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

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (69041)	3/24/2001 3:17:41 PM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Zeev, Perhaps a jury somewhere would look at the issue in the same way you have, but I don't see it and that viewpoint is swimming against the judicial tide currently flowing against such broadening of IP claims. For instance in the example you gave: I view Crisp's testimony as a big win for Rambus, since its shows that at Jedec's meeting, Crisp did not know how broad were the Rambus patents, and then he was of the opinion they did not cover SDRAM, thus, Rambus did not hide from Jedec the fact that they had patents covering SDRAM. When the specs was taking final shape, Rambus' engineers or lawyers hit their "common" forehead and then came to the realization, all that stuff is covered by our original teachings, let's make it clear with appropriate claims in continuations we have already on file...and get the hell out of Jedec, which they did. The jury is going to want to know what RMBS was doing at JEDEC with those undisclosed "claims in continuation" even before the "light bulb" came on and their attorneys/EEs, other than Crisp, advised, at this point incorrectly, that broadening the 1990 claims would be proper. I don't believe the jury will like the "story" they get from RMBS to explain this. More importantly we still don't know the substance of the evidence which IFX is relying upon to support its RICO and JEDEC affirmative defenses and counterclaims. Whatever answer is provided, it will have to avoid both those mine fields and it isn't readily apparent to me how this will be done. If its true that some of the Japanese fabs were already producing SDRAM samples with the disputed IP at the time of the 1992 IFX presentation, the NDA's as they have been generically described here, don't seem to be of much use. It seems obvious to me that both JEDEC members and RMBS were fighting tooth and nail towards different purposes at all relevant times here. Each of them, as do we all, had to make their best "guess" as to where the law would be if and when any of this came before a court. In retrospect it appears obvious to me that RMBS' purposes were always, from the beginning, inconsistent with those of JEDEC, nothing wrong with that. People are free to disagree. But it took one heck of a long time for them to "get the hell out" even after the depth of those cross purposes became painfully obvious to all, and that time frame just happens to coincide with the self same period in which all the "unspecified" IP was being formed as part of JEDEC's standards. IMHO, it will be comparatively easy for a skilled attorney to give those RMBS "purposes" an "evil" motive if they are able to give the jury the slightest evidence of concealment or deceit by RMBS or its agents. RMBS would have been far better off had they never joined JEDEC or, at the minimum, had Crisp step up to the plate and tell IFX and everyone the simple truth. That if they could ever prove or obtain "continuances" establishing their IP as covering every form of high speed memory architecture that JEDEC could devise, that they would not agree to JEDEC's rules regarding royalty rights under any circumstances. If they'd done either of those things we might well be a RIMM World today. At minimum they could have forced litigation over this issue as early as '93 when they wouldn't have had to deal with some of the adverse judicial doctrine like Festo or the four years of JEDEC silence. 0\|0