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Pastimes : All Clowns Must Be Destroyed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fedhead who wrote (40398)	6/16/2000 9:15:00 PM
From: John Graybill	Respond to of 42523

Two general possibilities come to mind pretty quickly: - The U.S. Patent Office is totally overwhelmed by the number and the complexity of technology patents. The P.O. grants patents for some fairly obvious "inventions", allows a "new use" of an existing patent in a new field to become a new patent (example, exaggerated for easy recognition: if you used a binary search routine in a hard disk drive, and now you claim that you can use it in a flash disk drive as well, that's a new patent), etc. The odds are absolutely overwhelming that Rambus has patents on things that shouldn't have been patented. Toshiba engineers might very well have done some clever things in their chips, as engineers are expected to do, that happen to be similar to things Rambus happens to have patented. - Then there's the U.S. court system. I don't need to list the horrors. Even if you have a good case, you probably don't want to throw the dice in the courtroom if there's any way to avoid it. Even if you're a world-class competitor, the thought of litigating in another country is a nightmare. And any country is less litigious than the U.S. This relative lack of experience in dealing with a hideously random process is a further disadvantage. (Can't help myself: "the Qualcomm of 2000" is something you could call a stock you hate for doing a three-for-one split the old-fashioned way.)