.
But now the PS4 uses GDDR5, and the Xbone uses regular DDR3.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly,
Join a consortium to develop a standard, sneak out at a quarter to four and patent the whole thing behind everyone's back and start throwing sue balls at everyone. They never had an original idea, or a working product.
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They forced them to license the name and put it on those products. Rambus never manufactured anything.
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They forced them to license the name and put it on those products.
How exactly was either Dell or Intel "forced" to license RDRAM and ship it?
Rambus never manufactured anything.
Nice goalpost shifting.
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They never had ... a working product.
And the most recent observation
They forced them to license the name and put it on those products.
Would be quite consistent with the original statement. Just because Rambus's logo is on a product doesn't mean it is a Rambus product. There is no shifting of goalposts here.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Insightful)
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What you're saying is that the NFL doesn't have a product because the products are the teams that are NFL licensed franchises and the NFL itself is just a logo without a product.
Yes. Licensing is not a product. Actual products would be the providing of refereeing officials for games and the establishing of a common body of rules for the game (including out of game stuff like the treatment of visiting teams, media, and spectators).
A product can simply be a license to a design.
A design that Rambus didn't actually have a part in aside from owning blocking patents.
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I think that this analogy is like explaining the birds and the bees with actual birds and bees. It's like pea soup as an analogy for patents -- strained. So the lawsuit is like a 10 yard penalty, illegal use of the hands -- but they actually gain the yardage in a game 12 years later?
I also think that RAMBUS is a horrible name for a football team.
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Which is not the same as "not having a working product". There clearly was a working product since others were able to manufacture RDRAM.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:4, Informative)
You are assuming that the final manufactured product actually matched the Rambus design, rather than being a different design that just happened to be patent encumbered.
I only have hearsay from people that worked on this stuff, but it all agrees on the fact that Rambus did not have a working design.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Insightful)
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RDRAM itself is an original idea. Synchronous memory and double clocking were not. Rambus acted in bad faith by participating in the JEDEC process to standardize SDRAM and then backing out to create patents on technologies they learned about from that participation that would be applicable to emerging JEDEC standards. For that they deserve to wither into bankruptcy. I'll never design their devices into a product.
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Didn't they think of that when they were planning the standardisation process? This stuff clearly wasn't public knowledge (or it would be prior art re. patents), so surely they knew this was a risk...
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was referring to the implication that they were still licensing the patent. I get now that it basically meant retroactively.
As for why it's bogus, I thought we all new the story. They snaked the patents out from under the development group. Probably legal, still a scumbag move.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Informative)
You're badly misunderstanding people's gripe with this whole thing. Of course the patents were valid. The whole point of the consortium was to come up with a non-patented standard, so when Rambus went behind everyone's back and patented the whole shebang of course there was no prior art. The other memory makers had gone out of their way not to patent it.
And FYI, JEDEC won against Rambus in their lawsuit - Rambus was guilty of patenting stuff which was being discussed in secret at JEDEC. The problem was Rambus was only guilty of violating the terms of membership for JEDEC. The lawyers who drafted the membership agreement neglected to put in any penalties for patenting stuff behind everyone else's back, and as a result the only recourse JEDEC had was to kick Rambus out. There were no federal or criminal charges because they didn't break government law, they broke JEDEC's rules. The patents were still valid though, even though Rambus effectively stole them, because the there was no prior art and the USPTO decided it was patent-worthy.
Speaking of which, do you really think DDR is worthy of a patent? Counting a clock tick not just when the voltage goes up, but also when the voltage goes down? That should be obvious to a 5-year old.
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What Rambus did (and lost in court on) was create additional pa
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No, what happened is Rambus has the patents already applied for. They
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Rambus knew that they were intentionally deceiving the standards committee into using patented technology that they did not disclose.
How is Rambus not liable for fraud [wikipedia.org] in this case? Surely there must be more complexity to it?
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Re:Now I feel old. (Score:5, Informative)
The Rambus debacle actually pre-dates Slashdot.
The patent cat fight started in 1990, and slashdot started in 1997. It was old news by the time it was first mentioned on Slashdot.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:4, Informative)
This particular debacle started in 1990. In 2000, Rambus filed lawsuits against every memory manufacturer in a much larger debacle. That's the debacle that dominated Slashdot for months and contributed to a huge influx of users.
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Had you clicked the link in the summary you would have seen this as the second sentence:
The two have been mired in litigation since 1990, which is when Rambus first sought license fees and threatened infringement lawsuits against memory makers who turned to the popular SDRAM standard over its own.
Rambus started suing immediately after they formed the company.
Re:Now I feel old. (Score:4, Informative)
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I remember Intel trying to stuff some stupidly expensive, high latency RD-RAM down our throats around '99-2000 in some sort of deal with Rambus (a company probably even more unethical than Intel) where they both would win and consumers... not so much...
Anyway, depending on how you see it, "decades old' is either an exaggeration, or a very appropriate statement, in line with the usual factual and to-the-point slashdot summaries.
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Well, there was probably one or two optimizations in RD-RAM that seemed meaningful over "regular" RAM at the time (probably had to do with timing and read/write operations, though- didn't RD-RAM read on both up-tick and down-tick of clock cycles, or something like that?), and Intel thought it'd really make the Pentium 4 a powerhouse system. Except Intel really overreached with the P4 (and Itanium was developed around then too, right?), and forgot the most important part about RAM, that being the "Random Acc
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You missed a step in the P3 -> Core, which was the Pentium M. Intel was pretty much forced to build it, because power hungry P4's sucked in laptops.
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You missed a step in the P3 -> Core, which was the Pentium M. Intel was pretty much forced to build it, because power hungry P4's sucked in laptops.
I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).
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I'm writing this on a laptop with a 1.6GHz Pentium M CPU. Speed wise, its about equivalent to a P4 2.4GHz, most due to (I think) a shorter pipeline and 2MB of full speed cache.
It still works pretty well. Struggles a bit now with high bitrate h264 though.
Not bad for a laptop from 2004.
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Getting "gobs" of RD-RAM involved fat modules.
Aside from muck-raking HP, The Register also did a lot to raise public awareness of problems with Intel in the P4 era.
Caminogate failure finally explained [theregister.co.uk]
RD-RAM was supposed to support three slots, but they couldn't make it work. It was one fiasco after another.
Mercifully, we got AMD64 out of the deal and a healthy competitor until Intel's Israeli team kicked out the CoreDuo.
Intel subsequently played the UEFI card, but it's a dim echo of their original agenda.
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You also forget that the adoption of Pentium 4 didn't actually take off until the release of the Intel i845 chipset, which allowed the usage of good ol' DDR SDRAM. With that, a P4-based system didn't cost in excess of $1800.
RDRAM was an albatross around Pentium 4's neck except in very few usage scenarios. You're right though - the super deep pipelines that only existed to ramp the clock rate sky high meant that a whole lot of clock was wasted on branch prediction failures. The so-called NetBurst architec
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I remember back in 2000 when Rambus was the most hated company on Slashdot. Everyone hated Microsoft, but at least acknowledged that they were producing products. Rambus was just a dirty parasite.
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I keep reading posts on here talking about how god damned expensive RD-RAM was in the early 2000s and I just don't seem to remember it ALWAYS being that expensive, especially in summer '02
The price of RD-RAM came in line with DDR once the P4 got a chipset that could support DDR (which was after the athlon, which was already laying down the smack). Which of course pointed at the underlying agenda... Locking up who could manufacture the technology so the profit margins could be controlled. (see socket 8 licen
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I remember this from way too long ago. I figured it had wrapped up years ago. Was surprised to see it's just now reaching settlement. This was even before OJ's low-speed chase...
Hot Grits Indeed! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Six digits? What a bunch of n00bs... ;0
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Kids these days!
Now where's that naked, petrified Natalie Portman with the goatse link?
This is horrible news (Score:5, Informative)
This is absolutely disgusting. Rambus is the ultimate patent troll. For those not familiar, here is some history.
Back in the 90's, Rambus became a member of JEDEC, an industry consortium of RAM manufacturers. JEDEC rules require members to disclose any patents that are relevant to the technology being discussed. Rambus didn't. It sat in on the meetings, listened, and modified its pending patent applications to cover DDR RAM. After the new RAM standard was adopted, Rambus surfaced its submarine patents and started suing everyone left and right.
Add to that the fact is that Rambus itself does not manufacture anything -- it's a technology licencing house that has a few engineers and an army of lawyers -- and you get a perfect example of a patent troll.
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Why wouldn't the companies being sued use that information in their defense then? Or rather, why didn't it work?
~S
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The other companies won a few rounds of the lawsuits based on that, and I want to say Rambus was actually found to have committed fraud at one point. But Rambus won enough rounds of lawsuits to keep bringing in money.
Re:This is horrible news (Score:5, Informative)
Because US patent system effectively legalizes extortion. Some manufacturers rolled over and paid "licencing", but others, like Infineon decided to fight. The jury in Infineon v. Rambus ruled in favor of Infineon, but then Rambus appealed to the federal circuit and got that decision overturned. PJ, of groklaw fame, put it thusly: "federal circuit has never seen a patent it didn't like".
This is just a short summary, you can find more info if you like. Rambus extorted money from pretty much everyone who has so much as touched RAM.
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a) The patents were originally filed before Rambus joined JEDEC.
b) The patents were amended after Rambus left JEDEC.
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This is exactly why the patent system needs to change to make it impossible to amend patents after they have been filed.
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a) The patents were originally filed before Rambus joined JEDEC.
b) The patents were amended after Rambus left JEDEC.
s/left/was kicked out of/
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Re:This is horrible news (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the fact is that Rambus itself does not manufacture anything -- it's a technology licencing house that has a few engineers and an army of lawyers -- and you get a perfect example of a patent troll.
ARM Holdings PLC is an R&D company that doesn't manufacture anything. They generate all of their revenue through licencing IP to third parties whom in turn do the manufacturing. I do not see anyone calling them a patent troll.
Rambus Inc. is definitely a shady corporation but simply failing to manufacture products with IP that one owns and initiating litigation against those who infringe upon it does not automatically make one a patent troll.
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The ARM microarchitecture is hardly complex. It's very simple, employing only minor variations on technology that predates it by decades. Most computer engineers would call the bulk of the ARMv7 microarchitecture and other ARM IP obvious to one skilled in the trade. In fact, almost all straight RISC microprocessors follow a very similar architecture. ARM Holdings, despite manufacturing nothing, has wielded their patent portfolio offensively against companies and even bought a large stake in a consortium tha
Speed is not patented (Score:1)
The same judge also ruled that the wheel "appears to have prior art, per Babylonians." Romans gotta pay up.
Consider it a test you only have to pass once. (Score:4)
You'd think for the amount of money they steal someone would just shoot them in the head or hire someone to do it.
With what?! Ballistic weapons? Oh, that's rich! Consider that if any aliens exist there's at least a 50% chance they're more advanced than humans. If the aliens can manage interstellar space travel then they've already mastered the warp drive. [nasa.gov] Imagine all the technology they must have. You think they'd care about being threatened with micrometeors? Ooh, how terrifying!
One answer to the Fermi Paradox could be that the aliens can't visit you because they'll invalidate every damn patent on Earth with their prior art and destabilize the world economy humans built upon laws that create artificial scarcity of information and ideas. If only humans could extract their craniums from their rectums and stop treating infinitely reproducible information and knowledge as if they are physical things... Until human laws agree with the basic Universal truth that symbolic configurations of matter and energy are not matter and energy themselves, the Drake equation will never be solved.
Think about it. Economics 101 says that as supply tends towards infinity, price tends towards zero regardless of demand or cost to create. The elements that make up sand and water were forged in a huge expensive furnace: A 1-A supernova, yet sand is cheap, you just pay for hauling it, not the sand itself. You wouldn't sell Ice to Eskimos, as the locals say, but selling infinitely reproducible information to humans possessing "sentient" brains and digital information replicators is acceptable? The world economy of ideas and information can't even grok economics 101. It's the work to create new configurations that's scarce, not the 1's and 0's or ideas. You have no evidence that patents and copyright are beneficial -- Not a single one of you tested that damn hypothesis!
The Patent Trolls are what you pre-information-scarcity races deserve. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is. Imagine yourself in their shoes! Imagine that you risked being re-assigned as an overseer of primordial ooze for the next billion years just to directly tell the humans via world wide neural network of their folly, and they STILL didn't get it?! Imagine how you would feel if you went through the trouble to do all that, and the Humans STILL sided with the moronic laws?! If you travelled 23 light millennia just to stop in for a spot of tea and solve every problem human science will face for the next few centuries, but you discovered the "Best and Brightest" humans embracing an economy that's incompatible with the nature of information and is based on Untested Hypotheses would YOU trust them with a Warp Drive?! I wouldn't!
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Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is.
Really? Because I'd be fucking astonished.