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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim kelley who wrote (39043)	3/29/2000 2:30:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Re: Interestingly, they are not claiming that RAMBUS did not disclose the relevant patent s to JEDEC they are saying that RAMBUS subsequently modified the patents using JEDEC material. This is a real stretch since the patent claims are usually moving targets during the course of the patent process. This is going to very simple to check. Hitachi says Rambus modified its patent applications to include information disclosed to it in JEDEC material and at the JEDEC meetings (some of it old technology dating back to decades old IBM mainframes). I would expect that the recent move by rambus to demand royalties for SDRAM is going to alienate their entire customer base, but I could be wrong. While most cases drag on forever, this one may not need to. If there is any validity to Hitachi's claim (and rambus trying to require licenses for any and all SDRAM makes some of their claims seem dubious, at best. When was SDRAM first sampled?) it could raise questions about the validity of the entire Rambus patent portfolio. What is the value of Rambus minus it patents? Look, I'm not holding any position in rambus right now, though I think that the company is basically a parasite on the industry, so I'll leave it at that. Good luck to you, if rambus can make their claims stick, you'll probably be paying royalties to rambus for every electronic device you ever buy, including toasters and electric toothbrushes and the stock will soon be worth $1,000+ - but if they push their luck too far and the whole thing blows up on them, that won't happen, and the stock will go down quite a bit. Dan

To: jim kelley who wrote (39043)	3/29/2000 2:36:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Well, we may be turning the tide, in the last 10 minutes the tone of trading in RMBS is changing nicely. Zeev Now pushing $310.

To: jim kelley who wrote (39043)	3/29/2000 2:51:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Re: So why did Hitachi sign a license with RAMBUS in the first place? It gets better all the time! Jim, I don't know if you have much experience with litigation of technical contracts (I have some, but it is certainly not comprehensive), but there is a point of law relating to contracts called "fraud in the inducement". It's not nearly as criminal as it sounds, but is basically the way in which a contract is invalidated when one party misrepresents a contract to another party. Typically this inducement is done outside of the language in the contract, and even when the contract explicitly states that it is the entire agreement between the parties, the contract can (and often is) thrown out if it can be shown that one side misrepresented the contract to the other - even if it was only a verbal misrepresentation. I doubt Hitachi would have signed any agreement with Rambus that would require them pay to Rambus royalties on products they had developed without Rambus help and had been selling for years. If Rambus has been able to come up with some interpretation of the contracts they have been entering into that requires such payments, it is just as likely to invalidate the entire contract as it is to compel any kind of enforcement.