Business Insight Zone

We talked briefly a couple of weeks back about Rambus’s litigous history. (See especially the comments for that post.) All in all, that’s worked out in a pretty satisfactory way for the company in the US (if you ignore that little to-do with the Federal Trade Commission, anyway), but now things are hotting up again in the European Union. More details:

European Commission Accuses Rambus of ‘Patent Ambush’

Six months after U.S. regulators capped royalties that vendors must pay to Rambus Inc., the European Union (EU) is taking a close look at the company’s monopoly on the DRAM (dynamic RAM) chip market.

On July 30, the European Commission (EC) issued a preliminary “Statement of Objections” finding that the Los Altos, Calif., company violated EU competition law by not disclosing that it owned relevant patents during the development of the DRAM standard. DRAM chips provide the memory in computers.

. . .

“Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard,” the statement said. “This type of behavior is known as a ‘patent ambush.’” Against this background, the Commission provisionally considers that Rambus breached the EC Treaty’s rules on abuse of a dominant market position.”

Now, that’s just the Commission’s preliminary opinion, not the last word. But at the very least, it looks like Rambus could be in for a bit more legal grilling in the months to come.