Judge Says Rambus Destroyed Evidence, But Patents Valid
In the virtually never ending story of Rambus' patent infringement lawsuits against DRAM makers, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found the IP company guilty of destroying case relevant records.
The ruling is particularly spicy since Hynix had already been ordered to pay $397 million to Rambus for infringing its DDR SDRAM and SDR SDRAM patents.
There is a chance that this number will be reduced as a result of the new finding, even if a judge noted that Rambus did not deliberately shred the documents. Both firms were ordered to submit proposals on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalties that Hynix should pay Rambus. Needless to mention, Hynix welcomed the ruling and stated that it now feels that it should pay Rambus "considerably less" than what was agreed on before.
To the fortunes of Rambus, the judge also confirmed that Hynix infringed the company's patents and that the patents in question are valid. Rambus' stock gained $0.84 or 17 percent in Monday trading.
Rambus originally had filed the lawsuit against Hynix in August of 2000.
just my 2 cents
Right... the company which invests the most capital in R&D and has been granted the most US patents annually for nearly two decades straight has no right at all to derive income from said R&D.
just my 2 cents
Am I the only one who maniacally laughed out loud after reading that?
I believe blurr91 is talking about the idea of Apple blatantly suing anyone and everyone over nothing, which is what is happening here.
IBM has already patented the process of patent trolling.
They keep picking on the folks with the fab plants. Rambus doesn't have their own fab plants.
Right... the company which invests the most capital in R&D and has been granted the most US patents annually for nearly two decades straight has no right at all to derive income from said R&D.
they would also patent the most common or vague of concepts
You mean like The ATM, the floppy disk, the hard disk, the magnetic stripe, the UPC, DRAM, VRAM (not to be confused with SGRAM) the modern RISC architecture, PowerPC, the relational database, the 8 bit byte (not a patent, but they were the first to use it in a standard fashion), high availability computers and mainframes, navigation computers, virtualization, hardware cryptography, RAID-5, the Industry Standard Architecture, The IBM PC and AT formfactor, etc...
They didn't exactly wholly invent or patent every single one of those but whatever, something something innovation is dead because of patents amirite?
While we're at it lets just completely disregard their research on power efficiency, reliability, scalability and supercomputers, nanotechnology, quantum computing, storage and IO, their massive contributions to the Linux kernel and other free projects
Yes, definitely a patent troll that just patents useless junk
though i agree with you, i also have to point out that not ever pattent is useful, if they were all pure gold, well... you can kind of see where i was going with that.
Of course not all patents are the same, many are simply incremental improvements over existing inventions while others are inventions or improvements that were discovered and rejected in the process of inventing yet another product. If I task a team of engineers with designing something new and unique they will probably come back with several fully functional independent designs, each of which meets my requirements. Naturally I'd probably only pick the best design and commercialize that one. The other remaining designs won't be commercialized but they can still be patented and licensed to competitors who will otherwise reverse engineer my superior product in an effort to get around the patents that protect it.
The idea of courtroom attrition rather than real competition when the company's own products are outrun by the competitors.... use garbage excuses like round corners, photoshop evidence ect sounds all to familiar perhaps?
Funny, everytime someone tries to drag IBM into the stupid fanboi troll-fest they just end up looking like and ignorant pleb, thanks for giving me another hearty laugh at your expense.
Rambus Boss:- Really? Let me look at that.
BBBBZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTT
Rambus Admin:- Boss, I just can't find any documents that prove Hynix innocent
Rambus Boss:- Never mind, keep looking
/truestory
i meant it more like most companies have some amount of rounded edge rectangle patents just like apple, however most of them decided that it would be better not to ever presume those patents in court because their good name is worth more in the long run than the money in the short.