Micron Seeking Amnesty in DoJ Antitrust Probe?

deaddeng writes "Memory maker Micron Technology is allegedly seeking amnesty from a US Dept. of Justice grand jury investigation of price fixing, collusion, and antitrust by the memory industry, according to numerous news services, including the LA Times and Reuters. Last week, a Micron regional marketing employee pled guilty to charges brought under the same DoJ investigation for destruction of evidence and lying to the grand jury. The DoJ is investigating charges that major memory makers colluded to prevent the success of Rambus memory favored by Intel, and once that was achieved, colluded again to raise prices for DDR-SDRAM in 2001-02. If Micron is granted amnesty, it can keep its executives from facing criminal prosecution, but it may still face civil court challenges."

Comments

Similar in some aspects to the Roxio Case ...

[leoaugust]

Not that it is much of a similarity in actions, but the end goal reminds me of the Roxio case discussed earlier on /.

Micron and the other memory chip makers allege that Rambus duped an industry group into adopting standards for memory chips for which it already had sought patents. Rambus denies the allegations.

From a Slashdot Discussion earlier on the Roxio case

Optima believes most every company in the CD-burner industry may be infringing." Optima's patent was infringed in several standards adopted by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), which have been incorporated in a number of CD-ROM hardware and software products ...

So, it is adopted as a Standard, and then Optima sues after almost every CD burner is using it ....

Re:Micron deserves amnesty!

[nolife]

Micron bought out Dominion Semiconductor, a joint Toshiba-IBM memory fab plant in Manassas, VA in early 2002. As time went on, production went down, work on a second process lab was all but halted and the plant effectively stopped production early in 2003 (I had a family member that worked there). In the same time frame, they also cut production in their main plant in Idaho. The goal at was to also buy or merge with cash strapped Hynix in Korea but that was shot down by the Korean government. I believe their goal was either to move production out of the US or to buy who they could and join forces with those they could not. In that time frame, memory prices were extremely low, companies were failing and Micron saw a chance to gobble up the competition. The gamble failed when the Hynix buy fell through. Interestingly enough, they applied for and have recieved government funds related to memory dumping.
They had a goal of getting memory prices to a certain level and could not do it with competitors.

PS.. Crucial is Micron