http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?NewsID=5388&Page=1&pagePos=11&inkc=0
Mobile Phone makers your free lunch is over!
Rambus: Most mobile phones use memory interfaces that infringe on our patents
- Thread starter Brimstone
- Start date
http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?NewsID=5388&Page=1&pagePos=11&inkc=0
Mobile Phone makers your free lunch is over!
Well, they did get their RAM in PS2 also which means that product alone's responsible for bringing in royalties from well over 200 million pieces of DRDRAM...zsouthboy said:
Rambus isn't in Revolution, but it IS in PS3.
Both the ASIC interconnects and memory chips/interfaces use Rambus tech.Well I like them.zsouthboy said:
They wouldn't need lawsuits if nobody stole their inventions.zsouthboy said:
They did and do things revolutionary, I hope they don't die.zsouthboy said:
Also read e.g. this article and also the discussion about that article.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060131-6092.html
Just getting tired of all the uninformed Rambus attacks...
arjan de lumens
Veteran
Yep. If you are that small-time innovator, even if you get a patent granted, you are still likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to pay for years of litigation to get a dime from the Big Business that willfully infringe on your patent. Moreover, while doing so, you can rest assured that Big Business will carefully examine their patent portfolios for anything that can block your product from the market until your patent expires, or perhaps even cross-check your technology against everyone else's patents, identify possible infringements, and pay off the relevant patent owners to attack you etc.Mize said:
As far as I can tell, the patent system in its current form looks like a gigantic Prisoner's Dilemma.
fromfrom said:
I'm hardly uninformed about RAMBUS. No one is stealing their inventions; they're abusing our patent system (just like practically every other company, however).
I hardly think serial-bussed RAM is revolutionary.
And I still don't like the stunt Intel attempted to pull RE: RDRAM.
I mean this in all seriousness.. why do you like them?
DudeMiester
Regular
Well I think patents should expire in 5 years if you can't show you are seriously trying to make an actual product out of it. Just hoarding patents in the hopes that someday someone with deep pockets will potentially infringe them, imho should be illegal.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Seems like many of these problems would be solved if patent lawsuits were only granted to those who defended their patents right from the beginning.
How long have cell phones been out? You can't just wait until they become enormously widespread before you file a lawsuit. If a company has used your patent for a year or two (let alone the decade+ that cellphones have be around) and you haven't said anything, then I say tough luck.
A more difficult issue, however, is dealing with obvious or easily derivable ideas. Data buses seem like a pretty silly thing to patent, IMO. It's relatively basic in digital hardware design, and patenting it seems akin to patenting a data structure in programming. Another good example is how RIM will likely pay hundreds of millions for infringing on the idea of wireless email access. That's just ridiculous.
How long have cell phones been out? You can't just wait until they become enormously widespread before you file a lawsuit. If a company has used your patent for a year or two (let alone the decade+ that cellphones have be around) and you haven't said anything, then I say tough luck.
A more difficult issue, however, is dealing with obvious or easily derivable ideas. Data buses seem like a pretty silly thing to patent, IMO. It's relatively basic in digital hardware design, and patenting it seems akin to patenting a data structure in programming. Another good example is how RIM will likely pay hundreds of millions for infringing on the idea of wireless email access. That's just ridiculous.
personally I feel patents should be abolished outright.
On the face of it, they are designed to give a way of making money back from research, but in reality I don't see this is the case. If someone copies you, it's copyright infringment, however if they research their own version of what your doing to compete with you, then well it's all good in my book. Forces the original researcher to refine their product, competition etc.
Licensing existing technology is completly different than licensing an existing idea.
I've been put under pressure to patent things in the past, odly enough. I didn't thankfully.
On the face of it, they are designed to give a way of making money back from research, but in reality I don't see this is the case. If someone copies you, it's copyright infringment, however if they research their own version of what your doing to compete with you, then well it's all good in my book. Forces the original researcher to refine their product, competition etc.
Licensing existing technology is completly different than licensing an existing idea.
I've been put under pressure to patent things in the past, odly enough. I didn't thankfully.
zsouthboy said:
Not that they had any choice really, it was in the link in my first post.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060131-6092.html
arjan de lumens
Veteran
Which indicates that Rambus has a perfectly legitimate anti-trust claim against the DRAM companies, but not saying anything about the legitimacy of Rambus's patent claims.fromfrom said:
zidane1strife
Banned
arjan de lumens said:
Indeed it is quite pathetic, information should be free, we should give credit where it is due, but we should encourage information to be freely used and shared.
It's just BS that if I discover something in parallel or even later on my own, that I've somehow infringed on someone else's discovery, just plain BS. They're called inventions, but from what we now know, they're more like discoveries.