Talk:Rambus

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This page should probably lean more towards discussing the company, rather than the product. RDRAM is a good place to describe the memory technology. —Mulad 21:49, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to find some definitive commentary about the various patent and other legal battles in which the company was involved over the last several years.JimD 00:08, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)

I rewrote the article to focus on Rambus the company, with a section about competing technology and a section about the lawsuits and patent squabbles. Alereon 08:45, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Neutrality in Lawsuits section

I reverted the rewrite by 156.33.74.18 of the "The Lawsuits" section to the last version by me, with slight tweaks. I believe that the rewrite was substantially factually incorrect, and extremely biased in favor of Rambus. See the contrast between the following statements, both describing the same events (mine is second):

Rambus began discussing liscening terms with DRAM and memory controller manufacturers. Several of the largest manufacturers, including Samsung and Toshiba signed licenses, while Intel was already a licensee. Infineon, Micron and Hynix did not sign licenses and Rambus was forced to file suit to enforce their patents.

and

In 2000, Rambus began filing lawsuits against the largest memory manufacturers, claiming that they owned SDRAM and DDR technology. Seven manufacturers, including Samsung, quickly settled with Rambus and agreed to pay royalties on SDRAM and DDR memory. When Rambus sued Infineon, however, Micron and Hynix joined forces with Infineon to fight the lawsuit, countersuing with claims of fraud.

The rewritten article assumes that all of Rambus's patent claims were legal and valid, and that Rambus was merely defending its intellectual property. A court of law found that this was not so, and indeed found Rambus guilty of fraud on these counts.

I am, however, fully willing to admit that I have my own biases on this topic. I think it would be good if someone rather more impartial I could take a look at this section and see what they can improve. To this end, I've added an NPOV Dispute tag to my amended section. Alereon 07:35, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

This article shows a disturbing Pro-Rambus POV tendency. I see 3 problems with this article:

  1. a pure lawyer's perspective. Apparently in a lawyers mind even the most evil acts are perfectly legal and ethical until a court of law can be found to declare them illegal. This leaves out all cases where proof is incomplete or not available to the court, where the crime is too new to be matched by laws, or where tatutes of limitations have applied. This legalistic approach may be suitable for a law school paper, but it is not so for an encylopedia.
  2. The article completely disregards the political and social dimension of the Rambus problem. Rambus is controversial - it is one of the poster childs for the Patents Über Alles/Greed Is Good/Ethical Is All I Can Get Away With crowd, and it is one of the arch villains in the eyes of their opponents. Rambus is widely considered one of the archetypal patent trolls and symbolizes much of what is wrong with the patent system. This controversy should be reflected in this article.
  3. The international dimension. Outside the USA Rambus is often seen as a predatory US company that exploits a substantially biased US judical system to plunder other (foreign) companies. Infineon is German, its other victims are Korean, Taiwanese or Japanese companies. Rambus made zero contributions to their businesses, participated in bad faith in joint standards settings activities only to fast-patent everything discussed there and yet demands billions of dollars from them for basically nothing. Given the relative low regard many people have for the US legal system (as exemplified by its supreme court declaring an election looser the winner out of political preference while specifically stating that the underlying principles of this decision may never be applied again) a pure legalistic approach again can neither be the whole nor even the major perspective for an encyclopedia.

Another disturbing issue is the contemptous way some participants here refer to Rambus critics ("fanboys") - it betrays substantial bias on their part. Unfortunately I currently don't have the time to collect enough references for a decent rewrite of this . But for the aforementioned reasons I encourage others to do so Wefa 13:18, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible copyvio, possible NPOV issues

Latest edits by JSM replaced entire text by one which is substantially identical to the one at [1] -- site is down right now, but I could read the page from the Google cache. Lack of wikilinks and some formatting problems suggest that it is a cut & paste. Since the original site is down, I wasn't able to check the licensing terms. Also, some of the wording sounds suspiciously like an "official" company history from Rambus itself. MCBastos 21:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] response

pasted from previous post that was eliminated by a clearly anti-rambus poster with an agenda. The revert was acting up so a cut and paste was solution at the time. It is clearly not a marketing document and is, while substantially incomplete, much more neutral then the previous entry. It is a neutral fact that patents are presumptively valid unless ruled otherwise by the patent office, which has a well established process to contest issued patents. In the case of the rmbs patents no charge of invalidity has ever been filed with the office or tried in a court of law, as such, any entry which presents their documented patents as anything but valid patents is, in fact, taking a non-neutral POV.

Now, as it turns out, I accessed the page in question, to find the attribution at the bottom "source: Wikipedia....." perhaps you should be more careful before slinging copyright accusations around.

[edit] fictional entry

This page has again been vandalized by a fanboy who dislikes Rambus and has fantasys about the factual situation surrounding the company. The beginning of the "Lawsuits" section, stating that Rambus was invited to Join JEDEC in exchange for opening all of their patents and signing NDAs with memory makers is demonstrably false and an embarassment to the wikipedia. I will work up a NPOV article to repair this vandalism wholesale. - JSM

[edit] lawsuits: "CAFC decision"

The last paragraph of lawsuits currently includes the sentence "In October 2003, the US Supreme Court turned the CAFC decision into law by refusing to hear the case." It is somewhere between difficult to impossible to figure out what this refers to just from the text. (I suspect this refers to a sentence in the first paragraph referring to the "Federal Court of Appeals", but I'm not positive.) This is especially crucial since it would be nice to know what exactly it is that has now become law. Can someone fix this to make it clear? --70.231.194.106 19:47, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] JEDEC entry circumstances and "CAFC" mention

Changed mention of CAFC to Federal Appeals Court, since CAFC is an abbreviation, and moved that line to paragraph discussing the case being appealed. Also changed the "fanboy" entry-to-JEDEC language mentioned by JSM above to more correctly reflect the reality, which I had direct knowledge of. --67.113.252.198 21:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

These claims are contrary to my understanding of the events. Can you cite some sources? Tbjablin 01:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Read either http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/040223initialdecision.pdf (FTC decision) or the CAFC decision http://rambus.org/legal/appeal/01-1449.doc (denied appeal by the Supreme Court, and therefore can be considerd final on the issues surrounding the participation of Rambus in the JEDEC standards committee.) The previous language misstated the timing, circumstances, and legalities. --67.113.252.198 22:36, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Tbjablin 06:01, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Lawsuits Section

I have done some minor clean up to the lawsuits section, but still have a few outstanding issues that can be perhaps clarified by someone else.

Firstly, it states that "In January 2005, Rambus filed four more lawsuits against memory chip makers Hynix Semiconductor, Nanya Technology, Inotera Memories and Infineon Technology claiming that DDR 2, GDDR 2 and GDDR 3 chips contain Rambus technology." However, I do not believe this to be factually true, if you read the news release on Rambus's Web site (http://www.rambus.com/news/pressrelease.aspx?id=31) regarding the lawsuit it seems to indicate only *one* lawsuit was filed, but with four companies cited as defendants.

As well, the section regarding Rambus's settlement with Infineon, which states, "This sent Rambus to the settlement table with Infineon,” seems a bit presumptuous. Do we know for a fact the dismissal forced Rambus to settle? Have they come out and said that? If not, I propose it be altered slightly.

Thanks Kj8744 06:44, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Does RD RAM operate as synchronous RAM?

The article does not spell it out exactly, though the article tells RD RAM was meant to compete with SD RAM. Might be good to include its electrical operation, making more clear its electrial shortcomings and strengths. Generally the article is informative and well written. Terryeo 17:09, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutral point of view

I think that this article fails the NPOV test. It is biased in favor of Rambus. There is scant mention of the controversy caused by Rambus's participation in the JEDEC standards process. At the very least there should be a mention of Rambus's questionable MO and the storm of ire that it raised. Their actions brought the entire patent system and standards process into question.

The Licensing section links to the "Fabless semiconductor company" article. This misleads the reader. A fabless semiconductor company is a bona fide manufacturer that designs, develops and markets product but contracts out its fabrication. Rambus falls into an entirely different category. It patents and licenses inventions. These inventions may just be minor or obvious improvements of other inventions. Rambus does not design, manufacture or market any product.

The "Lawsuits" section is especially problematic. For example "Rambus was invited to join..." Standards bodies are open to participation by interested parties. Generally a standards body announces the formation of a committee and interested parties ask to participate. That cannot be characterized as an invitation. "As Rambus continued its participation in JEDEC, it became apparent that they were not prepared to agree to JEDEC’s patent policy..." This sounds like it came straight from a Rambus PR flac or lawyer. Any particpant would be required to agree to the patent policy before joining the committee. Furthermore JEDEC policy required participants to disclose related patents and patents pending which Rambus failed to do. An IP firm would be acutely aware of such issues yet Rambus participated all the same. Out of context the meaning of “[O]ne day all computers will be built this way, but hopefully without the royalties going to Rambus” is unclear. It could mean that the speaker thinks the patent is obvious or invalid. (I heard it said Rambus worked their inventions into the standard so they could extort royalties from implementors or even that Rambus got patents for inventions developed collectively at the meetings.)

What's with the "Management Team" section? That belongs on a corporate website not in an encyclopedia.

Linking to a "fan site" is certainly not neurtal unless you include sites with opposing POVs proportionately. (i.e. If there are 10 favorable sites for every unfavorable site then include 10 favorable links for every unfavorable link.) Frankly, corporations don't have fans and patent trolls only have enemies and co-conspirators.

I'll wait for feedback before editing the article but I am anticipating a major rewrite with better citations.

Infologue 06:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

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