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Rambus Wins Appeal of FTC Anti-Trust Ruling
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Rambus has won its appeal in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision said that it wasn't sufficient to prove that Rambus lied or harmed competitors; the FTC had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law. This is, unfortunately, a very dangerous ruling in light of some of Microsoft's activities relating to OOXML because it raises the bar on the proof required to act against such behavior. However, the ruling in the Rambus case was merely vacated and remanded for further proceedings, not overturned. So, if the evidence warrants, the lower court might be able to decide that consumers were actually harmed by Rambus' conduct and rule against them. Alternatively, this ruling could be appealed to the Supreme Court by filing a petition for a writ of certiorari, but the Supreme Court only grants a few of those per year."
As long as the burden of proof to show harm to consumers isn't too high, this should be relatively simple. Explain to a judge how the PC market grew and evolved into one where all parts are interchangeable and show the benefit that's had to the consumer. Then show how the actions that rambus took fragmented the market artificially, resulted in artificially high prices from rambus and set back the ram industry overall.
The ooxml case is a little harder, especially since it's so early in the game that you can't see all the blowback yet, but considering the fact that even MS Office isn't compliant with the standard, it should be fairly simple to show that it's hurt the standards industry as a whole.
The biggest downside is that this ruling encourages lying and backstabbing between competitors trying to work together to build good standards.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
> As long as the burden of proof to show harm to consumers isn't too high, this should be relatively simple.
:) I'm only sure about the Supreme Court being able to overturn this ruling (if they deign to), and the lower court being able to hold Rambus accountable for other reasons.
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Proving things like "harm to consumers" is VERY expensive and requires expert witnesses and studies to counter your opposition because it's so vague. Proving someone lied is a lot simpler and less expensive. Not to mention less of a matter of opinion.
As long as they can get away with lying to standards bodies to create or further a monopoly, though, I really don't like it. Suddenly, it changes the economic equation so that people can't challenge them unless it's too expensive not to. In other words, Microsoft may be able to use this as nearly a carte blanche to subvert standards bodies in its war on open standards.
Oh, I should also add an addendum to this story: it seems that this was decided by a three judge panel, so there's one more possibility for appeal, according to some Groklaw comments. They may be able to appeal and have all the judges decide. But this appeal might not be granted, either, so who knows? If any actual lawyer responds and tells us about the appeals route, listen to them, not me
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
True, I guess what it comes down to is whether you are "hurting the compitition" or just "hurting competition"; as in the spirit of a fair and even playing field. In this case, Rambus was clearly trying to tilt the field in their favor.
I'm not 100% up on my late-1990s corporate dramas anymore, and maybe it's just a flippant or spurious kind of analogy to ponder, so set me straight where I've got this wrong:
Putting a file in a particular directory, so that other users might possibly request initiation of a download, is a criminal activity that can incur penalties of ~10000000% the cost of obtaining the original file legally. It doesn't matter if the file is actually downloaded. That's the "making available" charge.
But somehow, brazenly sharing ideas in memory technologies with all your competitors in the standards group, while maintaining a submarine patent, and then launching legal attacks on all those who built on the shared ideas, this is somehow okay because they hadn't proved that such a move had moved beyond the standards group and affected the marketplace? That's the "no harm to consumers" defense?
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This is the same court that let Microsoft off the hook on appeal (so Bush could then let them off the hook entirely.) In fact, that same ruling was quoted as a reason to let Rambus off the hook.
The point the judges make is: If JEDEC would have known about the patents and intended patents, they would probably just have enforced RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory)licensing terms. This would still made Rambus the monopolist, just at a lower rate. So the deceit did not give Rambus the monopoly, it just gave it better licensing rates.
But the judges also doubt that the evidence holds up to the light in regards to the deceitfulness the FTC found. It doesn't say in the JEDEC rules of conduct that you have to tell everyone about everything you plan to patent in the future, only that you have to list existing and pending patents (which can be found by a 15 min search on the USPTO website anyway). Rambus "crime" was that they knew they had the ability to patent the technology JEDEC was discussing, and were not disclosing it; something against the spirit, but not the letter of the code for standard setting organizations.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
It is an argument that the patented solution was practical and cheap.
...all he needed was a army knife, a bow and explosive arrows.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls