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.'"

Comments

Subject goes here

[snowraver1]

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.

Magnuson-Moss

[Anonymous Coward]

The Commission noted that this was the fourth time it had appealed a case to the Supreme Court without the U.S. Solicitor General... The agency said it has had that authority since he Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act went into effect in July 1975.

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.

Re:Magnuson-Moss

[lysergic.acid]

great law indeed. i'd never heard of Magnuson-Moss before, but i wish the conspicuous disclosure of terms and conditions provision were more generally applied to cover all business contracts and advertising. perhaps it'd mitigate "small print syndrome" and other deceptive business practices.

maybe then instead of pouring millions of dollars into marketing/advertising and other manipulative business practices, companies will instead have to put that money into R&D to develop competitive products/technologies and succeed based purely on their technical merits (instead of, say, lobbying/bribing/tricking standard-setting bodies to adopt your proprietary technology as an industry standard).

i mean, things like films, music, clothes, etc. are highly subjective, thus they inherently rely on promotional advertising/marketing to gain exposure, after which each work can be propelled on its own creative/aesthetic merits. however, technology should to be judged on its technical merits, not which company has the biggest marketing budget or the most lobbying power to buy their own industry standards.

Re:comon practice?

[Ironsides]

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.

Re:Really?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

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.

Re:comon practice?

[mabhatter654]

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.

Re:comon practice?

[mabhatter654]

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.