pheilman,
I appreciate your response. That rationale has been discussed before on the thread, and the reality is that royalties are paid in every industry to companies for their IP (IP is not just traded). The RMBS model would have changed nothing other than possibly extending it to Carl's business which probably is used to trading it (I don't know, for example, if TI gets any cash royalties from memory IP). If others had come along and also invented memory technology that was needed by the industry, then they, too, should be paid. The patenting process is actually in place to protect the small inventor, not the large one. Several years ago, the major manufacturers admitted that they had been too focused on the chip-level technology, not the interface-level technology. So Rambus focused on that area. And the lawsuits and extensions of the patents have little or nothing to do with the animosity as Carl and others were here telling us how evil the technology/company was long before the lawsuits were filed (back when they were just trying to get RDRAM going). The attempt by Rambus to extend the royalties to SDRAM and DDR DRAM certainly increased the animosity, but by no means created it.
And in particular, Rambus came into Carl's field and ignored all the prior developments and treated all the manufacturers as idiots. It is OK to have angry customers if one is truly a gorilla, but not if one is a gorilla by proxy.
I'm not sure what you mean about ignoring all prior developments -- certainly Rambus didn't go back and try to re-patent every DRAM patent that exists. Based on the statement above made by the "memory industry", I'd say they generally tried to augment the core technology (and, indeed, RDRAM is built on top of the SDRAM core).
I won't argue about the attitude that Rambus has taken. I believe they could have handled the management of the relationships much better.
See, we don't care to make money on Rambus, it is just that Rambus success means failure for any company actually making something.
Interesting point of view. I disagree with the entire premise that a company can't be founded solely to generate IP, but I'll have to give some thought to some precise reasons for you.
Thanks again,
Dave |
