Standard-setting

Article: Standards, Intellectual Property Disclosure, and Patent Royalties After Rambus

Abstract

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Rambus, a developer of computer memory technologies, failed to disclose information about its intellectual property holdings to other participants in the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), a private standard-setting organization, during the period in which JEDEC was developing Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) standards. According to the Commission, this failure prevented JEDEC from considering the patent royalties that Rambus would charge in determining whether to incorporate its technology into the standard.