Wednesday, November 16th 2011
Shot Down In Flames: Darling Of The Tech Industry, Rambus
Rambus is the company best known for suing dozens of companies over memory patents that it holds and is suing so prolifically, that many just see this company as a patent troll. It has been accused many times of obtaining submarine patents while a member of the JEDEC group until a decade ago, which it is now fraudulently using to try and extort royalties from every other company using DDR memory and its derivatives. Unfortunately, those lawsuits didn't stick, encouraging Rambus to carry on enthusiastically. Rambus won patent fights against NVIDIA and Samsung for example, who now have to pay them ongoing royalties. However, it looks like Rambus may have bitten off more than it could chew, because it has just lost a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron Technology Inc and Hynix Semiconductor Inc, erasing more than half of the chipmaker's value as investors abandoned its stock in droves. Rambus stock immediately plunged more than 60% on this good news.
Rambus's central claim was that Micron and Hynix had colluded to fix prices of memory chips, to prevent Rambus technology from being widely used and claimed that this collusion cost them over $4 billion in lost profits. However, it looks like the court didn't buy this argument for lack of proof and handed the win to Rambus's opponents in a 9 to 3 vote, at the end of a three month trial. Rambus has been suing competitors instead of out-innovating them for about a decade now and has been more successful at this game than would have been expected. It still has several other lawsuits ongoing though and with these same companies too, but this loss could be a taste of things to come, which might finally call a halt to their brazen litigious activities. Rambus said that they might appeal this decision, which isn't surprising as it's a high stakes game for them and potentially precedence setting, so one can expect that they won't go down without a fight. Let's just hope that they do go down though.
Sources:
Yahoo, MarketWatch
Rambus's central claim was that Micron and Hynix had colluded to fix prices of memory chips, to prevent Rambus technology from being widely used and claimed that this collusion cost them over $4 billion in lost profits. However, it looks like the court didn't buy this argument for lack of proof and handed the win to Rambus's opponents in a 9 to 3 vote, at the end of a three month trial. Rambus has been suing competitors instead of out-innovating them for about a decade now and has been more successful at this game than would have been expected. It still has several other lawsuits ongoing though and with these same companies too, but this loss could be a taste of things to come, which might finally call a halt to their brazen litigious activities. Rambus said that they might appeal this decision, which isn't surprising as it's a high stakes game for them and potentially precedence setting, so one can expect that they won't go down without a fight. Let's just hope that they do go down though.
25 Comments on Shot Down In Flames: Darling Of The Tech Industry, Rambus
Hope the company dissappears. I hate working on a PC and finding it out it has RAMBUS in it. WTF was Intel thinking!!
Although it's a lot more likely that if they did get bought, the tech would remain proprietary, at least any part of it which on its own or combined with other technologies affords said company a significant enough performance advantage over standardised memory that it becomes attractive to buy into the proprietary system
Let those patent trolling bastards burn in hell, with the lawyers that represent them!
EDIT: Actually I expect GDDR5 will be blown away by DDR5.
So it might get to the point where all the memory manufacturers, and video card makers, just might find it worth while to buy the company just so they don't have to spend shitloads of money to defend themselves against Rambus' bullshit lawsuits.
The evilness of youtube
On topic, look at that drop :D www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:RMBS
Ah there ya go Marks take on the MTV Micheal Jackson uprising in the mid eighties ....That little faggot got his money on mtv .........and a custom jet ....Oh we are talking about Rambus right ? great thanks now im gonna be listening to "Brothers in Arms" all day greatest Dire album of all time...Also for the guy that said the cgi took a long time ..Yeah but they won the first Grammy for videos that year for it:)
Forgot to say Sting from the Police did the backup vocals on this song lol.....
Go Micron and Hynix rip them a new one with their 4 billion..
The problem is adoption (lack of it) and probably also price (that was the main problem last time).
Reading this news post made me think that professor farnsworth should have delivered the news :laugh:
www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MU
Oh, good point, bta. ;) Nice little bump in the graph there.