Carl, of course, when you are first inventing something, you have no idea how broad your invention is, if you have a good patent lawyer, he writes the claims to be as broad as the specification allows. I'll give you an example from my own experience, I have a patent (5,836,669) which relates mostly to appliances and how to illuminate the inside from a light sources not within the appliance itself. Originally, i was going to just make the claims limited to "appliances", but I have a smart lawyer, and in discussing the proposed claims, it occurred to me that there might be broader applications, and my lawyer agreed, and while the first independent claim relates to an "Appliance", in claim 24, the scope is broadened to include "An article of manufacture", thus that would include strange things like drawers within furniture, light boxes, an MRI tube's internal spaces etc. even though, it was not my original intention.
Since the original 1990 patent application (the specification) seems to have been broad enough to cover SDRAM (which was not yet in existence or in public domain), patents that derive from that specification surely can contain broadening of the original claims, if indeed the original specification can be construed to have covered these. The PTO is the one that decides if the original specification indeed covers these "new" embodiments (SDRAM) and by allowing the later SDRAM related patents, the PTO declared that RMBS already in 1990 invented those aspects of SDRAM which are in "question". Just because Crisp did not know they did, does not really matters.
I view Crisp's testimony as a big win for Rambus, since its shows that at Jedec's meeting, Crisp did not know how broad were the Rambus patents, and then he was of the opinion they did not cover SDRAM, thus, Rambus did not hide from Jedec the fact that they had patents covering SDRAM. When the specs was taking final shape, Rambus' engineers or lawyers hit their "common" forehead and then came to the realization, all that stuff is covered by our original teachings, let's make it clear with appropriate claims in continuations we have already on file...and get the hell out of Jedec, which they did.
Zeev |
