Rambus Court Win Stands
Memory vendor still faces FTC charges in patent dispute.
Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
A federal appeals court has denied a request from Infineon Technologies to revisit the court's split decision dropping fraud charges against Rambus, freeing the memory vendor from allegations that it improperly influenced a standards-setting organization to adopt its patented memory technology.
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal victories for Rambus, which has been involved in litigation over its membership in the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) for several years.
Rambus's RDRAM is mainly used for high-performance, computing-intensive applications, while most PC vendors use the less expensive DDR SDRAM in systems. RDRAM has won more acceptance among gamers, and is used in the extremely popular Sony Playstation 2.
Verdict Reversed
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned a jury's fraud verdict against Rambus in January. The court ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that Rambus sought to influence the SDRAM standard while withholding the fact that it held patents on aspects of the technology.
Rambus was a member of JEDEC in the 1990s when the group was developing the standard for SDRAM, but left before work was completed. After the standard emerged, Rambus sued a number of memory vendors that refused to license its technologies for products based on the SDRAM standard, which Rambus said contained patented technology.
The federal appeals court ruled that Rambus could not be held liable for failing to disclose its patents because the rules and regulations of JEDEC concerning patents were poorly defined. Infineon asked the court to rehear its decision, but last week's ruling ends the involvement of the federal appeals court. Rambus is now free to pursue its patent infringement lawsuits against Infineon and other DRAM vendors.
FTC Case Continues
A separate case is pending between Rambus and the Federal Trade Commission.
The FTC filed a complaint against Rambus last June, also in regard to Rambus's behavior with JEDEC and its patent claims. The FTC claims Rambus knowingly destroyed evidence, and had asked for a summary judgment against the vendor.
An FTC judge ruled that Rambus had destroyed documents relevant to the case. However, the judge stopped short of ending the case, and denied the FTC's request to skip the trial and proceed directly to the punishment phase.
The FTC is an independent federal agency created to deal with "unfair methods of competition" and "unfair or deceptive acts or practices." The commission is meant to act on behalf of consumers, and since its creation in 1914 has received authority to enforce a range of consumer protection laws. |
