in reply to:
>> He is using the standard that rambus could reasonably foresee that it would litigate with ANY infringer for ANY patent. In that context, he really wanted to say that litigation (with ANY infringing company) was foreseeable in 1995 (or maybe even earlier) but since nothing happened before shred day '98, he has picked 1998 as the date that rambus should have put a hold on document destruction.
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When you consider who fires the first salvo, you like to ask what did they know and when did they know it. Did they just think of it a day ahead, or did some possibility occur to them a year or two before filing a high stakes lawsuit. This is the question the infringers like to hide behind.


>> January 18, 2000 5:25 PM PST
Memory designer Rambus has filed a lawsuit against Hitachi for patent infringement, a move that could end up spreading across wide segments of the semiconductor industry.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Rambus filed an action in the Federal District Court in Delaware which alleges that Hitachi unlawfully incorporated Rambus' intellectual property into the designs of a large number of Hitachi memory chips and microprocessors, according to company executives. Rambus is seeking an injunction, as well as punitive damages.

Hitachi could not be reached for comment.

The circumstances of the suit indicate that Hitachi isn't likely to be the only company hit by some sort of legal action or request for royalties. Conceivably, Rambus could eventually file similar, although perhaps less bitter, suits against any company that made SDRAM memory (synchronous dynamic random access memory), or products that "interface" with computer memory, during the past 10 years. Such a list could include Samsung, Micron Technologies, Infineon, IBM and Intel.