Government Brings Antitrust Actions Against Rambus, Micron 257
A Happy Plague writes "I work at a hedge fund and one of the nice ammenities are real time news tickers. At 11:34 EDT, a nice red line scrolled on my screen.."FTC Alleges Rambus Violates Antitrust Laws". The headlines followed..."...Anticompetitive Acts... Deceived standard setting organization...never acknowledged patents... deceptive conduct..."
Too bad it takes a long time fo bureacracies to work, but they usually come around. Yahoo News has the story." Of course all rambus has to do now is buy a president to get out from under this. In related news, Tricot writes "Over at Salon, there is a newswire article claiming that the justice department is investigating memory chip maker Micron for anti-competitive practices. Wow, if it's a monopoly, then it certainly hasn't hurt prices."
How do you know? (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know this? You have no way of knowing what prices might be were this not a monopoly (if it is ruled a monoopoly). You might consider the prices "fair" now, but who's to say they couldn't be better with competition?
More.... (Score:4, Insightful)
More editorial bullshit. What if this was about Chinese space technology? Would we see the same statement with a link to a negative Clinton story?
Sometimes slashdot.org is worse than the Yellow Times.
The case for the Corporate Death Penalty (Score:4, Insightful)
However, as companies begin to lower their ethical standards and sink to the level of Enron, Anderson, and Rambus, the citizens of this fine nation need to stand up and demand accountability. Rambus should be a rallying cry, and it should be the pilot case for testing the resurrection of the corporate death penalty. Why?
- Rambus produces nothing. The Rambus technology was licensed
(albeit in a very unethical manner) from several other companies.
Rambus has never employed a single engineer. They exist only to
facilitate the creation and maintenance of an artificial monopoly.
- Rambus is a threat to other businesses and consumers. Rambus
has attempted to assert patent rights on several key, widely deployed
technologies, such as SDRAM. This is a textbook example of extortion.
Rambus did not create these technologies; they manipulated the sale of them
so that they would be able to prosecute their competitors in court. An
individual would rot in jail for doing something similar.
- Rambus does not support alternative operating systems. Thus
far, Rambus has refused to cooperate with the Linux developers who are
trying to optimize performance on machines with RDRAM. This gives
Microsoft an unfair advantage and again hurts the consumer by inhibiting
choice.
The list goes on, but the point is clear: Rambus deserves to get the corporate death penalty.Give it a rest (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it a tad irresponsible to accuse Bush of being "bought" by Microsoft because his administration is hesitant to interfere with market forces -- even when your typical
Republicans are normally slower to jump on the antitrust bandwagon. Accusations of impropriety are just way out of line, though.
Politcal slant AGAIN (Score:3, Insightful)
A quick check of fecinfo.com's donor search shows that Bill Gates has donated generously to MANY democrats. In fact, in this 2002 election cycle, all of the donations shown are to democrats. But overall, Microsoft has given to both main parties and even some independent parties.
Any idiot should be able to figure out that a republican president will be "pro business". Note that microsoft didn't buy a pardon, like some common criminals did from Clinton.....
Oh, I forgot, this is slashdot, so microsoft and republicans are always evil.....
poor business stategy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it a sign of a greater ethics issue in the industry or is it high level management who can't figure out how to solve a problem other than to pursue a costly and risky legal battle? I think its both, and investors should be wary about putting any more money into this company.
Buy a President? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is that supposed to mean? Gates gave tons of money to Gore but not Bush. Every time Bush does something that helps a company you all act like he was paid off. Here is the truth. He is a republican and as one believes that companies should be left alone by the government. A good republican, and libertarians to, shoul alway fight for the repel of laws that inhibit fair business. Most non-techies don't understand that M$ is evil they just see another business.
Thus Republican + Nontechie = doesn't worry about M$. For better or worse that is the way it is.
Can we cut down on the partisan sniping? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, excuse me? What does President George W. Bush have to with RAMBUS much less the Microsoft case from this link? President Bush appointed the first African American, Charles James, to head the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Assistant Attorney General Charles James never has said that Microsoft should get away scott free, he just disagrees with breaking up Microsoft into two monopolies from one. His solution is to penalize Microsoft and force them to adopt different business practices that would remove barriers to competition from outside companies on their operating system.
There is no need for these sort of comments on Slashdot story briefs. AAG Charles James has a long history of serving this country through its court system and to have a partisan sniper misrepresent his opinion in such a blatant fashion is repugnant. I don't know if its racism or just pure hatred towards the current administration that would allow this sort of misrepresentation to be published. It would be nice if Slashdot editors would review these submissions before they are posted and depolitise them.
Damn Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Extreme Patents Bad
MPAA Bad
RIAA Bad
EFF Good
Free Speech Good
Video Games Good
Open Source Good
I am completely okay with you disagreeing with my analysis of the purchasability of George Bush, but to say that /. should be unbiased in it's coverage is to ignore the history and goals of slashdot. And to assume a default democratic bias is in my opinion unfounded, I mean, look at our criticism of Idiot Senator Hollings a senator so completely purchased that he must have a barcode tattooed on his forehead.
chrisd
Re:Can we cut down on the partisan sniping? (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that all the agreement contains is some (rather weak) restrictions of future conduct (for a short time) there is not one penalty for past conduct anywhere in the agreement.
Remedy (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Rambus was part of the JEDEC.
2. JEDEC rules require disclosure of patents.
3. Rambus declosed no patents.
4. (while part of JEDEC) Rambus suggested certain methods employed in SDRAM and DDR (that they had patents on).
5. Now that SDR/DDR is well-entrenched, Rambus is suing for royalties.
The obvious (to me) solution is to take a closer look at numbers 2 and 3. Rambus was required to declare their patents. They did not do so. Thus, they have no patents on the technology incorporated into JEDEC standards. Don't mess around with antitrust laws, just invalidate the patents in question and let them try to make a living on the technology they've got legitimate claims to.
Re:The case for the Corporate Death Penalty (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely disagree. The reason we see this kind of behaviour is that the company is punished and the individuals that make these decisions are not directly punished.
The solution is to find the person or people who made these decisions and prosecute them in a criminal court for the crimes (i.e. extortion, fraud) they have commited.
As long as we only levy punishment at the company as a whole, those individuals at the top who make these decisions are going to get off scott free and continue to engage in these behaviors. Put one of these bastards behind bars for as long as he actually deserves, and the next one will think twice before engaging in this kind of behavior. People (not companies, not guns, not computers, not books, and certainly not ideas) commit crimes and people should be punished.
Face It, White Collar Crime Pays! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the time the ringleaders are long-gone or retired before the dust even begins to leave the ground.
some sorely needed facts (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with Micron (with global DRAM marketshare of ~18%) having a "monopoly" in the DRAM market; indeed, in addition to Micron, Infineon and Samsung (and probably others) recieved subpoenas today as well. While the DOJ has not made any public statements about this (that I've seen), it is extraordinarily obvious to anyone who has followed the DRAM industry over the past year or so that they are investigating allegations of dumping on the DRAM spot market. In particular, the spot price for DRAM (128 Mbit SDRAM chips in particular) declined by something like 75% last fall, in the absence of major new supply or significant shortfalls in demand. The resulting price was well below even the marginal cost of producing these chips.
When the price suddenly shot back up a few months ago with the announcement that Micron had reached a tentative deal to buy the already-bankrupt Hynix, it became quite clear that the spot market price was being kept artificially low in order to try to force the ailing Hynix out of business. (The Micron-Hynix deal was later rejected by Hynix's board, causing--wouldn't you know it--another DRAM price war.) The whole thing was made even more fishy by the fact that DRAM contract prices (that is, the DRAM sold in monthly contracts to OEMs like Dell, HP, etc.) stayed way way higher than the spot prices; Hynix was mostly limited to the spot market in its attempts to desperately sell off excess inventory to try to raise cash to pay off their creditors (after all, who wants to sign a contract with a company on the verge of bankruptcy??).
The obvious conclusion is that the other memory makers (Samsung and Micron are #1 and 2 in marketshare) dumped excess inventory on the spot market or even purposely sold at worse prices than they could otherwise get, in an effort to drive Hynix out of business sooner and thus reduce supply and cause prices to be higher than before. By itself, this is probably not illegal, because none of them has a monopoly. What would be illegal is if any of them colluded to keep the spot price artificially low. If they did that, they would be guilty of forming an illegal trust (that's why it's called anti-trust law, not "anti-monopoly") and engaging in illegal dumping or even price-fixing. Personally I would be surprised if this did not occur, but we'll see if the DOJ can find enough concrete evidence to bring a claim.
[For those wondering how the DRAM market turned out--spot prices are way down again across the board, although 128Mbit SDRAM is not nearly as low as it got last fall. (256Mbit and DDR chips are close to record lows, though.) The difference now is that contract prices have finally come down to near-spot levels (in a normal market, contract prices are lower than spot levels), and, considering the recent warnings by Intel and AMD, it looks as if low demand may actually be to blame, not price-fixing.]
The Rambus story: The short version of events posted here is more or less right: Rambus was a member of JEDEC while the SDRAM standard was being worked on; Rambus did not disclose any patents they had which read on the SDRAM design being discussed, nor did they disclose any intent to seek royalties on the standard; later, after SDRAM was standardized and became the mainstream DRAM type, Rambus sought royalties from anyone producing SDRAM or an SDRAM memory controller, which is to say almost the entire worldwide electronics industry. (Also DDR, which according to Rambus not only infringes their SDRAM patents but also a couple others on double-clocked operation in a DRAM.)
Some memory producers (including Samsung and Elpida) agreed; others (specifically Micron, Infineon and Hynix) refused and were taken to court. (The threatened legal action regarding SDRAM controllers never really happened because Rambus was focusing on memory producers first.) In the first such case to come to trial, in which Rambus sued Infineon in Virginia, not only did the judge rule that Rambus' patents don't actually cover SDRAM/DDR, but the jury found Rambus guilty of fraud for sitting on JEDEC and failing to disclose their intent to seek royalties on SDRAM--which is essentially what the FTC claim charges. (Unlike the DOJ investigation I talked about above, the FTC is past the investigating stage and today actually filed a claim against Rambus.)
However, it's not quite as simple as other
Re:Give it a rest (Score:2, Insightful)
The market for aluminum was strong when Alcoa was a monopoly too, just because there is strong demand doesn't mean there isn't a monopoly hurting the industry with anti-competitive tactics.