Rambus have been such clots that it’s hard to feel sorry for them now that the EC is bringing its great clunking hammer to crush this little, but irritating, nut.
The EC has produced another of its Statements of Objections (the last chip company to get one of these was Intel in relation to alleged anti-competitive marketing practices against AMD).
This Statement of Objections relates to Rambus charging too much for royalties after illegally trying to establish a monopoly.
Rambus has the usual nine weeks to reply. If it doesn’t, or if its replies don’t wash, the EC may fine Rambus and order it to charge reasonable royalty rates. Apparently it’s already been ordered to do this in the US by the Federal Trade Commission.
Why it wants to charge unreasonable royalty rates used to be a mystery, when its unreasonable royalty rates have landed Rambus in some of the most bitter litigation in the semiconductor industry’s history.
Then it turned out, last month, that Rambus has some ‘activist shareholders’ who have, for many years, been egging the company on to charge outrageous royalties, and the previous management rather weakly failed to resist these activists.
So, as a result, Rambus spent most of the last decade locked in litigation with a large proportion of its potential customer base, a particularly arid and stupid way of spending its time and money.
The EC has resurrected the old charge, heard in various US courts and by the FTC, that Rambus went to standards-setting meetings at JEDEC, then went off and patented technologies which looked as if they’d be incorporated in industry standards, and failed to tell JEDEC, as it was obliged to do, what patents it held.
The Rambus story is a morality tale of what happens when greed takes over from sense.
If the EC can knock some sense into the heads of those Rambus ‘activist investors’, then it will be doing the memory industry a big favour.
A little knowledge is dangerous. Making a statement that Rambus was obligated to tell JEDEC about it's patents demonstrates just that.
Rambus did not have patents during its tenure at JEDEC. It was trying to license as yet unpatented technology. Had it disclosed the patent applications at JEDEC meetings, the technology would have become public domain. Hence - there was a strong business reason not to disclose patent applications. There was no intent to deceive anyone.
Further along those lines, Rambus had privately contacted many of these companies (IBM for one) prior to JEDEC participation, to try to get licenses for its IP, all under NDA's. These ballplayers knew very well what Rambus had. What did they think? That Rambus came to JEDEC to sit on its hands.
So the trite comment that little Rambus deceived JEDEC and these huge multinational companies is not supported by the facts. Read the FTC's Judge McGuire's opinion, or Judge Whyte in Hynix v. Rambus. Or better yet, go to Rambus.org.
This legal entanglement is not for those who look only the surface, destined to repeat the untruth's that have morphed into "facts." Rambus deceived no one.
Thanks Shane but I thought it was a pre-requisite for attendance at JEDEC standards-setting meetings that attendees must disclose relevant patents and patent applications.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that is my understanding