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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.'"
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.
A patent IS a government created monopoly.
Yoghurt
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.
the price of admition to JEDEC open meetings was a contract that you would put all your patents on the table and that information shown was considered "shared" and "safe" under the contract everybody signed. Rambus broke both.. they did not disclose all of their patented technology and actually lead joint discussions in that direction, and they took information about JEDEC direction back to the patent lawyers and edited the patents they didn't disclose to cover stuff that JEDEC engineers were working (SDRAM, DDR, ect.) on to avoid/work around patent issues. Then they dropped the meetings, said they "quit" and started filing suits.
Then they somehow got a court to say that the sharing contract was just a "suggestion" and couldn't actually take away the changes they made to the patents... then used the meetings they tainted as evidence in court JEDEC was willfully violating their precious patents. Then they had the gull to sue that JEDEC colluded to exclude the expensive RAMBUS ram from the market after they tainted the open discussion and started suing over patents!!!
This matters to the FTC because the industry had a contractual arrangement between manufacturers to disclose/share patents in an open manner so the FTC didn't have to bog the courts down with frivolous lawsuits. Rambus came in, broke long established contractual terms and then actually got a court to say such terms in trade associations were just "suggestions" and that individual patent owners could withdraw from whatever arrangements they set up whenever they wanted. note this affected MP3 when several companies used contract loopholes to withdraw their patents form established agreements then re-sued companies that had already paid up. This affected MPEG-LA in the same way. The recent Agilent lawsuit over some hardware decoder was also another patent revoked from an industry association then they sued all the members. The FTC wants a stop to the practice of a few SCO types breaking the system.
What the court said was (paraphrasing slightly) was that it doesn't give a Goddamn about one business screwing over another business using deceptive practices. It's only if said practices can be shown to have harmed retail purchasers that there's a case to answer.
It may seem clear to me and thee that achieving a patented monopoly by stealth would harm retail purchasers, but that's up to the plaintiff to demonstrate.
So, sure, it's a dick move by the circuit court, but the law says what the law says. There's no "Aw, c'mon, they were mean and sneaky" clause.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.