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Micron Seeking Amnesty in DoJ Antitrust Probe? 164

Posted by CowboyNeal from the playing-nice dept.
deaddeng writes "Memory maker Micron Technology is allegedly seeking amnesty from a US Dept. of Justice grand jury investigation of price fixing, collusion, and antitrust by the memory industry, according to numerous news services, including the LA Times and Reuters. Last week, a Micron regional marketing employee pled guilty to charges brought under the same DoJ investigation for destruction of evidence and lying to the grand jury. The DoJ is investigating charges that major memory makers colluded to prevent the success of Rambus memory favored by Intel, and once that was achieved, colluded again to raise prices for DDR-SDRAM in 2001-02. If Micron is granted amnesty, it can keep its executives from facing criminal prosecution, but it may still face civil court challenges."
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Micron Seeking Amnesty in DoJ Antitrust Probe? More

Micron Seeking Amnesty in DoJ Antitrust Probe?

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  • Rambus is better? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:15AM (#7859272)
    And Rambus Inc.'s practices [slashdot.org] are better [ftc.gov]?

    • Re:Rambus is better? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eschasi ( 252157 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:48AM (#7859386)
      What are you saying here? That Micron et. al. shouldn't be cited for doing illegal things like market-wide collusion simply because RAMBUS tried to illegally pervert the standards process?

      IMHO both RAMBUS and price colluders, if guilty, ought to get it in the neck.

  • Who can you buy from? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:16AM (#7859273) Homepage Journal
    Normally, I try to make ethical decisions about where and what I buy. I pick up stuff made in the U.S. when I can (and it's not easy anymore), I avoid patronizing businesses that have practices I don't agree with, and I try to support businesses that benefit our community with our presence.

    Case in point for why being a responsible consumer can actually pay off for the person doing it. The average computer repair shop has a regimen of troubleshooting/burn-in tools that while effective for diagnosing many simple problems is simply not representative of the actual uses and requirements of their customers. At the place I pick up my systems from, the process is tailored to the uses the consumer has for the equipment -- they start with the standard toolkit (POST card, power supply checker, RAM tester, troubleshooting diskette, virus scan, 3D benchmarking suite), but will also try some of the latest games, office software, and any of the stuff you bring in for them to test (basic hourly fee applies if testing goes beyond two hours.) They even run some stuff past the web browser; apparently, certain web features [65.61.160.117] demonstrate sound or display problems even among the same versions of a web browser on different systems due to often overlooked plugin incompatibilities, and some OEM systems come without certain "webfonts" that these guys will put on to make web pages look more like the designer intended. One has to pay a little more for this level of service, but the result is a finely-tuned system without the weeks of learning PC/Windows fundamentals.

    Service varies a great deal depending on where you go. Some businesses are just skimming along without a good deal of regard to the customer, but others are more than eager to throw in everything but the kitchen sink for something like 120%-150% of what the skimmers charge. Local businesses competing against chain stores realize that every edge is important in remaining viable, and their owners/employees tend to be pretty cool people.

    Unfortunately, what we're talking about here is the consumer's choice being limited to two giants: SDRAM and Rambus. This isn't to the benefit of the customer, and I feel strongly that we need to request another standard of memory that is truly Open and Free so that anybody can manufacture it without a patent submarine or limiting consumer freedoms. The playing field is so restricted right now that we're pretty much beholden to pay what they charge if we want the product, and whether or not they're taking unfair advantage of it this isn't a situation that is to our longterm benefit.

    • You bring up a very good point. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Future Man 3000 ( 706329 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:49AM (#7859392) Homepage
      At the end of the day, the responsibility falls to the customer to buy or not buy. If you keep buying cheap electronics, don't get upset when you can't find quality anymore. If you've got a problem with somebody's business practices, buy somewhere else (in this case, there's probably a few SDRAM manufacturers that aren't colluding.)

      Too many people are passive consumers. That's why you can't buy a TV that lasts more than three years anymore, that's why you can't legally play DVDs under Linux, and that's what's gonna get us all DRM in our hardware. Modding someone down who happens to believe in supporting your local economy instead of the multinational clusterfsck where we all work 80 hour weeks for $4/hr seems to be the action of someone in fundamental denial of our situation (and their power as a customer).

      • That's why you can't buy a TV that lasts more than three years anymore, that's why you can't legally play DVDs under Linux, and that's what's gonna get us all DRM in our hardware. Modding someone down who happens to believe in supporting your local economy
        Too bad it is the American companies that are the ones pushing DRM down everyone's throat...
      • I should make it clear I'm not accusing that there is any colluding going on. In fact, if you look at competitors not named in the article, it seems SDRAM prices are about the same across the board. So this does raise the question of whether this is actually going on and to what degree customers are being harmed, if any at all and if not where's the problem?

        • The memory industry is a lot like the string (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The memory industry is a lot like the guitar string industry. Excluding makers of goat, nylon, and other kinds of strings for classicals, there are only 4 manufacturers of steel core guitar strings. There are plenty of rebranders out there, but the odds are 50% any brand you buy is going to be made by the same company. One company dominates more than half of the total production with the remaining three slugging it out for their piece of the pie.

          In the face of such limited competition it is in the inter
    • Well, maybe I'm just completely off, but isn't SDRAM a format that describes how the ram 'fits', both as a hardware package and in signal format (ie. voltage level), where Rambus is a company making a memory format named after the company? Not that price fixing is any good. Micron is pretty huge, and they do make quite a bit of chips, but you can purchase ram that isn't micron. In fact, some of the micron memory i had would not play nice with the existing micron dimms in the system. What does that matter

  • Isn't Rambus evil? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mattgarnsey ( 660568 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:16AM (#7859275)

    The DoJ is investigating charges that major memory makers colluded to prevent the success of Rambus

    So? Yeah, beat 'em down if they were fixing prices, but I'm not so upset w/ a conspiracy against Rambus. Hell, if they asked me, I would have joined up!

    I have a hard time remembering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We still hate the RIAA and love Linux, right? We've got so many jihads, I can't keep them straight!

    • Re:Isn't Rambus evil? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by gantrep ( 627089 )
      have a hard time remembering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We still hate the RIAA and love Linux, right? We've got so many jihads, I can't keep them straight!
      Your difficulty stems from the idiotic moderation system that promotes groupthink(and doublethink, but that's a seperate matter). Just remember that karma is completely worthless, and post whatever you feel should be said, regardless of what everyone else here thinks. I despise collective opinions.
      • I despise collective opinions.

        MEE 2. PLZ ADD ME 2 TEH LIST THX.

      • "...the idiotic moderation system that promotes groupthink..."

        I just have to laugh when I see posts like this modded "+4 insightful." ...stupid mod system.

        • I'm laughing too. Sometimes if you include something along the lines of "This is not a troll", or "Here goes my karma, but this just has to be said," regardless of whether the poster had any karma to begin with, or even if the post is at all controversial, it can get inappropriately high moderation, because the slashdot community likes to think that one of the values they hold in highest esteem is free speech, so anyone advertising themself as even the smallest martyr for free speech, gets buko kodos.

          The i
      • I despise collective opinions.

        Heh. Looks like it is time to get started on some serious self-loathing.
    • I have a hard time remembering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

      It's easy! The bad guys use lawyers as offensive weapons and the good guys frantically run around trying to find a lawyer who is prepared to act as a defensive weapon before the first set of lawyers hit.

  • If this were a socialist country, or Micron was a monopoly like Microsoft, then such a thing would be possible. However, this is a free market, and any company who wants to sell a lot of RAM would not join a price fixing collusion, but exclude themselves from it. If Micron was doing such a thing, why wouldn't Crucial, Buffalo, Geil, Kingston, and so forth lower their prices and blow the competition away? Most of what happened was because Rambus RAM was attempting to become an overpriced proprietary monopoly

    • The point is almost well made. The issue is that if they were colluding then it had to be with OTHER large manufacturers to fix the prices. You can't actually collude on your own, the whole point is that you are working with others.

      So maybe what the DoJ is doing is going after the one where they have the evidence in the knowledge that this will cause the others to fall as well. The RAMBUS issue is a mute one for the same reason that Passport failed for Microsoft, an existing monopoly wanted to make more
      • Don't worry, they are going after De Beers and Microsoft...
      • Yes, if there was a conspiracy here, it was not a very effective one. RAM prices may have had a few plateaus, but overall, they've declined rapidly. Compared to diamonds, or my favorite - energy utilitys, or even things like bandwidth, why has the federal government focused on the possibility of price fixing here in the first place?
        It looks like DoJ tends to only investigate if some company offers to turn state's evidence relating to other charges, and doesn't care whether the industry in question is
      • So maybe what the DoJ is doing is going after the one where they have the evidence in the knowledge that this will cause the others to fall as well.

        I took it to mean that Micron was basically being the rat. They are seeking amnesty by ratting out the others involved. So they don't get in trouble, and they come out looking like the good guys (comparatively). IMO they shouldn't get amnesty unless they voluntarily came forward, which it appears they didn't...
    • You are not familiar with antitrust procedings. I have not followed this case, but from the article it looks like Micron is a "whistleblower" in this cartel. If you are the first to go to the competition authorities to admit to a cartel and co-operate in providing evidence, then the fine will be lowered substantially; in some cases, it would even be reduced to zero.

      As much as I can read into it: Micron went to the FTC and said: "Hey, we had a cartel with Infineon, Samsung and Hynix. Hee is all the evid

      • Re:Micron deserves amnesty! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by eschasi ( 252157 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:53AM (#7859406)
        Putting on my cynical hat, note that everyone Micro admits to colluding with (you did read the articles, folks?) is a foreign manufacturer. Given the ever-increasing tend towards protectionism in the US, it's not hard to believe there are purely pragmatic reasons why the DOJ would grant US-based Micron amnesty while socking it to those Korean and German competitors.

        What, me cynical?

        • Hm, in the spirit of global peace I wouldn't go that far. Competition authorities are usually fairly unbiased when it comes to foreign and local firms. Still they manage to produce incredibly bad decisions!
        • That would be more interesting if Micron wasn't the only remaining U.S. memory maker*. So, by definition, anyone that Micron 'colludes' with and then rats out would be a foreign manufacturer. Sorry if that bursts any conspiracy bubbles...

          Disclaimer: I am a Micron employee. And like most of the people around here that I talk to, if we *were* conspiring to raise prices, we did a piss-poor job of it. We just has our first profitable quarter in over two years, and even that was just barely. Maybe we shoul
        • Well, I'll point out that Micron is the only US memory maker left, so anybody that they colluded with would be foreign.


          Also, they have not admitted colluding at all. They've said that they are cooperating with the inquiry, but they've said that since it started last spring. All of the articles that have been published are just rehashing a single Bloomberg article that is based on rumors and unattributed sources. Lots of smoke, but no fire.


          -h-

    • If this were a socialist country, or Micron was a monopoly like Microsoft, then such a thing would be possible. However, this is a free market,

      if only that were true! i hate ms as much as the next guy and i used to be all for the doj going after them. however, ms is not a monopoly. there are MANY oses out there, for many different uses. just look at how the market is reacting to ms's high prices and low quality. linux is florushing(sp)!

    • Crucial is owned by Micron. Its a memory seller. That's why here in Boise, ID (Mircon's HQ's) we have the Crucial.com (TM) Humanitarian Bowl at Boise State.

    • Re:Micron deserves amnesty! (Score:4, Informative)

      by nolife ( 233813 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @10:11AM (#7859521) Homepage Journal
      Micron bought [micron.com] out Dominion Semiconductor, a joint Toshiba-IBM memory fab plant in Manassas, VA in early 2002. As time went on, production went down, work on a second process lab was all but halted and the plant effectively stopped production early in 2003 (I had a family member that worked there). In the same time frame, they also cut [fuckedcompany.com] production in their main plant in Idaho. The goal at was to also buy or merge [google.com] with cash strapped [internetnews.com] Hynix in Korea but that was shot down by the Korean government. I believe their goal was either to move production out of the US or to buy who they could and join forces with those they could not. In that time frame, memory prices were extremely low, companies were failing and Micron saw a chance to gobble up the competition. The gamble failed when the Hynix buy fell through. Interestingly enough, they applied for and have recieved government funds related to memory dumping [google.com].
      They had a goal of getting memory prices to a certain level and could not do it with competitors.

      PS.. Crucial is Micron
      • As a ten year stockholder in Micron, I may be able to add a bit to this...

        Sure Micron slashed job in Manassas (I live 5 miles away)...everyone was slashing jobs back then. The Hynix purchase was not shot down by the Korean govt. In fact, they were pushing for it. The government had bailed Hynix out of bankruptcy a couple of times already (via the state controlled creditors), and the company was pouring money down the toilet. Hynix was over $6B in debt, and threatening to take its creditors down with i
        • The Hynix purchase was not shot down by the Korean govt. In fact, they were pushing for it.

          You are correct. Maybe Micron thought with government backing, it was worth the effort to attempt the merger.

          They have a big hiring banner in front of the Manassas fab. I do not know anyone that works there any more but obviously something is still happening there.
      • Actually, production went down at the Manassas plant because of the time that it took to phase out the Toshiba processes and phase in the Micron processes. Also, the Manassas plant was refitted with 300mm equipment, an upgrade to what was there before.

        There was no production cut in Idaho. Micron ended a number of dead-end and pie in the sky projects and laid off the associated people. The 1800 layoffs were worldwide, by the way. About a thousand in Idaho. Most of the layoffs were R&D related - pr

    • Micron is the only American manufacturer of RAM of any significant size. All those other companies you name are resellers of RAM, usually in DIMM form for PCs - just look at the actual chips on the DIMMs, you won't see any of them labeled "Geil" or "Kingston" - you will see names like Micron, Winbond, Hynix, etc.

      The issue with RAMBUS is far more complicated than the general computer-using public is aware of. Even a general overview of the court testimony can prove enlightening - essentially it looks like

    • If Micron was doing such a thing, why wouldn't Crucial, Buffalo, Geil, Kingston, and so forth lower their prices and blow the competition away?

      You make a good general point: cartels (like OPEC) break down when competitors in or out of the cartel find it to their advantage to lower their prices.

      The problem with your example is that Crucial is a unit of Micron, and I don't believe any of the others actually make chips (they (I assume) just make S/DIMMs using the chips from a limited number of fabricator

    • Um, Micron owns Crucial so I wouldn't expect them to rock the boat too much. A better list of people to drop their price would be the other DRAM manufacturers, of which there are far fewer than 5 years ago. At this point, you have Samsung, Micron, Hynix (almost dead), Siemens, Elpida and assorted Taiwanese manufactures. Most of Japan's manufacturers collapsed. Elpida is the only one left. LG and Hyundai (Korea) merged into Hynix and have been bleeding ever since. The DRAM market has had a REALLY bad time of

  • Not that it is much of a similarity in actions, but the end goal reminds me of the Roxio case discussed earlier on /.

    Micron and the other memory chip makers allege that Rambus duped an industry group into adopting standards for memory chips for which it already had sought patents. Rambus denies the allegations.

    From a Slashdot Discussion earlier on the Roxio case [slashdot.org]

    Optima believes most every company in the CD-burner industry may be infringing." Optima's patent was infringed in several standards adopted by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), which have been incorporated in a number of CD-ROM hardware and software products ...

    So, it is adopted as a Standard, and then Optima sues after almost every CD burner is using it ....

    • Thanks for bringing that issue up; I've been wondering about that for a while. Doesn't a company who wants to file an IP claim have to "mitigate the damage?" In other words, don't they have to show that they did something about the violations as soon as they knew and could do something? Seems to me that a company that patented the cdrw routines in '95 would have had to cry foul against easy cd creator v 1.0, wouldn't they?

      Otherwise, sounds like they have the same problem AT&T had vs. BSD...

      • No, because easy Cd creater 1.0 doesn't infringe on this patent. They didn't patent CD writing, they patented something that is useful for filesystems on some types of CD media. As I understand it, without reading the patent [1] they basicly patented a way of marking which areas on a disk were currently free on write once media. (That is where anything you mark free now might be used latter, but you can't change your previous marks) You could do this for RW media, but it doesn't make sense. OSTA adopt

  • amnesty (Score:1, Insightful)

    by krog ( 25663 )
    of course, if I requested amnesty for strangling a child to death, it would be a different story. it's not that different you know.

  • Only Micron? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kurt Wall ( 677000 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:25AM (#7859309) Homepage
    Rambus, Inc.'s misbehavior is well-known, so Micron is hardly alone here. If Micron is guilty of collusion, the pregnant question is, "With whom were Micron colluding?"

  • Libertarialism != Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sparklingfruit ( 736978 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @09:40AM (#7859360)
    One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy. Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today. A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power. This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes. The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)
    • (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales.

      Not for want of trying. Even if it were a good idea, communism as an economic system requires a political system that won't scale in terms of space or time and will fail disasterously if you try. "True communism" has not been implemented, not because of cruel chance, but because it has infeasible requirements.
    • *NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism

      It should be illustrative then, that that it's been tried and failed repeatedly, that communism has been shown to pander even more to powermongers and despots than most alternatives?

      It seems to me this "that isn't true communism" argument is a variation of the "no true scotsman" fallacy, that one need merely disown as "not _true_ members of xyz" anyone who provides an example of reprehensible behavior. I see it all the time when debating relig
    • ...it is subsuming of the state to corporate/industrial interests, perhaps to the point where the CEO class attain government offices that oversee their activities; also the corporate state focus collapses into a narrow buildup of "real power" including the imposition of military values on society, and using the military to grab resources for said power structure. When things become tough and uncertain for multinational corporations, they may try to clutch onto state power and turn it into the means for t
  • Take Two entertainment has revealed plans for a new GTA game. It is said to be about the memory maker giant Micron and there practice to "kill the Rambus makers". I guess Tommy Vercetti is suppose to take out corporations that try to get any part of the market share. Sounds kinda interesting.

  • So, let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fortunato_NC ( 736786 ) <verlinh75 AT msn DOT com> on Friday January 02, 2004 @10:00AM (#7859446) Homepage Journal
    ...and I'll freely admit that I haven't RTFA yet...

    but Rambus surreptitiously cuts a deal with Intel to make their patented technology the new industry standard for memory, and when it backfires, the rest of the industry is guilty of collusion against Rambus?

    The inmates are running the asylum, kiddos, and it's getting nuttier by the minute!
    • You don't mind memory makers getting together and artificially inflating the price you pay for RAM? How interesting.
      • You don't mind memory makers getting together and artificially inflating the price you pay for RAM? How interesting.

        If they did, they did a pretty poor job of it, seeing as they were all selling memory for less than it cost to make it at the time that they were supposedly inflating the prices.

        I'd say that as far as price raising goes, Michael Dell just got his panties in a was that prices were going up some because of demand and it was costing an extra five bucks per computer to keep the same amount o

        • Yeah, it was pretty funny watching "TeamDDR" hoisted by their own petards-- they drove DDR down to price parity with SDRAM in the middle of the worst tech recession ever, and they tried to jack DDR prices after Intel finally threw in the RDRAM towel-- in early 2002, DDR prices quickly rose from sub-$2 for 128Mb PC2100 to over $4.00. They are back near their lows again (DoJ investigation has been going on for over a year).

          The problem with the industry is overcapacity. The solution in a free market is for
          • Yeah, it was pretty funny watching "TeamDDR" hoisted by their own petards-- they drove DDR down to price parity with SDRAM in the middle of the worst tech recession ever, and they tried to jack DDR prices after Intel finally threw in the RDRAM towel-- in early 2002, DDR prices quickly rose from sub-$2 for 128Mb PC2100 to over $4.00. They are back near their lows again (DoJ investigation has been going on for over a year).

            The DOD investigation started with Michael Dell's complaints about collusion, short

            • Micron has stock-convertable bond offerings almost every quarter; they are diluting the equity of stock holders rather than going to the banks, because their bond rating is sub-junk. But they are cash starved. I'd like to see what a fraud audit would show about their accounting.

              DRAM production is not labor intensive, but it is resource intensive and sensitive to environmental and labor laws; Micron already produces a lot of it's DRAM off-shore. Manassass is not producing anything right now, and hasn't fo
              • Well, look, you just don't know what you're talking about!

                Micron produces the bulk of their products in the Boise, Idaho fabs. It produces some product in Japan and Singapore that is destined for Asian markets. It produces some product in Italy that is destined for European markets.

                The facility in Manassass, Virginia is coming on line as an advanced, 300mm fab. The facility in Lehi, Utah was built during the previous tech orgy and is currently utilized as a test facility with several hundred employee

                • Please, their "money in the bank" is from convertible bond offerings; they've burned almost $2 billion in shareholder equity since 1999. The amazing thing is that anyone still believes their bullshit.

                  They aren't competitive in DDR (irony of ironies) because they were the last to shrink processes and the very, very last to move to 300MM wafers. They are good at stretching out a process, they are lousy and innovating. And don't even talk about their patent portfolio-- they have ZERO revenues from royaltie
    • When it backfires because they supposedly price-fixed RDRAM chips...

      Who do I recommend for SDR/DDR SDRAM NOW?
  • I think it is time that we make individuals inside organisations accountable and make laws that they are not able to hide behind a corporate legal enity.
    The manager screws things up? than that manager has to be accountable.
    If lower rank personel makes a mistake they often see themselfs without a job and lot of troubles.
    I want the same for managers, full accountability for the person that screwed up.
    This is also saver for a company as a whole as it can go on without having a bad rep if their management inste
  • The story that all of the media outlets are reporting about originates from a Bloomberg report that is pretty much based on rumors and unattributed sources. Every other article is just a rehash of the original.

    It just kills me that Rambus contends that the memory makers colluded to keep DDR memory cheap to price RDRAM out of the market, but Michael Dell says that they colluded to raise the prices of DDR to make Dell, et al, pay more money for memory.

    Other than Samsung, the other major DRAM companies we

    • This seems to be a bit more complicated, but if you care to plow through 10,000 pages of FTC-Rambus trail documents, it boils down to:

      -- collusion to kill RDRAM by falsely inflating pricing estimates AND production estimates to convince Intel and PC OEMs that RDRAM costs would not fall even if production ramped.

      -- continued collusion to sell DDR-SDRAM below costs, at price parity with SDRAM (a public commitment by Micron, BTW).

      -- A smear campaign managed by InQuest and CMP (paid for largely by Micron).

      -
      • This seems to be a bit more complicated, but if you care to plow through 10,000 pages of FTC-Rambus trail documents, it boils down to:

        Well, not to be snotty, but I suspect that you haven't plowed through those pages since your list below appears to be a cut and paste from the Yahoo message boards!

        -- collusion to kill RDRAM by falsely inflating pricing estimates AND production estimates to convince Intel and PC OEMs that RDRAM costs would not fall even if production ramped.

        Remember that ever RDRAM

  • The whole Rambus debacle has a lot of layers to it. It includes Enron, the Bush's, Micron, et al. Take a good look, this is big business being true to form. As a company, Micron is one of the better behaved, but when billions of dollars start flying around unfettered or watched, bad things happen.

    Remember when every technologist under the sun was poo-pooing Rambus, that every stock analyst was pumping them up. Rambus was one of the darling stocks for the longest time despite a lack of positive cash flow or
  • The following is testimony from the FTC trial showing how Bert McComas help Micron, Infineon and Hyundai collude on RDRAM production.

    1567. In April 1998, Bert McComas, an industry consultant, gave an "exclusive" seminar for DRAM manufacturers about Intel's selection of RDRAM (Rambus memory). (RX 1138 at 1; Tabrizi, Tr. 9061-62). Mr. McComas pre-cleared his seminar invitation and list of topics with Mr. Tabrizi. (Tabrizi, Tr. 9064).

    1568. Mr. McComas's invitation asked its recipients not to forward the
  • Let's review the closing arguments in the FTC case. Pay close attention to Judge McGuire's questions.

    FTC VS Rambus: Oral Arguments
    JUDGE McGuire: All right, thank you, Mr. Royall. If you want, you can just stay up there, because I'm going to inquire of you, and then what I intend to do during this phase is to -- I have a few inquiries I want to make. Some of them will go to a party, and I won't require the other side inherently to respond. Other inquiries I may make will be open 1 questions for either si
  • MR. ROYALL: Well, I think it's absolutely necessary to reach a correct factual determination here definitely to take into account the course of conduct and the testimony, yes. JUDGE McGuire: Now, if that's the case, the evidence shows that at JEDEC, we had some companies that clearly disclosed patent applications. We have evidence that other companies had not disclosed patent applications. If that's the case, then how does that speak to the clarity of the patent policy, and if, in fact, the policy was clear
  • JUDGE McGuire: Okay, if I assume for argument's sake that that's the case and that the policy clearly obligated participants to disclose patents and patent applications, how should I construe the evidence in this case that shows that some companies in JEDEC comported with that policy and other companies had not comported, and other than the episodes involving TI, quad CAS and WANG, was there any evidence that would show that the other five or six companies, IBM, Samsung, Toshiba, several of those, was there
  • MR. OLIVER: I don't recall that, Your Honor.
    JUDGE McGuire: Mr. Stone, I believe you had indicated in your arguments that IBM had failed to disclose patent applications. Is that an issue in dispute?

    MR. STONE: IBM announced in 19 --

    JUDGE McGuire: I know it announced it was not going to file applications or it was not going to disclose applications, but was there not at least one episode where they had a patent application -- and if not, just tell me, and I'll just drop this. I may have misunderstood the
  • JUDGE McGuire: Okay, so that's an issue. Are you saying that, Mr. Stone? Because I'm taking this from your argument.

    MR. STONE: Yes, yes.

    JUDGE McGuire: Are you saying that the applications by these other companies that had not been disclosed are just applications but had no real pertinence to the standard?

    MR. STONE: No, the IBM inventor was present at the meeting when the write transfer was talked about with regard to SyncLink, which was one of the ones I raised. Desi Rhoden was a named inventor on a
  • JUDGE McGuire: So, that goes back to your earlier comment that the EIA policy as interpreted through JEDEC was that "patents" also included patent applications -- the term "patents" also incorporated the term "patent application"?

    MR. OLIVER: Yes, Your Honor.

    JUDGE McGuire: Okay. Did you want to comment? You don't have to, Mr. Stone.

    MR. STONE: I just want to make one comment on that. I don't want to go back through all the evidence, but I want to remind the Court that Gordon Kelley, the chairman of 42.3
  • JUDGE McGuire: And in fact, isn't that what happened when the CEO of Kentron testified that he would not disclose claims or applications but yet he gave sort of a broad overview of what the application entailed? Would that comport to the patent policy if we assume it was mandatory to disclose patents or applications?

    MR. OLIVER: So long as it was sufficient to disclose the relationship between the patent application and the ongoing work at JEDEC, yes.

    JUDGE McGuire: Okay. Mr. Stone, I want you to address
  • MR. STONE: May I respond just briefly, Your Honor? I have two responses. The only difference between the '703 and those others was in the claims. Mr. Oliver just said we didn't have to disclose the claims, but he says, oh, we have lots of testimony that people couldn't read that WIPO application of the '703 patent and understand what the invention was all about. We have the Mitsubishi documents, and they go through claim by claim by claim in the WIPO application, and they show how it has applications to SDR
  • JUDGE McGuire: All right, Mr. Stone, how were they different?

    MR. STONE: I quibble just slightly on a different point, Your Honor, that our view is on-chip DLL is not required by the DDR standard. Some manufacturers use it. We don't believe it's required by the standard. Otherwise, we think the four features are either in the products today or three of the four features are required by the standard.

    JUDGE McGuire: Okay. I know as far as the RDRAM goes, there's the argument of complaint counsel and that o
  • MR. OLIVER: Yes, Your Honor, there is a great deal of evidence. There are a number of documents throughout 1998 and 1999 that Mr. Macri in particular explained that really traced the history of DDR II starting in April of 1998, and one of the very first questions they asked, of course, is, okay, what should be used as a starting parameter, if you will, and it was very quickly decided that there was no interest in using anything other than DDR SDRAM as a starting point for DDR II, and from that moment, all t
  • JUDGE McGuire: Okay. In this complaint, I've been asked if I uphold these counts, these antitrust allegations, that to impose a sanction that would in essence preclude the patent holder from exercising its due rights under the patent issued by the patent office, and there has been no showing of any fraud on the patent office. So, my question is, what authorization in law does the FTC have and by implication does this Court have to impose the type of sanction that I've been asked to impose in this case?

    MR.
  • JUDGE McGuire: Can there be antitrust implications purely on a conclusion that a participant in JEDEC did not act in good faith?

    MR. OLIVER: Yes, Your Honor, there can. Again, that is set forth particularly in paragraphs 47 through 55 of the complaint.

    MR. ROYALL: If I could just supplement that by noting the testimony at trial relating to rules of JEDEC and EIA that required good faith, and these rules are not just mere aspirations. They're rules that has been enforced, just as the patent policy has been
  • sorry...stopped in midsentence from previous post All that Rambus did was not disclose certain applications. It had every right not to do that but for what complaint counsel say is a violation of the rules.

    MR. ROYALL: Your Honor, could I very briefly? That argument is a non sequitur. Obviously this company did join JEDEC. It participated for four and a half years. We've shown all of the evidence of what it knew, exactly what it was doing. It engaged in a scheme, and it achieved its end, and it has a mono


  • . JUDGE McGuire: Okay, I think that's all the inquiry I have of complaint counsel at this time.

    JUDGE McGuire: -- there is evidence in this case that there were certain emails that were sent by -- internal emails by CEO Tate and Crisp regarding the fact that -- and you touched on this somewhat today -- that let's not tell our partners that we think that DDR may infringe on RDRAM, and so that implies that the partners could not determine on their own that that was the case, then does that not stand in conf
  • MR. ROYALL: The only thing I would add to that is Mr. Stone has given an explanation for why Rambus might have wanted to wait in disclosing patents, but there's lots and lots of other evidence of another explanation, which is the concern about the patents being worked around and the potential that if they were to disclose and to let people know, then they could work around in the standards and avoid the patents. Now, he didn't mention that, but there's lots of evidence that that is something that was very m
  • JUDGE McGuire: And we touched on this earlier, Mr. Stone, but again, on kind of the same topic, how certain DRAM companies in the industry had some knowledge of these patent applications and for whatever reason they determined that they would not issue due to prior art. How would that understanding, though, be imputed to JEDEC as a whole?

    MR. STONE: Well, they said it at some of the meetings. We have minutes where they describe the Rambus application, the '898 application, when it was discussed -- I belie
  • ...Now that DDR manufacturers have colluded to raise prices on them, if I want 512 MB of memory, I can choose to buy:

    - 2 x 256 MB Simpletech RDRAM at $95 each [newegg.com] for a total of $190.00

    Or

    - 1 x 512 MB Crucial PC-2700 DDR SDRAM at $72.00 [newegg.com]

    What makes this story ridiculous is that the DDR manufacturers didn't *have* to collude to price Rambus out of the market; Rambus is just a whole heck of a lot more expensive... partly just because you have to buy them in tandem.
  • If every Oil Producing and Exporting Country sucked up and sold oil as fast as they could, gas would be under $1 a gallon and all these countries would be poor. OPEC exists to keep oil production at market equilibrium. Similarly, if every DRAM manufacturer produced at 100% capacity, RAM would be $.10 a meg, and all the producers would go out of business. I see nothing wrong with manufacturers agreeing to only produce to market equilibrium, it's better than the alternative of wild swings between high and low

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