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

To: Ian Anderson who wrote (81833)	4/12/2002 9:54:56 PM
From: SBHX	Respond to of 93625

Mr Anderson, >>"allowed", "normal", "not fraudulent". This reminds me of a party a while ago where I overheard a lawyer talking to his friends about Enron. He was commenting on the "shredding of documents". His words were (I'm paraphrasing) : Documents are regularly destroyed, that is standard procedure. If there is any hint of a possible legal issue, it is perfectly within their rights to destroy all documents. When they receive the formal notification, then legally they have to preserve all documents. Until that happens, it is perfectly within their rights to immediately destroy all documents. But people who don't undertand the law just assume what they did was wrong. Then he smiled in his effeminate way. The picture I had in my mind was of the employees who lost their retirement money, and for a moment, I felt like grabbing his collar and shaking him a few times. Your reply reminded me of what that lawyer said. I'm afraid the jury in virginia didn't understand that what rambus did was allowed, normal and not fraudulent. Here's my take on what the jury thought was happening (as gathered from various pieces of documents I read on this). 1. JEDEC was looking at ratifying a standard on the next gen memory. 2. It was very clear to everyone that this memory has to be royalty free. 3. Any time a patent was discovered, a workaround was found to deliberately not infringe the patent. 4. Rambus sent Richard Crisp deliberately to find out the specs in JEDEC. 5. Rambus' legal counsel warned all participants and Tate about equitable estoppel that would make these patents unenforceable. 6. Rambus obtained the final ratified standard for sdram and went about ensuring their claims would match sdram. 7. In JEDEC, when asked if the proposed final standard was in conflict with any participants' IP, Crisp (who knew perfectly well) misled JEDEC about this. 8. Rambus participants in JEDEC not only attended the ratification vote. They voted on a proposal that they knew had elements they were patenting. That jury went out of their way to nail rambus, they did not think rambus should be allowed to do this. They were incensed at what they heard (my guess). I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if rambus has a good chance of winning the appeal, but perhaps you are right, maybe the law allows them to get away with this. I think at best it is a grey area. But I wouldn't know. Perhaps that lawyer was also right, destroying those enron documents could be perfectly normal and legal until they had official notification. I sure hope not. Those who lost their life savings over enron, and Fred Abramson who lost his life over rambus deserve better. Me, I don't think either Kenneth Lay or Geoff Tate should be allowed to get away with this. SbH