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September 25, 2006

Page Count FTC

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report towards punishing Rambus for its memory patents, which were "unlawfully acquired monopoly power by deceiving JEDEC;" JEDEC being the committee that embedded Rambus' patented technology into memory standards, thus granting Rambus its windfall. The most astonishing facet is the ignorance of the FTC regarding patent valuation.

In a section on capping the royalties for RDRAM, as compared to SDRAM, the FTC, ignoring any analysis of the claims, suggests for valuation purposes using the relative number of pages in the patent application attributed to the two different memory types -

For example, an admittedly rough allocation compares the number of pages in Rambus's initial patent application describing technologies used in SDRAMs and DDR SDRAMs to the number of pages describing technologies unique to RDRAM. At most 9 (or 14.5%) of the 62 pages describe technologies in SDRAMs and DDR SDRAMs. [footnote 18 on page 21]

One can easily imagine what else the FTC got wrong, including that Rambus behaved unlawfully with regard to JEDEC standards in the first place.

Posted by Patent Hawk at September 25, 2006 10:02 PM | Patents In Business