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

To: Scumbria who wrote (49541)	8/13/2000 11:12:44 AM
From: Barry A. Watzman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

From a legal perspective, your assertions that things are "obvious" (although no one patented them) simply do not hold water. It's very easy to say, in 2000, that something that people have been doing for years is "obvious". But the fact is that Rambus' 1990 patents were the first patent applications for many of these features, and the patent office found no DOCUMENTED evidence that ANYONE had EVER done this previously in issuing the patent. Further, and this is really perhaps even more significant, I think we can conclude that an exhaustive search by legal experts taking months and probably costing millions of dollars (by the attorneys working for Toshiba and especially Hitachi) also found no such evidence. However, Rambus has about one-hundred patents with perhaps thousands of claims in total. If even one claim of one patent is infringed, the infringer has no right to manufacture the infringing product without licensing it from Rambus. None of the claims has been legally invalidated so far, but it's quite possible that if one to two THOUSAND claims were invalidated, that the memory makers would STILL be guilty of patent infringement and liable for damages (triple damages at this point, since there has been enough publicity and notification that at this point any continuing infringement is "WILLFUL" almost by definition, even if it started out as innocent and accidental). That is all that Rambus needs to collect royalties from the entire memory industry on not only RDRAM, but also on DDR and, possibly, SDRAM.