My sincerest thanks to all three of the guestbloggers who (along with Ted) have kept things lively over the past two weeks: George M. Wallace, whose work you can follow at Declarations and Exclusions and A Fool in the Forest; Kevin Underhill of Lowering the Bar; and Skip Oliva of the Voluntary Trade Blog. Well done! I also notice that the comments section has been humming along busily. I should go away more often.
Archive for January, 2007
Five more for the road
I’d like to thank Walter and Ted for letting my play in their sandbox this past week. Before I go, I’d like to highlight a few more antitrust cases and stories to watch in 2007:
Rambus, Antitrust & the Common Law
In the next few weeks, the FTC is expected to issue a final order in its five-year case against Rambus Inc., a California-based developer of memory technology. Rambus has proven to be the longest and possibly costliest litigation in FTC history. The FTC’s trial costs alone approached $3 million, with over $1 million going to “expert” witnesses and consultants.
The Rambus case started as a patent infringement dispute between the company and several memory manufacturers. Rambus doesn’t produce any memory itself; it develops and patents technologies and licenses them to manufacturers. During the mid-1990s, Rambus participated in a memory standard-setting group, JEDEC, and this is where the trouble began. The manufacturers claim Rambus misled JEDEC into incorporating Rambus patents into certain memory standards. Rambus said it was denied permission to present its technologies for standardization and that JEDEC members simply infringed Rambus’s patents.