Shares in the machine of the perpetual patent litigation known as Rambus received a healthy boost yesterday on word that the International Trade Commission had taken from his patent complaint against a litany of technology companies.
Rambus, whose nominal specialty is designing ways for chips to get data back and forth, but that is better known for more than a decade of bitter legal battles, earlier this month a complaint with the ITC, say that products from various companies included chips that infringement of the patents.
As someone who has been paying attention to the numerous patent battles around smartphones knows, the IRP is generally seen as a fast-track for the settlement of patent litigation. Since federal courts are slow and expensive litigation, businesses often go to the IRP ostensibly to block the importation of products found to infringe on patents. Because almost every technology product is built outside the USA, sales of an infringing product be subject to an exclusion, the usual result when a violation is found.
What's interesting is the wide range of companies that Rambus has called in its complaint: Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, Broadcom, Seagate, Motorola, Hitachi, Asus and Garmin belong to the person who is better known. The full list contains 34 companies — including some subsidiaries.
Some of the patents involved in this complaint were the subject of a previous case that Rambus took to the ITC against Nvidia. The Commission considered the patents – known as the Barth family of patents – were valid and issued an exclusion order, asking Nvidia sit and sign a license agreement in August. Rambus is obviously looking for a similar outcome of Broadcom and Freescale, which it says are among those now in breach of the Barth patents.
In addition, there is another set of patents known as the Dally family, what Rambus not invented but to which they hold a license. The patents are owned by MIT and are based on the work of Bill Dally, a former MIT Professor of electrical engineering, which is now at Stanford University. The patents had license only a small private company called Velio Communications, where Dally CTO and which was taken over by the chipmaker LSI Logic in March 2004.
In a twist that could happen only in the strange world that's acquired Rambus patent law, the exclusive licence for Velio serial interface patents – the Dally family – in a separate deal in the waning months of 2003. The irony is that LSI among those persecuted because of infringement of the Dally patents. Some M & A lawyers at LSI should be kicking themselves today.
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