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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Morris Catt who wrote (30338)	2/1/2001 10:04:18 PM
From: PINBOTMAN	Respond to of 65232

Morris, Thanks for the thoughtful post. Here's something I posted on the subject in the past: Rambus Dram-UNOCAL Reformulated Gas (RFG) patent similarities. As an employee of an integrated major oil company, I've been following Unocal's RFG patent with much interest. As an investor in both AMD and RAMBUS (but not INTEL), I've been watching the RAMBUS patent suits with more interest and have been struck by the similarities. As an engineer and not a patent attorney...well, for what it's worth, following are some excerpts from a recent press release on the Unocal RFG patent. As background, Unocal allegedly got their technology in a forum similar to JEDEC and every major oil company and many other interested parties have been engaged in lawsuits with Unocal and Unocal has prevailed all the way to the Supreme Court. With that said: -The American Petroleum Institute, the Western States Petroleum Association, and the National Petroleum Institute filed a friend of the court brief (9/13) with the Supreme Court asking the high court to review Unocal's RFG patent. -A lower court upheld Unocal's RFG claims/patent, which API said "makes extraordinarily broad claims related to RFG" (sounds familiar to RAMBUS' dram claims). -The court ruling requires some companies to pay Unocal 5.75 cents per gallon for the RFG sold in California(there's a lot of gallons out there, just like dram and they both are pervasive throughout the economy hitting industry and the consumer--but Unocal has prevailed to the high court). Unocal also owns 4 other RFG patents that are dependent on the initial patent (RDRAM-SDRAM-DDRDRAM look alike?) -The joint brief urges the Supreme Court to review "because of its potential impact on consumers, and the country's cleaner burning gasoline programs." Think about it, 6 cents a gallon over a year versus a one event at a time couple of percent on memory--which should raise the ire of consumers more--and nothings happened yet in the RFG case? -API's view/concern is that Unocal "gamed" the patent process by "participating in the California Air Resource Board and US Environmental Protection Agency process to develop cleaner burning RFG regulations while at the same time secretly filing a patent application, which later was amended to track regulatory requirements. (Sounds a lot like the JEDEC forum with a whole lot more power from government/environmental and consumer groups behind it--and they still prevail.) -The group also said, Unocal "used the patent system to put refiners in a regulatory/patent law trap, with a result that will cause harm to the public." Seems to me it boils down to: who knew what, when did they know it and what were the rules of engagement as they relate to patent law. Much precedent in the above for RAMBUS longs and haters. For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield), Jim