Rambus Barred From Enforcing Chip Patents

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Hahahaha! This couldn't have happened to a more deserving company. :D Thanks to Scott W. for the link.

U.S. District Judge Sue Robinson in Wilmington, Delaware, said yesterday the patents are unenforceable as a sanction against Rambus officials who engaged in a document-destruction campaign designed to “gain a litigation advantage” in a patent-infringement lawsuit over technology for high-speed memory chips.
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Seems this judge has her head on straight. A rarity for sure.
 
LOL Rambus hopes to reach an agreement regarding the patents? Didnt the judge more or less invalidate them since they cant be enforced?
 
They were always more interested in the legal side than the make a good product side. Does that end well for anyone ever?
 
Shouldn't those executives who orchestrated the shredding of evidence be charged with obstruction of justice?
 
I love that judge! For once someone has finally seen through RAMBUS smoke screen and put their conniving methods to a partial stop. I'd still like to see the executives get jail time for obstructing justice. That would be icing on the cake! :D
 
oh well, tho still functional, my Asus P4T is a little long in the tooth these days :D
 
GOAL!
For the past 10 years I've been waiting for the destruction of this company. hahaahahahaha
 
Honestly, I thought these guys (Rambus) went under years ago. Are they really a chip maker? Seems like they've been in court for decades.
 
Scythe5 said:
Honestly, I thought these guys (Rambus) went under years ago. Are they really a chip maker? Seems like they've been in court for decades.
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Almost 13 years, to be precise. They filed the lawsuit against Micron back in 2000 according to PACER.
 
Maybe we can get this judge to start hearing Apple patent cases :)
 
Scythe5 said:
Honestly, I thought these guys (Rambus) went under years ago. Are they really a chip maker? Seems like they've been in court for decades.
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Along with SCO, RAMBUS is the patent troll who will not die...;) No, IIRC, RAMBUS never produced a single commercial Rdram module. RAMBUS bills itself as an "IP company" that sells "licenses" to its Rdram technology to other companies who then manufacture the Rdram themselves. No one except Intel (who initially ponied up a $1B investment in RAMBUS which it later sold off entirely) has shown any interest in the company or its IP, so in order to generate a revenue stream Rambus, Inc started stealing from other dram manufacturers in this way:

Rambus joined JEDEC, the international ram standards body, as a full member. JEDEC members share their technology among themselves freely so as to take all competing dram ideas and streamline them into a single design family so that all the JEDEC members can make generally the same *type* of ram without fear of stepping on any patents owned by competing companies. JEDEC is invaluable to the industry and the consumer as well!

Rambus had a different idea, however, from the start of its involvement with JEDEC. Few companies saw any merit to Rdram's dependence on high-speed MHz to drive ram serially on a narrow bus, 8-bits wide (and maybe 16-bits, IIRC), when it was compared to JEDEC's
sdram standards, which produced ram running on much wider buses (32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, etc.) at much, much slower MHz speeds. The theory behind Rdram per Rambus was that the serial ram bus was overall the faster, better bus, making Rdram serial the clear winner over Sdram parallel in terms of performance and reliability. Gospel according to RAMBUS.

The problem for RAMBUS from the start was that few people agreed with RAMBUS' theories, and saw sdram as the clear winner over Rdram. You can imagine that this was pretty much a death knell for the traditional Rdram IP.

So, since its own IP failed to get airborne , RAMBUS joined JEDEC to look at what competing ram manufacturers were doing and making. Rambus would then take the technology the JEDEC partnerships produced and, in complete and direct utter violation of all JEDEC organizational rules, Rambus began to sneak off and silently patent key elements of the JEDEC technology under the exclusive ownership of Rambus--as if the tech was an original RAMBUS technology rather than what it was--an original JEDEC technology.

This went on for years before the JEDEC principals discovered the growing list of patents filed by RAMBUS which were, in fact, JEDEC technologies. RAMBUS was fired/dismissed from JEDEC on the basis of moral turpitude, IIRC, relating to the theft and conversion of the sdram technologies. By this time, though, JEDEC members like Micron and Samsung, etc., were busy manufacturing sdram built on the JEDEC designs which were *thought* to be free of IP patents in accordance with the rules governing JEDEC developed technologies.

Up steps RAMBUS out of the blue to claim that the JEDEC member companies were *all* guilty of infringing on RAMBUS' patents (now finalized) relating to *sdram* technologies! You can imagine that the JEDEC partners were aghast when they looked at these patents and found them to be none other than the very technologies JEDEC partners had developed jointly, along with RAMBUS, to be shared among JEDEC members royalty free!

As a result of these brazen thefts, RAMBUS singlehandedly came very close to wrecking one of the PC industries' cornerstone organizations--JEDEC. Indeed, not all JEDEC members, even knowing that RAMBUS was attempting to screw them, deemed a court fight with RAMBUS worth the expense, and several of these companies went ahead and "settled" with RAMBUS and paid RAMBUS various fees in order to use their own JEDEC-developed technology in their upcoming products.

Other companies fought, though, and as this article illustrates, are still fighting RAMBUS. And the good news is that after a decade RAMBUS is at last steadily losing ground consistently, its reprehensible conduct finally unmasked for all to plainly see. But when something like this can happen in our patent system then clearly something is badly broken in that system. The worse news is that obviously whatever that something is that is badly broken--it hasn't been fixed yet! We're still waiting! (All mistakes of spelling, syntax, fact and chronology belong to the people reading this post, most likely...;))
 
WaltC said:
Along with SCO, RAMBUS is the patent troll who will not die...;) No, IIRC, RAMBUS never produced a single commercial Rdram module. RAMBUS bills itself as an "IP company" that sells "licenses" to its Rdram technology to other companies who then manufacture the Rdram themselves. No one except Intel (who initially ponied up a $1B investment in RAMBUS which it later sold off entirely) has shown any interest in the company or its IP, so in order to generate a revenue stream Rambus, Inc started stealing from other dram manufacturers in this way:

Rambus joined JEDEC, the international ram standards body, as a full member. JEDEC members share their technology among themselves freely so as to take all competing dram ideas and streamline them into a single design family so that all the JEDEC members can make generally the same *type* of ram without fear of stepping on any patents owned by competing companies. JEDEC is invaluable to the industry and the consumer as well!

Rambus had a different idea, however, from the start of its involvement with JEDEC. Few companies saw any merit to Rdram's dependence on high-speed MHz to drive ram serially on a narrow bus, 8-bits wide (and maybe 16-bits, IIRC), when it was compared to JEDEC's
sdram standards, which produced ram running on much wider buses (32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, etc.) at much, much slower MHz speeds. The theory behind Rdram per Rambus was that the serial ram bus was overall the faster, better bus, making Rdram serial the clear winner over Sdram parallel in terms of performance and reliability. Gospel according to RAMBUS.

The problem for RAMBUS from the start was that few people agreed with RAMBUS' theories, and saw sdram as the clear winner over Rdram. You can imagine that this was pretty much a death knell for the traditional Rdram IP.

So, since its own IP failed to get airborne , RAMBUS joined JEDEC to look at what competing ram manufacturers were doing and making. Rambus would then take the technology the JEDEC partnerships produced and, in complete and direct utter violation of all JEDEC organizational rules, Rambus began to sneak off and silently patent key elements of the JEDEC technology under the exclusive ownership of Rambus--as if the tech was an original RAMBUS technology rather than what it was--an original JEDEC technology.

This went on for years before the JEDEC principals discovered the growing list of patents filed by RAMBUS which were, in fact, JEDEC technologies. RAMBUS was fired/dismissed from JEDEC on the basis of moral turpitude, IIRC, relating to the theft and conversion of the sdram technologies. By this time, though, JEDEC members like Micron and Samsung, etc., were busy manufacturing sdram built on the JEDEC designs which were *thought* to be free of IP patents in accordance with the rules governing JEDEC developed technologies.

Up steps RAMBUS out of the blue to claim that the JEDEC member companies were *all* guilty of infringing on RAMBUS' patents (now finalized) relating to *sdram* technologies! You can imagine that the JEDEC partners were aghast when they looked at these patents and found them to be none other than the very technologies JEDEC partners had developed jointly, along with RAMBUS, to be shared among JEDEC members royalty free!

As a result of these brazen thefts, RAMBUS singlehandedly came very close to wrecking one of the PC industries' cornerstone organizations--JEDEC. Indeed, not all JEDEC members, even knowing that RAMBUS was attempting to screw them, deemed a court fight with RAMBUS worth the expense, and several of these companies went ahead and "settled" with RAMBUS and paid RAMBUS various fees in order to use their own JEDEC-developed technology in their upcoming products.

Other companies fought, though, and as this article illustrates, are still fighting RAMBUS. And the good news is that after a decade RAMBUS is at last steadily losing ground consistently, its reprehensible conduct finally unmasked for all to plainly see. But when something like this can happen in our patent system then clearly something is badly broken in that system. The worse news is that obviously whatever that something is that is badly broken--it hasn't been fixed yet! We're still waiting! (All mistakes of spelling, syntax, fact and chronology belong to the people reading this post, most likely...;))
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RAMBUS: Ultimate backstabber.
 
I haven't liked RAMBUS since one of the RAMBUS sticks in my old P4 rig burned me. :mad:

They can die in a pit full of in operation sticks of RAMBUS. Its very akin to fire.
 
I was fortunate never to have to deal with that garbage (RAMBUS). Did it really run that hot? Hot enough to burn you? Damn, it's a wonder the motherboards didn't die prematurely because heat damage.
 
It sure was, but the ram was fast. In my old box i had 4 256mb sticks with fans mounted over the ram. I wasn't paying attention and went to pull a stick after shutting down. I mounted the fans after that.
 
I've been waiting for years for something like this to happen. Even dirtier, that many don't know... or have forgotten, was Intel's involvement with RAMBUS and the drug deal they made with RAMBUS for shares, so long as they pimped their technology on Intel motherboards. For a long time, Intel fans had RDRAM shoved down their throat because of this dirty drug deal. To meet that end, Intel also touted RDRAM as the fastest technology. That was until an internal presentation showed that PC133 was actually faster.

So filthy dirty. I don't care how much better Intel is than AMD, I still only buy AMD chips due to this fiasco.
 
AceGoober said:
I love that judge! For once someone has finally seen through RAMBUS smoke screen and put their conniving methods to a partial stop. I'd still like to see the executives get jail time for obstructing justice. That would be icing on the cake! :D
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Can you get charged with obstruction of justice in a civil case? I always thought that was only in criminal investigations.
 
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