SbH, IP is what fuel innovation. I am floored when I hear complaints about high royalties rates like 2%, and then I meet with people from Hasboro, and they are telling me that they pay 7% royalties (and a tidy upfront sum of more than $500,000,000 not for technological innovation, but for the right to use "Star War" themes in their toys. Disney charges 15% royalties for the use of their characters, musicians get royalties on their creations ranging in the 5% to 15%, great actors also get royalties from movies they make without doing any "innovation", and sports figures get paid very large sums (Foreman got more than $100 MM for the use of his name in the Foreman grill, the guy that invented it gets 5% if memory serves). Rambus spent very large sums to develop an innovative methodology, sytems and unique methods to allow the removal of the speed bottle neck in a system that contains memory, that is not a standard, that is a new "product", you may call the unique protocol a standard, but the concept of a hybrid random access and "page" or "packet" access, in diametric opposition to pure random access, is not a question of protocol, it is a question of a new technology. Just because Infineon is trying to get around it by picking pieces does not make them less thieving.
Zeev |
