Rambus drops patent suit against NVIDIA Update: only part of it
By Nilay Patel 
posted June 9th 2009 11:33AM
posted June 9th 2009 11:33AM
So much for all those Rambus / NVIDIA fireworks we know you were hoping for -- the two companies just announced that the patent infringement proceedings begun last year have come to a close and the International Trade Commission has been asked to drop its investigation. According to the statement, "Rambus has conceded that NVIDIA products do not infringe on its four patents before the ITC." That's that -- guess we'll just have to get our kill-crazy destruction kicks elsewhere.Update: Sigh -- Rambus has told MarketWatch it disagrees with NVIDIA's release, and that it's still litigating five more patents before the ITC. Round and round we go.
Rambus was still alive?
Rambus is now little more than a Patent squatting company. Though the long-dead RDRAM was the most memorable Rambus tech, they license patented memory tech to all sorts of firms. I don't know if this lawsuit has anything to do with RDRAM.
Patent squatting? you mean, except for the xdr-dram memory in every PS3 and the 94% of the Cell (and Cell derivative) chip-to-chip interconnects that use licensed rambus technology? The only one squatting is another hater in his underwear at his keyboard spewing misinformation for his peers.
Wow, a Rambus fanboy?
Whether you make the money from the patents from licensing or from lawsuits, you're still making money from patents, which in my opinion is patent squatting. You can give it a whitewashed name like "IP Brokering" but it's all the same. This pic:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Rambus_HQ_patent_wall_section.JPG
Is a wall of some of their patents. I think it's companies like Rambus that stifle innovation by wasting companies' resources in defending probably frivolous lawsuits.
Now you're gonna make me read the long section on Rambus in Wikipedia, so I can "spew" correct information from public record:
1995: Rambus withdraws from JEDEC, a semiconductor standardizations organization, because it wanted to profiteer off its patents. JEDEC stipulates that licensing should be "reasonable and non-discriminatory", terms that Rambus was unwilling to comply with
2000: Rambus files blanket lawsuits about SDRAM and DDR. Samsung and others quickly pony up, but Infineon, Micron, and Hynix decide to fight it.
May 2001: Rambus was found guity of FRAUD for having claimed to own SDRAM and DDR.
2003: The 2001 ruling is overturned but the supreme court refuses to hear the case
2005: Rambus fires it up again, but shreds key documents before trial, and has the charges dismissed.
Meanwhile, in 2002, the FTC starts investigating Rambus for trying to overstate its patents in an attempt to license the emerging SDRAM standard. This went through to 2007, when the FTC set caps on the royalties that Rambus could charge memory manufacturers.
There's more that I won't rephrase and retype from Wikipedia, but the pattern of patent ambush and abuse is clear.
Rambus was still alive?
Rambus was still alive?
they have a few things going.
High speed interconnects
PS3 uses thier XDR RAM.
I was the only one who read it as Rambo? DX
Yes.
Clueless reporting, and incorrect. Rambus trimmed the lawsuit (normal procedure) by dropping 4 of the patents, leaving 5 patents and 25 claims.
In the Hynix trial Rambus had to pick only 10 claims for trial of the 50 or so that were infringed. So expect the Nvidea case to be trimmed more as well. The four that were dropped were later patents that can be refiled later in another suit. Nowhere does Rambus say that Nvidea doesn't infringe those patents.
Rambus is still around, and even more of their patents are making their way into JEDEC specs, even though JEDEC is on notice that Rambus has patents.
The problem with this article is that the release is probably from Nvidea, not Rambus.
This story only contains half-truths, which is a statistical win considering it was sourced from Fox News.
For a more realistic view of the situation try here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/rambus-withdraws-some-patent-complaints-vs-nvidia
So will rambus sue instead to fill up the suit of suits? It's known that they cannot imagine a day where they aren't in at least 12 lawsuits, that's what they are all about.
Ryan,
It was Rambus that figured out how to make synchronous DRAM work. When Rambus had DRAM operating at 500 Mhz, the standard was 33mHz asynchronous. They licensed the tech to a number of firms, but some didn't want to pay, instead they colluded illegally to drive Rambus out of business by keeping RDRAM prices high, and selling sdram and DDR below cost, while at the same time telling Intel they were committed to ramping RDRAM, but sponsoring articles saying that RDRAM was too expensive to make, and the royalties were too high.
The large antitrust trial in history starts in less than three months, and the world seems unaware of it.
Rambus continues to innovate, they have over 500 patents now for bleeding edge chip interface technology, all developed in-house. You can't call them a patent squatter or patent troll when they are developing technologies that JEDEC can't seem to help themselves too, even though they know Rambus has patents. DDR2, DDR3, GDDR etc all use even more Rambus technologies, even though they were developed long after Rambus left JEDEC in 1996. In fact DDR was developed entirely after Rambus left JEDEC.
The problem has been that the companies don't want to pay Rambus, because they have thought that the FTC would save them, or that their plan to drive Rambus out of business would work. But it hasn't, and payday starts in less than three months.
If that's all true, I guess I'll have to load up some DDR3 ram? (I don't have the latest system that supports DDR3 yet) If those memory companies have to fork out large sum of money, I'm sure memory price will increase alot.
And all this time i though rambus was the bad guy.
The jury that found Rambus guilty of fraud for trying to patent technologies (which were part of JEDEC) says otherwise.
What an utterly worthless company. They're the Monster Cable of the semiconductor business.
Rambus was still alive?
Rambus tech is used in PS3, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. Im sure I read that the cell is designed to work in conjuction with Rambus memory tech.
Here is proof of life - http://www.rambus.com/us/products/ps3.html
Brandon,
A lot was said about Rambus' "exorbitant royalties" yet the royalty would have amounted to about 80 cents per computer, and about $12.00 when RDRAM was at it's artificially highest price point.
So yes, you will probably pay more per stick, but the amount will probably be less than $2 per computer (to make up for past royalties that were not paid. So if two bucks is a big deal to you, by all means rush out and buy now.
The dram manufacturers forced the lesser technology (DDR) on you by making you think it was Intel and Rambus that were the bad guys. A lot of accusations are out there that Rambus stole from JEDEC, invents nothing, etc, yet when those claims are aired in court, there seems to be no evidence to back them up.
Rambus' inventions that are used in SDRAM and DDR were invented and filed for patents BEFORE Rambus ever set foot in JEDEC, and from the NDAs and the public european patent applications the JEDEC companies KNEW just what Rambus patents entailed, and decided to build a lesser memory using only some of the technologies, and avoid paying royalties by driving Rambus out of business.
There is a memo from Willie Meyer of Infineon (discussing RDRAM) that says "someday all computers will be built like this, hopefully without the royalties going to Rambus". In that same presentation, one of the proposals is to make the Rambus patented technologies public domain, or to buy Rambus and dump it.
the AT trial should be interesting, especially since so many sheep only believe the "Rambus stole form JEDEC" or "Rambus doesn't invent anything" misdirection of the media. You have to realize though, the industry media lives and dies on ad revenue, and if they printed the truth about the story, how long do you think they would survive?
Reading the wikipedia article about Rambus...wow. They're epic patent trolls.
"Just because the patents are withdrawn, does not mean we concede anything. ... We've simply removed these patents from the proceedings"
... umm
"just because we run away with our tails behind our legs doesn't mean we're afraid of losing"
JS
They simply consolidated to the strongest patents. Rambus only has to win one claim of one patent, nvidia has to invalidate all of them. In the meantime, they claim everything in the complaint, make the other side scramble and spend money, then consolidate to the strongest claims fo rtrial.
Look at the cases that Nvidia has filed, you'll see the same tactics. In fact, all of these misleading press releases by nvidia are just more of the same game.
"So much for all those Rambus / NVIDIA fireworks we know you were hoping for"
No dude, I think you're the only lawyer here.
i never thought that kurt would give up that easily.
Ryan, you're an idiot if you really think that any company with patents is a patent squatter. Any company that spends money to develop a technology expects to recoup their investment.
Look at Micron and Texas Instruments, both have huge patent portfolios, and still get a lot of money for licensing those patents. Should they give them away for free under your eutopian society view?
How about drug companies? A patent is a legal monopoly for a period of time. If you don;t like it, go change the law.
Ryan,
Read this:
http://www.law.com/jsp/law/international/LawArticleIntl.jsp?id=1202431336980
Maybe you will learn something. Rambus isn't doing anything that other companies are not doing.
You seem to be one of those who only believes what is printed in the paper is the truth.
Why don't you find ONE final decision (that was not overturned on appeal) that proves anything of what you are saying?
The 2005 date you are referring to is a decision that says that Rambus destroyed documents in 1998 during an office move and during office cleanup days, even though they said to "look for things to keep", well before Rambus was in litigation with anyone. Do you log every document that you put in the office recycle box? Drafts, etc? The judge said you should, and that since Rambus didn't, they should lose all of their patent rights. Even though the FTC case and others have remarked on the amazing amount of insight into Rambus actions (i.e, Rambus kept a lot more documents than most companies).
In contrast, Judge Whyte, reviewing the same evidence said Rambus did nothing wrong. Both decisions are up for review, but read boath, and see which one you think will stand up under appeal.
Let's take your FTC case. Initiated at the request of Micron, the largest case in the FTC's history, but at the end, the FTC's Chief ALJ finds completely in Rambus' favor in a 330 page decision. He notes that the only evidence that Rambus did anything wrong in Jedec is the verbal testimony of interested witnesses, and that that testimony is contradicted by contemporaneous (written) evidence, and for that reason, you have to discount the verbal testimony.
The full commission says you have to believe the witnesses, and throws out the entire decision, without so much as discussing any of the other 1600 findings of fact. Rambus points out to the full commission that even more evidence is now available that the witnesses are lying, because of evidence uncovered in the DOJ antitrust investigation against the DRAM companies. The full commission says that doesn't matter, and finds against Rambus.
The appellate court reviews, and spanks the FTC, saying that they have stretched already flimsy evidence far beyond it's stretching point, and effectively tells the FTC, that dog won't hunt. The Attorney General usually sides with the FTC in appeals to the Supreme Court, but in this case the AG refuses to joing the FTC.