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Title: Patent Rant!
Author: Alan Lenton
Date: 30 September 2006 09:55:05 +01:00 or Sat, 30 September 2006 09:55:05 +01:00
Summary: [30-9-2006] The US Federal Trade Commission is trying to have Rambus barred from collecting royalties on its patents!
Body: If you want a lesson on the absurdity of the patent system you just need to look at the brief filed this week by lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), arguing that Rambus should be barred from collecting royalties on its pre-1996 JEDEC-compliant patents.
JEDEC is the Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council, which, among other things, developed a standard for Dynamic Random Access Chips (DRAM) - the most widely used type of memory chips used in computers. Rambus participated in the drawing up of the standards while surreptitiously filing patents on those standards.
As a result Rambus has been able to collect royalties on technology that was intended to ensure interoperability and to be used free by DRAM makers. The FTC considers this to be unlawful behaviour, although, I confess, that I find it difficult to see exactly where Rambus broke the law.
If you have laws that were originally designed to give monarchs a source of income through the sale of patents, then you must expect them to not work very well in a democratic society.
The fault is in the law, not in Rambus's sleazy manipulation of it!
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ezYY0FypUC0FrK0Emmz0EE
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