Abusive Patent Practices

Well, it looks like everyone's favorite patent troll, Rambus is about to get spanked by the EU.

The European Commission has confirmed formal "patent ambush" charges against US memory chip designer Rambus.

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It said that "Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard."

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The FTC found that Rambus had through subterfuge, illegally gained a monopoly in four key memory technologies.

The gist of all this is that Rambus had an idea, a patentable idea, about how to improve memory performance.

It wasn't a bad idea, but it wasn't better than any of the other ideas out there either.

However, when the JEDEC was drawing up standards for the next generation of memory, Rambus, which participated in this board, deliberately, and deceptively kept the information that they had this IP, and that people who signed off on this standard would have to pay them royalties in order to use it.

Had Rambus revealed the status of their IP during the development of this standard, as required by law, the standard would have been drawn up in a way so as not to require their technology.

Personally, I think that people should go RICO on their butts, definately to the extent of putting them out of business, and hopefully to the extent of bankrupting principals in this scheme and sending them to jail.