Once upon a time - well, it was just a little over five years ago - Rambus, memory makers, and a who's who of technology companies participated in the JEDEC forum. Their goal was to develop DRAM devices for next-generation PCs and other applications. That was before Rambus unleashed its army of lawyers to prove in court that some of the world's largest memory makers were infringing on its patents. That was before those same companies - Infineon, Micron, Hynix and others - unleashed their own legal eagles against Rambus. And then the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice decided they wanted in on the feeding frenzy too.

Now, after countless claims, counter-claims, summary judgments and other ups and downs in court rooms, the legal battles still show no signs of abating. The improbability of a resolution in the near term was underscored last week, when Rambus yet again unleashed its legal guns. The company announced that it was suing Hynix, Infineon, Inotera and Nanya for patent infringement over their use of DDR2, GDDR2 and GDDR3 memory devices.

Rambus' new suit also marks the first original patent suit in the U.S. since 2000. Does it mean that DRAM suits and counter-suits involving Rambus and the memory supplier base will continue for years to come?

Should DRAM Resellers Worry?

Rambus' complaint , filed in a U.S. Federal district court in California last week, has an interesting legal relief clause. Specifically, the complaint cites customers, OEMs, distributors and others linked with the memory devices named in last week's complaint, sold by the four defendant companies.

In the "prayer for relief" section of Rambus' lawsuit, Rambus seeks a grant of "permanent injunction." This means the company seeks to stop any party from infringing on its patents for the DDR2, GDDR2 and GDDR3 memory devices named in the suit. However, the other parties mentioned in the complaint include "customers, representatives, OEMS, dealers, distributors and others." Rambus wants to enjoin these other parties from "from further acts of (1) infringement, (2) contributory infringement and (3) active inducement to infringe with respect to the claims of the Patents Asserted Against Defendants..."

So if you are a white box vendor or reseller and sell or distribute PCs with DDR2, GDDR2 and GDDR3 memory, do you need to hire a lawyer? John Danforth, senior vice president and general counsel at Rambus said, "patent law in the U.S. makes every one of those entities potentially responsible, and we haven't yet decided the full scope of relief we want. [The complaint] outlines what the outer boundaries are. Based on past laws, anyone in the chain can be challenged for patent infringement. But we haven't yet decided whom to pursue beyond the named defendants...the relief outlines the outer boundaries of the relief available for us to have."

However, Danforth qualified these "outer boundaries". "We haven't named any of those parties or moved for any kind of injunctive relief against those parties," Danforth said. "We have tried to aim or focus on the DRAM producers, and that is where we have been litigating for a while, and that is who we refer to right now."