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Rambus Destroyed Evidence In Anti-trust Trial
Marasmus writes "CNN is reporting that memory-chip maker Rambus has been found guilty of destroying evidence which was 'critical' to the anti-trust case brought by the U.S. government. Interestingly, the Judge has denied the FTC's request to move on to the penalty phase of the trial. Destruction of evidence in an anti-trust case normally yields a forfeiture of trial, but Rambus 'will have the burden of proving its innocence" instead.'
they just kept them in memory...and turned the power off.
postmodernsideshow.com
The article doesn't explain what reasoning the judge gave for not switching right to the penalty phase, but requiring the less-onerous "proving their innoncence". This seems unusual.
From the article: "Rambus has maintained that its document destruction was part of the company's regular document retention policy."
So what exactly is their policy? Does the government regulate this, or do individual companies simply decide a policy? Anderson tried to use this as a defense as well, during the Enron scandal, if I remember correctly. A policy of "don't retain potentially incriminating documents" wouldn't surprise me, considering Rambus' alleged past behaviour. Are these policies about as useful as corporate codes of conduct that companies such as Nike have? If they don't already, should the FTC set down guidelines?
take your sig and shove it
Quality of article notwithstanding, the case is interesting because it touches pretty much every computer sold today since pretty much everything uses either DDR or RIMMs. Then there are the human factors like the skullduggery on the part of RAMBUS, their once "gonna take over the world" position, their "relationship" with Intel, etc, etc.
Hmmm, I wonder if Enron could get away with saying the same thing at trial. "I'm sorry, your honor, but we always destroy our evidence, it's our normal business practice."
...The MS anti-trust and now RAMBUS (which I had no idea was anyone's 'darling')?
Has the government prosecutors lost their teeth or is this just fuel to the idea that this was an arrangement that was bought and paid for? This does not sound like justice to me... justice for all that follows the rules and all that? This is very disturbing.
So first they enter into a consortium, and don't show they have certain patents, and now they don't show evidence? I sense a pattern there, but I can't seem to find one for the judges decision.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
And the fact that they went into JEDEC meetings to help define an open standard and then patented things being developed there. The RAMBUS saga is about abuse of the processes used to develop new standards. Rambus has yet to be properly dealt with for that, and that make an update on their case "News for Nerds" as much as anything.
Abstract - A process by which documents, which encompasses the plurality of both physical and "virtual" assembledges of characters or images, are converted into a non usable format either via the physical process of shredding, disassembly via the use of prehensile appendages, use of the 'delete' or 'rm' utilities, editing with Microsoft Word, or any other method that would make said document unreadable to any law enforcement agency.
Rambus says they legally destroyed the documents, a Judge says they illegally destroyed the documents. Rambus is useless.
:-)
HOWEVER, regardless of a company's retention policy, it is illegal to destroy documents related to a government investigation once the company is aware an investigation will occur or is likely to occur. This is what got Arther Anderson in trouble, they knew an investigation was coming and then destroyed documents. This is also why a written policy is important, and that it be strictly observed. That way in court it is easy to defend the statement we destroy all documents older than X months automatically. We did not destroy them because an investigation was coming.
The article includes a graph that shows a steep drop-off of their stock price.
The very first thing you do is to look at the numbers on the axes of the graph. The vertical axis of the graph is price of one stock share in dollars, but the graph goes from $15.43 down to $13.86, so that steep drop-off wasn't as steep as the graph makes it look. If you plot the same numbers on a graph that goes from $16 down to $0, it's not nearly as dramatic. The stock price fell by about 10.6%, while the graph makes it look more like 100%.
To learn more about tricky graphs and other misleading charts, read How to Lie with Statistics, a truly great and fun book.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Does anyone else think that maybe the US gov't is encouraging the big-name companies based in the US to play by a different set of rules in order to maintain market share? Note that Worldcom had tremendous overseas assets, as did Enron. Rambus had one of the largest market shares in its field and an original patent. Microsoft is still on 90(+)% of consumer computers worldwide, and AOL has not had to abide by its promises to open up the IM market under the rules established for the merger with Time-Warner. Granted, all the aforementioned companies are heavy political donators, but it seems that the US government of the last 25 years (since the Chrysler bailout in the late 70s) has encouraged a trust mentality among larger companies that allows them several get-out-of-jail-free cards as long as they stay profitable and maintain market share. I'd like to hear y'alls opinions/comments on this...
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
It's seems obvious that they did wrong in adjusting their patents during and after the JEDEC process, without disclosing their patent knowledge or intents to the body at large. I can just hear the conversation: "Let's sit in on this standards body, write down their ideas, quielty patent them, wait for them to be implemented, hire lots of lawyers, and start suing everybody!!"
If they had been (or are) allowed to get away with their behavior in regards to that standards body, it undermines the ability of all companies to cooperatively design and create standards in good faith.
Nothing says "We're innocent" like destroying evidence
I think this decision has some broader implications which the people commenting have so far missed. This means there might be some legal requirement by other companies to keep information which may prove necessary for purposes not yet known.
For example, could it be argued that ISPs must keep complete logs of user traffic in the event of legal action taken against a user? Or that companies must retain versions of software builds for X years to prove they didn't "steal" intellectual property in building their system?
Granted, that is a big difference from keeping documents which were used in the process of conducting business (e.g. patents, SEC filings, shareholder meetings). Is this the first ruling of its kind? (I'm guessing no.) Any legal experts have any insight into where else this sort of ruling can be applied in a broader sense?