Nightowl, first, thank you for the compliment.
To assert that Rambus is not entitled to a royalty because the memory makers are selling at a loss is just as absurd as it would be to assert that the makers of the silicon crystals from which the wafers are cut are not entitled to charge "real cash" because the end products are being sold at a loss.
The fact that memory is sometimes sold at a loss is the problem of the memory manufacturers, not of their suppliers. After all, that is all that Rambus is: a supplier, no different from the suppliers of silicon crystals, or plastics, or metal or any of the other raw material used by the memory makers. And not deserving of any different treatment just because what is "supplied" is "intellectual" rather than "physical" matter. I assure you that suppliers in general don't care what you do with the material that they supply, or whether your business which uses their supplies makes money or not. They want and get their money "up front". And there is no reason why intellectual property should be treated any differently in this regard than physical property. In fact, however, Rambus' royalties are a fixed percentage of the selling price, so that as the selling price declines, the royalties also do decline.
Additionally, by the way, it is very likely that Rambus is not even the only supplier of "intellectual" property. For many, many years, and quite possibly still continuing, Texas Instruments was collecting "real cash" royalties on every DRAM chip manufactured. And many, many memory makers will apparently owe royalties to Mosaid, in Canada, for IP with many similarities to that owned by Rambus [the Mosaid patents, as I understand it, deal with physical chip fabrication, while the Rambus patents deal with what the chips do and how they do it, rather than with how they are made].
The industry producers have only themselves to blame for selling product below cost. No one is holding a gun to their head; they do NOT have to sell below cost, indeed one option is to simply leave the memory making business. Chip making equipment can be used to make any kind of chip, not just memory chips, and there is a shortage of FAB capacity at this time. They have only themselves to blame if they actually are selling below their cost, and it is absurd to claim that this entitles them pass their problems on to their suppliers.
Regarding JEDEC and the need for standardization, this is largely irrelevant also. The bulk of the Rambus patents deal with what goes on deep within the memory chips and how the chips work, MOSTLY internally. Jedec's role is primarily to establish EXTERNAL standards, mostly at the module rather than at the chip level, e.g. package specification (electrical and physical), and interconnection standards (including timing and definition of EXTERNAL electrical signals). There is overlap, but I think that the bulk of Rambus' work (and patents) and JEDEC's work deal with areas that should not be in conflict with each other.
I find Hume's post amusing. As far as I know:
- We can't determine if it's even true or, in the extreme case, a complete fabrication (Mr. Hume, I'm not accusing you of any form of dishonesty, I'm just making a legally significant point)
- If it is true, there was apparently no contemporaneous documentation of it
- It may be true, and documented, but irrelevant because it didn't apply to synchronous dynamic memory storage chips (or for any of hundreds of other legally significant reasons)
I'm not a patent attorney (although I have taken law courses in the subject), and neither, I don't believe, is Mr. Hume. But I am absolutely sure that the search for legally significant "prior art" conducted by Hitachi was extensive, and I am equally sure, from the fact that they settled, that no such legally significant prior art was found. That does not mean that none exists, but it does mean that the chances of it being found are slim. Beyond that, however, if you read my prior post, is the fact that you need to invalidate not just one patent and not just one claim, but about a hundred patents (with a hundred MORE coming, by the way) with perhaps thousands of claims. If you somehow manage to invalidate "all but one" of them, you are still guilty of infringement on the ONE remaining claim, and you still must stop production or license the infringed patent(s).
You seem to suggest that "everyone" was doing these things (the subjects of the Rambus patents), but that they simply didn't apply for the patents because they didn't want to pay the legal fees and go to the (admittedly significant) trouble of getting the patents. I would suggest to you that this is NOT the case. Because if it was, the very products that these companies were making prior to Rambus' applications for the patents, would be the smoking gun "prior art", patented or not. All that you have to do is find one dynamic memory chip with a date code 1989 or earlier using the Rambus patented techniques, and the Rambus patents would be dead. These companies know what the products that THEY used to manufacture did and how they worked internally. Billions and billions of those parts still exist and are in daily use. If they had used the principles and claims of the Rambus patents, you would have heard about it by now. I can only conclude that your assertion that people were doing this [I'll add "in production products"] but "simply didn't patent it [because it was obvious]" simply does not stand the test of the facts that no prior art -- in terms of either physical products or published literature -- has been found to exist, despite what is unquestionably a multi-million dollar search by legal and patent professionals. |
