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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.'"
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.
When ATSC was created, everyone knew who owned the patents on the different parts of it. What RAMBUS did was guide the standards process so that the standard would involve patents they own in the standard, without letting them know.
R The difference here is that RAMBUS disguised the fact that they had patents on the technology in the standard while in ATSC everyone knew about the patents before hand. That is the difference.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
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.
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
and it was just before the submarine patent changes were put into effect, so they altered their patent descriptions to cover stuff they heard in "open" meetings. They abused the hell out of the patent office and even the FTC can't let the court's decision stand because it would wreak havoc on contractual dealings between companies.
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.