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

To: Scumbria who wrote (49589)	8/13/2000 1:20:11 PM
From: Barry A. Watzman	Respond to of 93625

There are two aspects of patent law that people have trouble with. First, patents cover independent discover. So, if Rambus patented something in 1990, and memory makers, independently and with no help from Rambus developed it in the early 90's (ANY date after the Rambus patent application), and then made it industry standard (via JEDEC, for example), and did this all with no help from or even knowledge of Rambus, that's tough. Under both US and International patent law, they still owe the patent holder royalties. Some people may not like it, you can argue that "it's not fair", but that's the way it is under both US and International patent law. Anyone who owns a patent owns the invention(s) covered by that patent for 20 years, even if a subsequent infringer developed the infringing product independently, perhaps even without knowledge that the patent being infringed even existed. The second issue is that the patent office seems, at times, to issue patents for things that seem absurd or obvious. The Amazon "one-click" checkout patent is an often-cited example of this, there are many others (see my post on the smart card retry patent). In the end, this is subjective and difficult to argue. However, most of the patents in this category are "methods patents", a class into which I think that most of the Rambus patents do not fall. Also, the patent office took 9-10 years examining the Rambus patents before issuing them (for reasons unknown to me), consequently, my feeling is that the examination was not at all superficial but quite in-depth.