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HP Sues Seven Optical Drive Makers Over Price-Fixing
Lucas123 writes "HP has filed a lawsuit against seven makers of optical disk drive technology, claiming the companies engaged in widespread price fixing in order to drive up the cost of Blu-ray, DVD and CD drives for PC and peripheral equipment makers. The suit was filed Thursday at the district court in Houston against Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, NEC, TEAC and Quanta Storage. The lawsuit claims the conspiracy to drive up prices took place from at least Jan. 1, 2004 through Jan. 1, 2010, when "almost all forms of home entertainment and data storage were on optical discs" and the companies controlled 90% of the optical disk market. HP alleges the companies used industry events, such as CES, as cover to communicate competitive information and hammer out anticompetitive agreements."
It could still be legit though. Weren't a lot of those listed companies found guilty of price fixing CRT displays?
It seems suspicious that optical drives are so expensive despite being such old technology.
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Not only that, but it has taken an awfully long time for the price of Blu-Ray drives to really drop... maybe there was some fixing going on. I wouldn't be shocked.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
The 405nm blue lasers in Blu-ray drives were covered by Nichia patents until the expired recently, and Nichia does sue to protect it's patents. Single source, patent-protected lasers were part of the reason it took so long for the prices to drop.
The ironic thing is that optical drives, though boring, have their use. For example, I can pay $10 a month for 100 gigs on a cloud storage, or I can pay for a few Blu-Ray blanks, burn the data, and call it done. From there on out, the cost of storing the data is pretty much $0. To boot, it is very difficult for malware to tamper with media finalized on BD-R media.
Yes, a hard disk is cheap and can store a lot, but for small documents, nothing beats burning to WORM media for long term archiving.
It would be nice if the 100GB BD disks came down in price. Next to a modern LTO drive, it would be very useful for backups.
FTFA:
There was already a criminal investigation and the folks HP is suing pled guilty in a plea deal. Now HP is making the equivalent of a civil case.
American legal systems allow civil suits to follow criminal suits. And the defenders were already found criminally guilty, although they pled to some unknown settlement.
$150 or more? I picked up an ASUS from Newegg around 6 months ago for $35 or so. It's an internal model and has SATA connections. It works great and appears to be as high quality as my other ASUS gear (I've found their components to be very reliable). The software needed to play a Blu-Ray movie was much more expensive than the drive itself.
Hang on, no groklaw.
Damn
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Replying to myself, because on further review, HP does still make optical drives. You can get an HP CD-R/DVD-R from Newegg for ~$100, comparable to ones from other manufacturers which cost $20.
And HP is saying the competition is overpriced? WTF?
Or do they just badge engineer theirs these days, and the ~5x markup isn't enough for them?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You sure showed me. They were $22, with free shipping, in 2009.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Actually older technology is only cheap if it's still widespread. The more esoteric a technology becomes, the less price pressure there is, largely because fewer and fewer companies are willing to make the investments in the factories necessary to produce the product. Case in point, floppy disks. Floppies are actually more expensive now then they were back in 1994, largely because almost nobody is using them. The few companies still making them can charge more for them because there is no competition. The people that are left with floppies are pretty much left with them out of necessity, because they are tied to legacy equipment that only accepts them etc.
While optical media isn't quite there yet, I wouldn't expect optical drives to fall much farther in price. More and more companies are going to drop out(or barring that, collude with the other manufacturers to fix the prices, as we are seeing here). Eventually causing the price of optical media and drives to bottom out then start creeping upward.
Monstar L