Talk:Rambus

Discussion

Please, read this article and improve: http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/article.php/12095_3598601_1 --217.168.89.156 (talk) 22:43, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

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)

As much as I dislike saying this, this article is factually accurate and is objective. As a company, Rambus' revenues are in excess of 95% from patent litigations and they are a very aggressive firm at enforcing their patents. --DefaultChris (talk) 14:47, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

I would like to have a current production section. What items does Rambus supply the majority of the design for? Does it supply whole designs similar to AMD designing Athlon? Does it supply interface designs for memory manufactors? Other than the lawsuits, what does their designs do? Perhaps a block picture of a memory or chip that uses their product(s) with arrows or other highlights for what they designed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.111.22.25 (talk) 20:59, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

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)

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.

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

My thoughts: 1) Mostly very fair criticism, but you do seem to be expressing a personal bias. I have one too, but I'm trying to stick to what is provable. 2) I'd replace "fabless semiconductor company" with "semiconductor IP design company." 3) RE: "Rambus was invited to join" - Your general description of standards bodies is spot on, but in this case Rambus actually was invited by Toshiba to attend a meeting as a guest. They later joined. 4) RE: "As Rambus continued it's participation ..." That was my edit of a particularly biased pro-RMBS write-up. I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt and not imply a misadventurous intent to their subsequent actions. It's clear to the members that there was a meaningful patent policy but RMBS argued in court that the meaning of the written policy was unclear until after their "offenses" occurred. The text doesn't negate their action, which was to purposefully not disclose their IP as expected by the members, or oh-so-simply just agree to RAND. 5) I put in one other minor edit which was to change the "all" companies signed an NDA to "numerous" companies had an NDA. JEDEC has many member companies big and small and certainly not all had NDA's. There's a conspiratorial flavor to say otherwise. - Dudealicious

Fair use rationale for Image:Logo rambus small.jpg

Image:Logo rambus small.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 05:21, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Lawsuit articles

I have cut and paste the list from the article's external links section. The information in these sources should be incorporated into the article as cited statements (or otherwise removed). Ham Pastrami (talk) 12:51, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

• Independent Research Site on Lawsuit Related Issues
• Rambus' Rambling Lawsuits.
• Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit decision
• FTC Issues Complaint Against Rambus, Inc.
• FTC Chief Administrative Law Judge issues his written ID
• Full FTC Commission Final Decision.
• Rambus' Litigious Path.
• New lawsuits seek to bust Rambus.
• Rambus Faces Fundamental Threat .
• Rambus is back with a brand new lawsuit in hand.
• Rambus files new memory suit.
• Rambus sues four for GDDR 'infringement'.
• Rambus poo-poos Hynix Euro patent victory claim.
• Rambus income slides despite revenue gains.
• Infineon accuses Rambus of 'litigation misconduct.
• Rambus CEO eager to move beyond the courtroom.
• XDR2 to quintuple memory data transfer speeds by 2007
• FTC Finds Rambus Unlawfully Obtained Monopoly Power

PCI Express

The article mentions they developed PCI Express in two or three places but their role is not explained here and they're not even mentioned in the PCI Express article. Also, the article states that "Rambus survived the obsolescence of RDRAM and moved to support DDR and DDR2 in the area of video card technology and in particular, PCI-E." which isn't supported by references. From what I can tell RAMBUS has always been primarily supporting their techs (Rambus and XDR) for video cards even if they haven't been particularly successful. Indeed I don't see any sign of them supporting DDR or DDR2 which can mostly be considered competing techs. When they didn't have anything to offer, they obviously had to live with that but that's different from actively supporting what's largely a competing tech (even if RAMBUS did get some royalties from DDR/DDR2). Also the way the article runs in to PCI-E suddenly makes it sound like it's related to the memory Nil Einne (talk) 17:14, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Undue weight

The article currently is massively leaning towards a POV that this company just goes around suing people and does nothing else. The lawsuit section is 3/4ths of the article. I don't know a lot about Rambus, but it seems they've done a lot of work in tech development. Rather than cutting down the lawsuit section, the article should be expanded. I don't know enough about them to do so, however. <>Multi-Xfer<> (talk) 22:16, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

It could be argued quite readily that Rambus' notability is indeed 25% tech and 75% lawsuits. There have been tons of flash in the pan proprietary interface vendors over the years, but, in the end, Rambus is remembered for attempting to end run the entire memory industry--and not just in PCs. I also think it's fair to say that Rambus' RDRAM tech had 15 minutes of fame due to its raw throughput via its questionable reliance on what effectively was overclocking. It was not long before RDRAM was obsoleted by a more reasonable technology, which had most or all the benefits, fixed the problems, and was not as challenging to produce. The article covers all this, albeit in a more neutral tone.

Actually this was never caused by demand for Rambus products. Rambus sued Intel for patent infringement in the late 90's, as part of the settlement, Intel agreed to souly use Rambus's memory modules for all of the Intel motherboards being produced for 5 years. Rambus was overly expensive, ran hot, had high failure rate. This allowed competitors of Intel to offer their own motherboards compatible with DDR ram, which spurred the downfall of Intel's motherboard business.

Rambus has consistently been a bad actor. See http://www.mofo.com/pubs/xpqPublicationDetail.aspx?xpST=PubDetail&pub=6452 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.195.127.50 (talk) 23:11, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

216.149.187.98 (talk) 14:33, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

If you're still not convinced, consider the situation with Micro Channel, EISA, and VLB. While MCA was genuinely innovative compared to ISA, most vendors were unsatisfied with the licensing costs and lack of available peripherals, so they decided to create a rival. IBM surely would have as much of a case or perhaps even more than Rambus, but they stuck to competing directly. Now even people directly involved with the aforementioned technologies remember them only vaguely because, retrospectively, they weren't that interesting. It's the same with Rambus, except their mediocre technology stood out due to the company backing it. Whelkman (talk) 18:07, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Some of the lawsuit details could be moved to a sub-article, just like their tech is, e.g. XDR2 DRAM. But overall, the press coverage of their legal proceedings, which vastly overshadows product releases or regular deals, isn't at all exaggerated in this article. It is in fact underrepresented. Their fallout with Intel etc., could use more coverage in the history section too. Details have been made public by witnesses and covered by the press in recent press articles. 79.119.87.229 (talk) 05:42, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

New CEO

Rambus named Dr. Ronald Black as new CEO about 3 weeks ago. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/25/rambusinc-ceo-idUSL3E8HP3V620120625 Octavius SV (talk) 07:07, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Patent troll

The term patent troll is bias and I would like it removed. While it may be factual that 95% of previous revenues resulted from litigation protecting Rambus' patented innovations, the connotation of the term patent troll is negative and therefore bias.192.86.86.201 (talk) 18:11, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

That's your personal opinion, for more information please see the wikipedia page for patent troll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll

216.149.187.98 (talk) 18:48, 17 November 2012 (UTC)Steve

New Corporate Strategy

Dear Editors: I respectfully request that the opening paragraph of the Rambus Inc. Wikipedia entry be edited to reflect a change in corporate strategy and direction that began with the appointment of a new CEO in June 2012 and other changes to the board of directors. While technology licensing continues to be a focus for our company, we are now also focused on collaborating with partners and customers to bring their, and our own, products and solutions to market. We also recently released products that are standards-compliant, reflecting a more collaborative approach with the industry.

This is a stark departure from the more narrow, IP enforcement focused activities of the company last decade. In terms of referencing material, the following article in EE Times, a reputable, third-party publication that covers our industry very closely, describes this shift in strategy. In addition, we’ve included additional third-party articles that clearly showcase that Rambus invests in R&D and is closely involved in rolling out products to the market.

I've included below what I hope is an objective and unbiased description of the company's recent activities while retaining mention of its previous focus. This is to factually reflect the company's current business focus and not revise anything related to past IP litigation.

Thank you for your consideration.

Proposed opening Wikipedia paragraph: Rambus Inc., founded in 1990, is an American technology licensing company that has invented and developed technologies related to memory and interface design. The company primarily licenses its technology to customers but also delivers products and services to its customers, from early-stage technology to fully-developed products [link to EETimes story - attached]. While in the past the company has been labeled as a patent troll, today it actually invests in technology development and creates new designs for market adoption. Roughly 70% of the company is made up of engineers and scientists with advanced degrees. The company has been involved in patent-infringement litigation since 2000 but has recently settled some of its cases with DRAM companies [link to WSJ story - below] and SoC companies [link to EETimes story - below].

WSJ story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323949904578539720368087016.html?KEYWORDS=rambus

EETimes story: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263309

RambusMarketing (talk) 21:50, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Making the above suggested changes. Gwelch rambus (talk) 21:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)