Corporate & Securities Law

Big Antitrust News: Rambus Overturned

The D.C. Circuit’s opinion is available here.  Here is one of the key passages explaining the D.C. Circuit’s logic:

To the extent that the ruling (which simply reversed a grant of dismissal) rested on the argument that deceit lured the SSO away from non-proprietary technology, see id., it cannot help the Commission in view of its inability to find that Rambus?s behavior caused JEDEC?s choice; to the extent that it may have rested on a supposition that there is a cognizable violation of the Sherman Act when a lawful monopolist?s deceit has the effect of raising prices (without an effect on competitive structure), it conflicts with NYNEX.

More on this later.  My preliminary reaction is that the opinion contains some fairly broad-sweeping language that should make the patent holdup landscape fairly interesting in the near future, especially when contrasted to cases like Broadcom and N-Data.

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on April 22, 2008 (boomark / email).