Each of them will have the right to prevent other companies from using its data pipes. If you like today's brand of airline service, where there are more than three companies still around, you'll love tomorrow's world of telecommunications. Rambus, the Los Altos company that licenses technology to makers of computer memory chips, lost big this week in a federal court in Virginia, where the company had sued German chip maker Infineon for alleged violations of Rambus patents. If the jury was right, Rambus had attended meetings of an industry-standards group for years without telling other companies that it had applied for patents on the standards it was pushing. Rambus, which has other patent-infringement suits pending, talks a lot about how it's just protecting intellectual property.
Genuine inventions are one thing.
Taking advantage of a standards process to set up an industry for a fall, as Infineon claimed and the jury found, is another. Of course, Rambus denies the whole thing. Maybe it'll win the promised appeal. But there's an unpleasant odor to the company's actions. Maybe this will be a cautionary tale.