[ Thanks to George
Mitchell for this link. ]
“What would cause Sun to get so nasty? A patent infringement
lawsuit filed by Sun against Kingston that would cost Kingston all
of $5 million to $15 million in annual royalties. Sun Microsystems’
lawsuit claims that Kingston’s primary product, add-on computer
memory modules, is infringing on a Sun patent. Kingston, with sales
last year of $1.4 billion, is the world’s largest maker of the
after-market modules, which are used to expand memory in
computers.”
“Sun claims the unique right to assemble memory chips into
modules. To Kingston, this patent claim is akin to patenting
electrons. Memory modules, or DRAM modules, are ubiquitous and a
commodity, amounting to a total market that Dataquest estimates
will reach $30 billion this year. Worse, David Sun sees
sinister motives in Sun’s action: Once Kingston capitulates, Sun
will go after every maker of memory modules from “Apple to Z,”
resulting in a huge toll on the computer business if Sun, as seems
likely, asks for a 3%-to-5% royalty on revenues….”
“Kingston’s legal position is that Sun is getting rich off a
bogus patent. “We have smoking gun documents that establish that
Sun didn’t invent what it claims were the principal aspects of its
quote, unquote, invention, and that Sun knew it,” Dunlavey intones,
accusing Sun of dumping 3,000 pages of materials on a hapless
patent examiner on just one day.”