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Government Brings Antitrust Actions Against Rambus, Micron
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."
You are behind the times. Micron was using that tack a couple years ago, now their production costs are among the lowest in the industry and they are driving foreign competition out of the market, and some of them are crying to their governments about it, just like Micron in the past in the US.
Of course, if Micron drives enough other companies out of business (like Hynix, which is now in bankruptcy) they will be able to raise their prices since there won't be a surplus of DRAM as is currently the case. The weak PC market has hurt them all, but Micron's low production costs and low debt have them in a better position than some of the competition.
Yep, according to their stock chart, 11:34 looks right. 36% decline in one day? Yikes! Well, it couldn't have happened to a more arrogant group of SOBs.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
They withdrew shortly after the standards were being seriously discussed, but (allegedly) not before suggesting certain methods of doing things... which as it turns out they have patents on.
Actually, to my knowledge, nobody has ever alleged that Rambus tried to steer JEDEC towards Rambus-patented technologies. Instead, Rambus remained silent while technologies were being discussed at JEDEC meetings that could infringe on its patents and even amended its patent applications to cover things being discussed at JEDEC meetings. In addition, Rambus didn't bail out of JEDEC until 1996, when its first SDRAM-applicable patents were finally issued.
At one point during a JEDEC meeting, Rambus was asked point-blank if it had any patents pertaining to "two-bank designs." Rambus's representative merely shook his head no. Rambus actually had patent applications pending regarding two-bank designs and the representative who was asked about it knew this. Rambus later attempted to defend its silence on the topic by saying it believed it only needed to disclose patents that had already been issued, not pending ones. JEDEC's president says that Rambus is the only JEDEC member ever to misinterpret the patent rules in this way.
For anybody looking to read the whole unseemly story of Rambus and its unparalleled greed, Fortune Magazine has the definitive article on the subject.