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FTC Pursues Rambus Appeal To Supreme Court
pheede writes "SCOTUSblog brings us news that the FTC has appealed the recent circuit court decision regarding Rambus's deceptive conduct on the JEDEC standards committee, where they conveniently avoided telling anyone that they owned patents on the resulting standards. The FTC, which is proceeding on its own without help from the Justice Department, notes the circuit court's 'sweeping rules that would immunize' deceptive conduct by would-be monopolists 'in most circumstances.'"
ATSC standards had problems becuase of 8VSB for this same reason.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
Using deception to gain higher prices, the Court said, normally does not have the tendency to shut out rivals.
This quote near the end of the artice I find troubling. It almost sounds as though the court condones the use of deceptive practices.
It's true that companies use deceptive practices (the iPhone article earlier, cell phone companies in general) and those companies are certianly thriving, I think that the courts should be smacking companies that use blatent deception.
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I've heard of Magnuson-Moss mostly in the auto world, where it's known as the law that forcing manufacturers to cover warranty repairs on modified vehicles unless it can be shown that third party parts, modifications, or unintended usage contributed to the failure needing repair.
This is an interesting use of Magnuson-Moss which, as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia article, comes from the section stating "Likewise, service contracts must fully, clearly, and conspicuously disclose their terms and conditions in simple and readily understood language." What a great law.
[citation needed]
Show me one that has not been (in the USA at least). Microsoft? The government regulates patents and copyrights which MS uses to have an (unfair) advantage against competition. AT&T? The government gave funding to provide for telephone lines to "modernize" the USA, along with patents. Just about every ISP today? The government provided funding/permission for lines.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Corporations will generally screw over any person or entity, government or otherwise, to make a profit and protect any revenue stream. There is a strong case that deregulation would only fuel things like the financial crisis in the USA at the moment.
First fix the mindset of corporate CEO's who care not for the people working in the company who are not directly related or the end customer. They seem to exist to screw companies over and run with large payouts when all the problems that get swept under the carpet eventually emerge.
More government regulation could be beneficial here to check that corporations are really as valuable at any point of time as their own balance sheets say they are.
I don't think so. You made the claim, the burden of proof rests on you.
The thing that causes monopolies in a free market is consolidation due to economic hardship, bad business decisions, predatory business tactics, or limited market. Natural Monopolies arise wherever a company can provide infrastructure to a captive audience. That has nothing to do with the government, unless the government is actively encouraging it or trying to stop it. Prove me wrong.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
A patent IS a government created monopoly.
Yoghurt
I don't think so. You made the claim, the burden of proof rests on you.
And I just gave three examples.
Natural Monopolies arise wherever a company can provide infrastructure to a captive audience. That has nothing to do with the government, unless the government is actively encouraging it or trying to stop it. Prove me wrong.
That would not be a natural monopoly. A natural monopoly would be if McDonalds was the only place that sold hamburgers not because they owned copyrights or patents to hamburgers but no one else wanted to sell hamburgers. What we have in your case is the "natural monopolies" that only one or two companies can do because they received government funding (or permission) either in the past or in the present. Which would be the ISPs who got the phone lines (the needed infrastructure) when the government was handing out money left and right to phone companies to give phone service to everywhere in the country.
/. stories of Nintendo, Sony and MS being sued because of patent trolling by companies that have not, nor will make game controllers, yet they sue Nintendo, Sony or MS (or settle out of court for high sums of money) and thus help them have a monopoly because a smaller company would either be sued out of existence, be forced to withdraw a successful product, or rework it and no doubt be attacked by another patent troll. If Nintendo, Sony or MS had as much capital as a successful start up business and each had their current-gen system I doubt that any would end up surviving.
The software patent system actively encourages monopolies to form in its current form. It allows any business currently to patent something that they will never use only to put a hold onto the market. It also encourages patent trolls from preventing innovation by suing successful manufacturers of software or hardware once they become successful because of it. Just look at the numerous
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But you didn't prove anything. You gave examples that seem to support your argument, but you've barely scraped the surface of the potential interactions here. Let me clarify: You made a assertion that governments inherently cause monopolies. All i have to do to disprove this statement is cite an example of a government that has not.
Now answer me, what is wrong with my understanding of the term "natural monopoly" when applied to say, a telephone company? Or a power or water company?
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Corporations will generally screw over any person or entity, government or otherwise, to make a profit and protect any revenue stream. There is a strong case that deregulation would only fuel things like the financial crisis in the USA at the moment.
Yes, but lets just take one example, Microsoft. What keeps MS having a monopoly? Patents and (strong) copyrights (the government would naturally stop me from pirating an entire copy of Windows and selling it, but piracy for personal use would be non-legally enforceable, nor would copying small parts of the OS so long as it was clean-room), something that a deregulated economy would not have.
For example, Linux would no longer have the restrictions of the MP3 and DVD issue, DRM (so the all iPods would be usable), would have greater freedom in the WINE project and virtual machines to run Windows programs, etc. So the cheapest and best product in the end wins.
Lets take another example, Nintendo back in the '80s and '90s. Yes, Nintendo could still regulate official game developers to so many games per year, but they could not regulate unoffical game developers leading to cheaper NES systems and games. Again, the cheapest and the best wins.
First fix the mindset of corporate CEO's who care not for the people working in the company who are not directly related or the end customer. They seem to exist to screw companies over and run with large payouts when all the problems that get swept under the carpet eventually emerge.
Yes, but again, with deregulation, the companies with bad CEOs would end up quickly failing, thus eliminating the problems of CEOs screwing the companies over, you get a bad CEO, your company fails, you go to work at one of the two other companies that sprung up in its place.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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The conundrum is .... "ye strayed"
Nice try
All i have to do to disprove this statement is cite an example of a government that has not.
No, you have to find a company that has not. Not a government. And let me make a clarification, I mean an abusive monopoly that most people pay (or affects an industry in a negative way). Not just some monopoly that makes some small product that only has a niche audience.
Now answer me, what is wrong with my understanding of the term "natural monopoly" when applied to say, a telephone company? Or a power or water company?
Because a power or water company isn't really natural, its allowed and encouraged by the government. To say that it is natural is to say that if there was a world devoid of any government that was free-market that there would only be one of it when the society was at the height of its power. And I would argue that there would be surely more than one phone company and in large cities more than one power and water companies in the theoretical society above.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have to what? do i have to draw some kind of venn diagram for you?
Also, you might wanna read this
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
So these regulations, like rules against anti-competetive practices and insider trading.
These evil evil regulations.
Lets look at a world without them.
Say I set up a bus service. There's already a larger company providing a bus services in the city but they're expensive. I charge half the price that they do and start to get a lot of buisness and make a small profit.
They see what I'm doing and the next week my buisness has dropped right off as they start providing free bus services in my town. They have deep pockets because they're providing service to 100 towns and charging above the real cost.
By the end of the month I go bankrupt and they start charging the customers the price they did before(rip off).
Pretty soon they don't have to worry about startups because it's become known they'll bankrupt anyone who tries.
If someone with enough money to make a significant loss in startup sets up the company then they can take over large areas and make sure they're the only real choice.
Once they're bigger than their competitors it's just a matter of bankrupting the last of them with variations on this and then charging double the price.
Or how about a market where there's 3 major companies. they provide something essential so all agree to fix their prices (remember no evil government regulations against price fixing) and all make huge piles of money.
Mike has insider knowledge in a company and uses it to make a fortune in shares screwing over everyone else. (none of those horrible insider trading laws.)
The fact is that if you have a large pile of money starting off the game you can take over a small industry and jack up the prices/ kill off any startups with less money.
take over a few small markets and really rake in the dough and you can take over some bigger markets with the money from those.
That hit the nail on the head. For when handing out a patent you halt forward progress on that particular product or service. The really horrible part is that we are slowly painting ourselves into a corner, where we cannot forward development on anything because the instant we do we are infringing upon someones copyright/patent that happens to be the basis for our ideas/products. All human progress is built upon the progress of those before us. Imagining that every idea we have had has sprung from our foreheads unconnected and unrelated to anything we've ever seen or been in contact with is insanity. Reverse engineering is one of the most used tools our brain has, making it illeagle is very short sighted, just like patents, just like intellectual property, just like copyright. If you wanna protect your product/creation/idea keep improving it, so that those that do copy you will always be one step behind.
How quickly they forget (and I mean not just you but everybody else who couldn't come up with a reply). Standard Oil.
You don't seem to understand the concept of Natural_monopoly. That's understandable, there's been a lot of TV pundits and self-interested CEOs spouting plenty of nonsensical "economic theory" ever since Reagan.
"An industry is said to be a natural monopoly (also called technical monopoly) if only one firm is able to survive in the long run, even in the absence of legal regulations or "predatory" measures by the monopolist.[2] It is said that this is the result of high fixed costs of entering an industry which causes long run average costs to decline as output expands."
Laying pipe for water delivery and laying cable for electrification have high fixed costs. Go back to Roman and pre-Roman times and the state delivered it because no private enterprise was capable of assembling the capital necessary to build the infrastructure. Also look at Hydraulic empires. Hydraulic empires are basically natural monopolies on goods essential to life, and where the monopoly power is exploited to obtain political power (not the other way around). History is ripe with this stuff.
Another cause of natural monopolies is Network effects. In an industry where network effects are important, an early participant that can build a super-majority market share has a major marketing advantage over any competitors that they can also turn into a significant monetary advantage. This is particularly true in the telecommunications industry. If the telecom industry wasn't regulated, the major player (Bell currently) could simply refuse to exchange communications with smaller competitors (or charge hefty connection fees - above and beyond traffic-based charges - as happens in the IP internetworking business) because new customers would be more likely to need to talk to their large client base.
And you would be wrong. For the phone company, see the above network effects. For water companies, see the above links on hydraulic empires. Power? I think it depends on whether you were close to a good candidate site for hydroelectric power or a similar power generation method with high fixed and low variable costs.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The thing that causes monopolies in a free market is
Lobbying for government protection of the current (competitively successful) leaders, so that they can rest on their laurels instead of remaining competitive.
Well, i don't disagree with that.. but that's not how the system is supposed to work.. at least, not while you call it a 'free market'. I've never understood why bribery in congress is illegal, but lobbying is not.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
We've already established that governments can create monopolies.. that's not the point of contention.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
The court did not condone deceptive conduct, just that it is not anti-competitive and needs to be prosecuted under other laws such as contract law.
Some notable qutoes fromt the actual Court of Appeals ruling http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200804/07-1086-1112217.pdf
Deceptive conduct--like any other kind--must have an
anticompetitive effect in order to form the basis of a
monopolization claim. "Even an act of pure malice by one
business competitor against another does not, without more,
state a claim under the federal antitrust laws," without proof
of "a dangerous probability that [the defendant] would
monopolize a particular market." Brooke Group, 509 U.S. at
225. Even if deception raises the price secured by a seller, but
does so without harming competition, it is beyond the antitrust
laws' reach. Cases that recognize deception as exclusionary
hinge, therefore, on whether the conduct impaired rivals in a
manner tending to bring about or protect a defendant's
monopoly power. In Microsoft, for example, we found
Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive conduct when it tricked
independent software developers into believing that its
software development tools could be used to design crossplatform
Java applications when, in fact, they produced
Windows-specific ones. The deceit had caused "developers
who were opting for portability over performance . . .
unwittingly [to write] Java applications that [ran] only on
Windows." 253 F.3d at 76. The focus of our antitrust
scrutiny, therefore, was properly placed on the resulting harms
to competition rather than the deception itself.
--
We also address whether there is substantial evidence that Rambus engaged in
deceptive conduct at all, and express our serious concerns
about the sufficiency of the evidence on two particular points.
this monopoly was put in place way back in the early 90's and Intel was complicit getting Rambus on JEDEC in the first place. Somebody really oughta than Intel for funding Rambus a la SCO to do this to the industry.
I don't know if you libertards are just unbelievably stupid or are intentionally lying, but I'm inclined to think it's the latter. The natural state of commerce, in the unregulated 'free' market, is to form monopolies of various kinds, and suppress--brutally, if need be--any and all threats to that monopoly power. The failure of government to properly restrain this tendency, thanks to billions of dollars of lobbying spent on lying to the American public (like you) to the effect that "Jesus loves rich people and wants you to be one, so you should let corporations do whatever they like" is the primary cause of the USA's present troubles. Small business is good capitalism; big business is worse than communism, because at least under communism, there's a basic pretense of working for the good of equal fellow men, rather than to further enrich people who are already richer than you or I could possibly become in a dozen lifetimes.
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Lets take another example, Nintendo back in the '80s and '90s. Yes, Nintendo could still regulate official game developers to so many games per year, but they could not regulate unoffical game developers leading to cheaper NES systems and games.
You have a strange idea of how NES's history played out. Nintendo most certainly could regulate unofficial developers, because the NES featured what was probably the first DRM system ever deployed on a major consumer-oriented platform, without the awful blight of government intervention. If a cartridge didn't generate the appropriate pseudo-random bitstream, the console would continually reset (this was the cause of the infamous "blinking" problem). 3 companies that I know of found workable ways around this; Nintendo sued one (Atari), another (Macronix) eventually became a manufacturing partner, and the other (Codemasters) enabled a handful of mediocre-to-terrible games that never got major retail distribution.
do do do-do do-do-do-do dooooooo
Munumunuh
Evolution produces surprising results. A lot of the difficulties in trans-continental rail shipping and travel in the US is from the failure to encourage a monopoly, and the difficulties of different mechanical standards among the different, sometimes niche markets. So there are powerful evolutionary forces encouraging companies to avoid easy transfer, and powerful forces that encourage consumers and especially governments to encourage such standards to avoid compoletely wasting time, energy, goods, and money on such transfers. The results are predictable: a bureaucratic hash of local and federal regulations which each managerial 'organism' tries to tune to their own advantage. There are nations with a single train system, or phone system, and they do have some advantages in consistency of technology. There are tradeoffs: the pressure of competition can help avoid huge, wasteful, non-productive schemes that the cancer of a bad vice president can create, and encourages flexibility for the consumer. What results, either way, can be said to be 'natural'. Evolution isn't smart: it sometimes does things stupidly, because they work well enough to allow an organization or organism to survive and continue.
Antitrust legislation was created as a way to breakup 1800s-era monopolies like Standard Oil. What many historians ignore is that Standard Oil was only a *temporary* monopoly for about ten years. What later happened was that other oil companies (mostly in Texas) arose and undercut Standard's market share, thereby restoring a competitive environment.
That's true in virtual every case. A company establishes a monopoly, but it's only a temporary one because other competitors either (a) innovate and kill off the previous technology or (b) learn to undersell the monopoly company. One obvious example is the CD monopoly which was held by Sony & Philips over music distribution, but after about ten years ceased to exist due to other formats like DVD Audio and MP3s being used to provide music.
Now there are such things as "natural monopolies" like cable television, where it makes more sense to have one single company run one wire, rather than run ten wires. However even those natural monopolies are slowly but surely eroding away. Cable companies no longer hold a monopoly, thanks to television distribution by satellite, by phone line (DSL), and by internet (either wired or wireless). And now thanks to cheap fiber, it's technically feasible to have 3 or 4 cable companies serve each home and let the customer decide which company he wants.
Monopolies do not last forever. Therefore there's no need for government to break them up. In 99.99% of the cases the natural laws of economics will do that automatically.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
after about ten years ceased to exist due to other formats like DVD Audio and MP3s
MP3? Arguably. DVD Audio? Don't make me laugh- outside an audiophile niche, that went nowhere and likely never will now.
Monopolies do not last forever. Therefore there's no need for government to break them up.
Poor logic and an easy get-out since very few things last "forever". (Even if we use a non-pedantic definition of "forever" as being your lifetime and those of your next few generations of descendants).
If the monopoly has a damaging influence for what one could consider an extended period of time (e.g. sets an otherwise fast-moving industry back 25 years) or is having an extremely pernicious influence during even a shorter period, that's bad enough for me.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
One of the consequences of Rambus' actions is that standards bodies now take extraordinary measures to ensure that all contributors fully disclose all ideas that could be patented by the company so that they don't get submarined by them. Evem VESA, which is a video standards body, got to the point where all of their calls start out with a disclaimer by the moderator saying something to the effect of: "You cannot discuss patented or soon-to-be-patented ideas, and the contributor releases all claims to the same for use by members of the organization." All of this because of the way the Rambus situation panned out legally over the last decade.
On a slightly related note, there are all sorts of Rambus fanboi trolls who go around and post some nonsense that JEDEC is an evil cartel and that Rambus helped teach the industry how to build memory. A recent story on this subject on the EE Times website had deleted a post saying exactly this, and I've seen it in many different forums, financial and technical. The stock story being foisted all over the web s especially funny considering the old P4 i815 chipset could never take more than two RAMBUS RIMMs (despite having three slots) because of unresolvable signal integrity issues.