Mobile Phones Infringe Rambus Patents

[Mike Temporale]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/15/75436_HNrambuspatents_1.html?source=NLC-WIR2006-02-16' target='_blank'>http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/15/75436_HNrambuspatents_1.html?source=NLC-WIR2006-02-16</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Rambus Inc. owns the patents on memory interfaces used in most mobile phones on the market, and most of those phones violate the company's patents, according to Chief Executive Officer Harold Hughes. "We have technology that we invented literally 10 to 15 years ago, that is going into just about every mobile phone, so that will be an opportunity for us to find patent licenses," Hughes said in a wide-ranging interview Tuesday. Many people thought that Rambus would not survive patent infringement lawsuits it is involved in "and to a certain extent our technology was then incorporated wantonly," Hughes said. Rambus aims to get companies to license its technology, and that could include both chip makers and mobile phone manufacturers, Hughes said."</i><br /><br />The never ending world of patent lawsuits. :roll: Rambus says they spend $8-9 million a quarter on litigation. Of course, a 3% royalty from a $30 Billion industry should easily cover the cost of litigation. Anyway, there doesn't appear to be much to worry about, your Smartphone isn't going to be shutdown or anything. Most manufacturers are settling with Rambus and moving forward.

[edgar]

The lawyers make quite the pretty penny off of these cases, obviously. What the article doesn't say is that these lawyers fees are usually paid, on both side of the case, by the losing company. So if Rambus wins the case, their lawyers would be paid by the company "infringing their patent". Ending up with no out of pocket expense for the lawyers.

I understand protecting an idea and protecting one's investment in the future. What I don't understand is the PTO (Patent Trade Office) grantign patents simply on unproven / unimplemented ideas such as "email wirelessly accessible", "high speed memory in a postage stamp size". Or the courts providing relief to patent owners that haven't enforced or used their own patents in years.

It almost looks (or maybe they do) like the patent holders sit on their haunches and wait for manufactureres to implement their "patent" into wide spread use. Then jump on the "pay up or close down" bandwagon. These places must have researchers looking at the thousands of past patents, like at SCO, and bringing them back to light years after they stopped using or enforcing their patents. As if NTP, SCO, Rambus and the rest of them didn't know their patent was in use in all these technologies well before they sent out the letters, the lawyers and the court cases.

UGH Pfffft.

[wshwe]

There should be a law requiring patent holders to request royalities within a reasonable period of time after the patent was granted. Rambus should have been forced to assert its patent rights years ago. Cell phone manufacturers have violated Rambus' patents for many years.

[Jerry Raia]

Didn't Rambus start out from a lawsuit? :lol:
You never see the name Rambus with out the word lawsuit in the same sentence.

[shindullin]

Rambus makes more money off of patent lawsuits than the do off of actual products now days. What the Rambus lawyer said is at least partly true. Rambus was pretty much dead as a company that makes anything and was suing other companies left and right claiming patent infringement. Everyone wrote them off as a has-been company that would never make money again. This was also only half true. They ARE a has-been company that no longer makes much of value but they still have patents to prosecute that they can use to try to shake down real companies that actually make things.
These patents are called submarine patents in the "biz". They file vague, braodly worded patents having no intention of doing anything with it and having no idea what it might be useful for (submergeing so to speak), then they wait until someone comes up with the idea (often independently) and makes a product with it. Then they come up out of the water and fire their lawsuit torpedo's (or threaten to) and make off with some loot.
As for "late" lawsuits in general, there are definitely abusers of the patent laws, but not all late patent infringement filers are system abusers.
The common example for companies that should have filed for more patent infringement lawsuits but didn't and then paid for it by near destruction is Xerox. Their labs made the object oriented interface, and ethernet LANs to name only some of their significant innovations, but their business division couldn't figure out how to make money with them. (they should all have been fired) The company didn't patent things well, and they didn't prosecute patent infringements well, so they ended up a shell of a copier company even though their labs directly helped pave the wayfor the information revolution. Back in the day Apple decided to sue Microsoft when it launched Windows alledging a violation of their object oriented user interface patents, then Xerox came out of hibernation and sued both Apple and Microsoft for the same violation. Apple lawyers figured out that if they won against Microsoft, they would both lose against Xerox, so they dropped the suit. Xerox then stupidly also dropped the suit. (And went on to continue losing the copier wars.)
Frankly, Xerox paid a LOT of scientists a LOT of money to make technology that other people were able to put to extremely profitable use for free. They should have taken a portion of those rewards and used the money to make new products or at least new cool technology but instead they barely survived, even as a photocopier manufacturer.