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DRAM Makers Accused of Price Fixing
AdamWeeden writes "According to the EETimes, many of the states in the U.S. have entered into a class-action lawsuit against a group of eight DRAM manufacturers. The companies are accused of price-fixing computer memory for over five years, beginning in the late 1990s." From the article: "Four companies and 12 executives have so far pleaded guilty to participating in the conspiracy and have been assessed more than $730 million in fines. In May, three of the four companies, Samsung Electronics, Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Infineon Technologies AG agreed to pay a total of $160 million to settle class action suits related to price fixing. Elpida Memory Inc., the fourth company to plead guilty, is still involved in the class-action suits."
Always good to see lawyers making more money off class actions suits, and the rest of us getting a rebate.
Why why why why why when these companies do crap like this don't we just abolish thier corporate charter, sell their assets to their competitors and realse their patents and copyrights into the public domain and abolish their trademarks? I'm getting very tired of hearing about large corporation X acting against the public intrest by breaking the law. Make it so that shareholders will punish them for breaking the law and a corporation will not break the law.
So they fixed prices, so what, memory prices in the mid/late nineties plummited. Early 90s buying a 4 meg chip costed hundreds, mid 90s a 32 meg chip cost under a hundred, by the end of the 90s we were paying under a buck a meg, heck now it's what, under a buck for 10 megs?
In the end, the consumers will see none of it (who's really going to go through to paper work for a $3 rebate?), the lawyers will see millions, and the government will get the unclaimed payouts.
IOW, a complete waste of time.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
And what if I do not want to upgrade in the next 90 days?
This way you are actually helping them by creating a gold rush which will clear their stock inventory in the next 90 days and they can even write it off as a loss as well.
A penalty is supposed to hurt the penalised, not the improve its financial and inventory positions.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Of course, none of this means that the consumers get anything -- even if damages are awarded, you'd have to be able to prove that you purchased DRAM between 1999 and 2002. Hope you kept those receipts, folks.
I'll even give you more credit: You're OK with letting Price Fixing slide, which affected prices throughout the entire industry (from OEM machines to individual retail sticks and everything DRAM-related inbetween), if the consumer doesn't reap the biggest benefit from legal action taken against the corporations?
First of all, IANAL, but I'd think both the letter of the law and the spirit of the law should matter to some people. You set a *huge* double standard if you only go after companies that succeeded in their plot as opposed to those who ultimately slowed their decline. The law should apply to everyone and every corporation equally, and although it doesn't seem to do so, we should applaud efforts like these which make a statement that it does.
In addition, this is still YOUR government, whether you approve of its spending habits or not, and the lawyers undoubtedly earned their fair share by proving the states' case against the companies. And whether you like it or not, the government came out ahead here of corporations that thumbed their noses at YOU.
Whether it was a little $ or a lot of $$$, you were a victim if you bought a computer, a stick of ram, or anything related to DRAM during that five year period. Judging by that whole dot-com boom and Internet thing, I'd be willing to bet that a whole lot of DRAM-using OEM computers were sold, and a whole-lot of techies were buying DRAM as it became cheaper and more attractive. So in this case, if nothing else, your government stood up for you and its people, stood up for the law, and stood up for itself. It tried to send a message.
While consumers may never see a dime come directly from this case, the money will go to the state coffers, and the money will ultimately benefit society, even if your opinion of the government is of the lowest and most ineffecient kind.
Some good *was* done. The difficulty that you and others have with trusting in this simple thought is that you will never know exactly how it was done. You just have to understand, trust, and hope that this was the case. That, at this point in time, is how our system works.
1993 - 4 MB SIMM $160
2003 - 256 MB DIMM $160
Spitzer should go after real criminals, and stop using threats and publicity to extort big settlements.
I misread the subject as "DRM Makers Accused of Price Fixing" and got all excited!
This way you are actually helping them by creating a gold rush which will clear their stock inventory in the next 90 days and they can even write it off as a loss as well.
A penalty is supposed to hurt the penalised, not the improve its financial and inventory positions.
Huh! If this is going to be good for them, then why don't they do it themselves?
Is anybody going to stop them?
Here is one area that is very difficult to win the anarcho-capitalist debate on -- the cartelization of this particular market in this particular industry sounds very insidious and hard to compete with without the government intervening and bringing the hammer down.
Most people believe that memory manufacturing is a VERY expensive business. This is true in terms of overall numbers (billions), but it is false in terms of actual products required on the market. Memory is used in much more than just computers (cars, microwaves, cell phones, digital cameras, DVD players, etc), and it is a huge market, possibly a trillion dollar one coming soon. When you have a big market, a big demand and a low supply of manufacturers, it doesn't take much to raise the billions needed to enter a market where there is obvious collusion. 1 million Americans risking US$3000 in a market that you can prove is selling at a overwhelming profit is not a big risk -- and many people were aware of the over-priced memory market back in the 90s.
Yet I think the debate is won by the free marketeers when you realize that one of the biggest reasons for the cartelization in this case is patent and copyright law. Memory chips are heavily burdened by patents, and many of those patents are cross licensed by those in the cartel. This smacks of government-paternalism and is one reason why patents generally help the cartels and the State rather than the inventor. The cartel:inventor ratio in terms of who is helped by patents is very very high (more cartels are helped than individual inventors).
I believe the government is wrong for starting class-action lawsuits. We all know that few companies are hurt by class-action lawsuits, and even fewer "victims" are helped. The lawyers (who are the biggest supporters of the expanding State) win the most! Why don't we roll back before the cartel-State collusion and see what the real cause of this problem is? The biggest barrier to the market is NOT money -- stop thinking that! No matter what the financial cost is, if there is a profit to be made, people will invest. I don't care if it is quadrillions that are needed, as long as it is profitable (and cartels can always be beaten in price), people will risk money. The real barrier is the State -- no one can raise enough "force" to overcome the force of government patents and copyrights.
Maybe because American laws against price fixing wouldn't apply to an internation organization of which the US isn't even a member?
What do you think that we can do? We're a large consumer of oil, so we can apply economic pressue. That already happens though, and we already get very good deals. Believe me, gas is much less expensive in the US than in just about any other country.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Havent we seen this a few times in the past? " Oh, bad industry.. you are fixing prices.. *slap on wrist* .. now be good.. " then we go thru it again in a few years as nothing ever changes. Governmental 'fines' are considered a cost of doing business anymore, and have long since stopped being a deterrent.
---- Booth was a patriot ----