Blunderbus Rambus, the Los Altos company that licenses technology to makers of computer memory chips, lost big in a federal court in Virginia earlier this month. The company had sued German chip maker Infineon for alleged violations of Rambus patents. The judge threw out the infringement case, but allowed a jury to decide whether Rambus had committed fraud - and that's what the jury concluded. 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, says much 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 is another. Of course, Rambus denies the whole thing. Maybe it'll win the promised appeal. But there's an unpleasant odour to the company's actions. Maybe this will be a cautionary tale.