Slashdot Mirror
Infineon To Pay $160 Million For Fixing RAM Prices
Jerrod K writes "Infineon Technologies pleaded guilty to charges of price fixing in an international conspiracy. The Justice Department said this is the third largest antitrust settlement ever. Other memory chip makers involved include Hynix, Samsung, and Micron Technology." Reader phalse phace adds a link to CNET's coverage.
A local family man is facing 20+ years in prision for walking into the vault at the back where he worked and taking 100,000 USD.
Why do large corps get away with crap like this, hell the goverment doesn't even go after those whitecollar criminals that skip bail...
But, normal crimes they come down hard on.
Cases like this remind me why I don't think the libertarian philosophy towards free markets is all that realistic. Many libertarians believe that things such as this should be left to the marketplace to settle, and that government "interference" like this ultimately harms the market. I emphatically disagree. There are inherent flaws with the free market that the justice system can and should remedy so that the overall market is healthier thereby. Collusion does no one -- consumers, industries, or the economy as a whole -- any favors, and I fail to see how letting the market handle it would do anything but unfairly fatten the pockets of those who benefit.
This fine may be huge, but will we see a benefit from it? Probably not.
Sure. Just like CD prices fell after the CD price fixing settlemet... oh, wait...
Then I guess this will be like my rates with progressive going lower after they had the class action law suit over adjusting rates based on credit... oh, wait... that didn't happen either.
The only peopel to benefit from this will be the lawyers and the major companies - the rest of us will be lucky to get a coupon for a dollar off.
The latest info I can find dates from around May, but Infineon is one of the DRAM makers facing a patent-infringement lawsuit from Rambus, and if that doesn't go well for them (Rambus had an initial setback but has been getting favourable rulings since; anyone who wants to cry "submarine patent!" better read up on the history, it's nowhere near that cut-and-dry) they could very well go under. I think they will lose it, and get hit with willful infringment for triple damages, which will easily run the damages into the billions. I doubt Infineon could absorb that.
there's added incintive for the companies to NOT DO THIS SORT OF THING now, the society as a whole benefits and that is how you get the benefit.
that's the whole point of those fines, you make the RISK of running such price fixing schemes too high that they don't want to take it.
like the fairly recent cartel busts in metal and paper industries(northern+mid europe)... you don't directly get anything but by punishing with hefty fines (also in the 100m+ range)they send a message that "don't fucking do this".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They just broke down the company name to Infineon...
But those that were harmed already have the memory they needed. All the discount RAM in the world isn't going to be a remedy to everyone - only those who need more memory.
I don't know, but comparing the die size of the CPU to the area taken up by the chips on the memory module, it 'looks' like the memory is at least as dense as the CPU.
I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that a memory fab plant costs more to produce than a CPU plant, but the memory plant will produce far more chips over its lifetime.
Jason
ProfQuotes
"why aren't our taxes going down?"
Mine did. Tax tables changed, I took more money home. I bought a house, deductable interest, even lower taxes. Don't know what you problem is.
Yes, these wonderful lawyers who are doing this for the little people like you and me.
Actually, yes. Imagine that, a lawyer can right a social wrong AND get paid well at the same time. Sounds like a noble profession.
Disclaimer: IANAL
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Oh yeah, that would be a great idea, let them dump to gain market share. Too bad for their competitors.
Casca
My guess is you'd need some non-volitile storage to keep track of the bad bits and the mappings. A little non-volitile memory will more than double the cost of the chip and the remapping will slow the memory down to much.
Does this mean that companies like Dell (Any big computer company really) will stop charging five times more than retail for memory upgrades?
I tried to price it on Dell's site for notebooks. In retail, 2x256 is the same price as 1x512, more or less. (All prices that follow are Canadian)
Dell charges 200$ for the DIFFERENCE between them.
To upgrade from 2x256 to 2x512, they charge 600$. They should be charging about 150$. When I purchased a DDR333 512MB SODIMM, I paid 144$.
Now, even when using ultra-premium ram (Which they don't), there's a big difference between 144$ and 600$.
If I personally break the law I will probably be incarcerated for my crimes. Yet a corporation who's only job is to make more money then it spends simply pays a fine. If I am in jail I can't earn any money or perform any deeds outside of a very limited set of rules. Corporations shouldn't be fined. They should be forced to shutdown or even be disbanded.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
If you sell at too low a prices then you're "dumping" and that's illegal too.
One law is there to protect the consumer and the other is there to protect other suppliers.
Unless companies can sustainably make profit from their silicon sales we're doomed to boom and bust cycles where we oscillate between RAM surpluses and RAM shortages. In the long run, we all lose if these companies cant stabilise and make reasonable profits.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Meanwhile the price of petroleum continues to drop, yet we're still shelling for $2/gal. (yeah, I know it's cheaper than in Europe, but you pay more taxes on it than we do.) Heck, with all the oil execs in Washington DC, in the government, it's small wonder nobody investigates price fixing of that commodity, heck, how could they run a re-election campaign if they found what pretty much everyone should know - they are a cartel and they run the government. Infineon's error was not getting their own people into high office.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm sure they learned their lesson: keep doing it.
Memory is easy to design if you never plan to sell it. If you want to be competitve in the market, it is insanely difficult.
Memory makers must violate silicon design rules to increase density and remain competitive. This type of process tuning is on-going, and stabilizes just barely before the fab is obsolete.
CPU design is a bunch of hdl that you can get 10 trained monkeys to write. Process tweaking is black magic(k).
You're damn right they do this. And some systems (Macs) are *very* finicky about their RAM. An 'underclocked' DIMM may technically meet the electrical specifications for what they're selling it as, but still not meet the system's standards.
I've only found one manufacturer to never sell me an underclocked chip: Kensington. Of course, I suspect they sell their underclocked chips to other vendors as an OEM, but I can still trust the Kingston label. Others may be as good, but I haven't tried 'em all and Kingston has been reliable for 5 years.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Lets not forget about BlackwaterUSA which IS a business military, currently hired by our government.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
They're a bit cheaper in the UK now too, probably due to being in competition with Kazaa.
:(
They used to be a cheaper still, but then they stopped the grey imports
this article is a crock of shit, and the doj has taken a bribe.
the articles say that price fixin only occured from 99 to 02? look at the scoreboard budda. ram has ALWAYS been very expensive. it's made out of fuckin sand! there is no real cost with a low yeild...you just make more of it.
then there was the mysterious ram factory fire that got hushed up early reports indicated that there was no equipment found after the fire. what could that imply.
on top of this, infineon set aside 300 million for the fines, and was only fined half? could they be more obvious.
lets be realistic here. the doj only reacted because tons of people knew they were being ripped off--kinda like with M$. antitrust exists in nearly all walks of american consumerism. doj should read deparment of jokes. oil is a huge scam, electricity is screamin me too! remember when power was oing to be too cheap to meter? but the biggest scam has to be the auto industry. after almost a century of assembly lines the price of automobiles still continue to rise faster than inflation.
americans should wake up and smell the coffee... no wait, they just had a huge worldwide price hike too. its no small news that dairy, wheat board/cartels were invented in the us. what the american people should do is sue, and imprison the entire department of justice for not doing anything at the very least, and more likely, taking bribes and allowing this kind of thing to take over corporate america.
It's a fine, not a settlement. They're expected to cut a check for the amount to the government, not reimburse consumers.
Do you realize how messed up our anti-trust system is? So, Infineon engaged in price-fixing, and gouged the consumers for more money. Now, the government says "pay up", and Infineon just has to raise prices in order to cover this $160 million loss. In both cases the consumer got shafted. Once by the company, and the second time by the government. These settlements should go directly to the people that bought systems during the time period that price fixing was occurring.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon