Intel, EEOC to mediate employment disputes
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Chipmaker becomes first Silicon Valley company to form a mediation partnership with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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Chip maker Intel is being investigated by New York Attorney General following anti-trust concerns.
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Intel will announce the results of an internal review of its operations next week that could result in thousands of layoffs at the company, according to published reports.
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Intel will pay $250 million to settle a patent-infringment lawsuit over chip design.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel will announce the results of an internal review of its operations next week that could result in thousands of layoffs at the company, according to published reports. Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini told employees in an e-mail Thursday that he would reveal the results of the review in an internal Webcast next Tuesday, the New York Times reported, citing an unnamed Intel employee. A spokesman for Intel, in Santa Clara, California, said the company is on track to announce a restructuring plan before the end of the third quarter, meaning some time this month. "But we are not announcing plans to do anything at this stage," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, calling the talk of layoffs "speculation." Intel warned in AprilÂ that its profits would fall sharply this year and said it would restructure the company to cut spending by more than $1 billion. "We are going to restructure, repurpose and resize Intel for the future," Otellini said at the time. The company has battled this year with a slump in the growth rate of PC sales and fromÂ increased competition from Advanced Micro Devices, which has been increasing its share of the market, particularly in servers. Intel has vowed to claw the market share back with a new generation of dual-core microprocessors that it started rolling out in June. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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New York state launched a formal investigation on Thursday to determine if Intel Corp, the world's biggest chipmaker, violated state and U.S. antitrust laws to squeeze out rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
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An administrative judge has recommended the judge overseeing Advanced Micro Devices Inc's US antitrust case against Intel Corp permit AMD to pursue foreign documents that relate to Intel's alleged misconduct in countries outside the US.
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International Business Machines  Corp. has requested documents from Intel Corp., the world's  largest chip maker, as it prepares its defense in a  billion-dollar dispute with SCO Group Inc. over the Linux  operating system.
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This week, chip giant Intel is hosting its twice-a-year Intel Developer Forum, where PC hardware and software developers will hear the company&#39;s plans for future products.
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SAN FRANCISCO/SEOUL  - South Korean regulators have sent a "statement of objections" to Intel Corp following a two-year investigation into whether the U.S. microchip company violated antitrust laws.
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Chipmaker Intel  has been  granted a further short extension to respond to antitrust  charges leveled by the European Commission, an Intel spokesman  said on Friday.
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International Business Machines Corp. has requested documents from Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, as it prepares its defense in a billion-dollar dispute with SCO Group Inc. over the Linux operating system.
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Inks deal for ten years of patents Intel has agreed to stump up $250 to Transmeta to settle the patent dispute case between the firms without battling through the courts. Intel will pay its rival $150 in a lump sum, plus an annual license fee of $20m for the next five years.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - South Korean antitrust regulators have issued preliminary allegations against IntelÂ forÂ allegedly undermining competition in its PC microprocessor market, but formal charges won't be made for at least another month. The Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) sent a "statement of objection" to Intel, which contained preliminary allegations, said Nick Jacobs, an Intel spokesman in Singapore. The document is not a final decision, nor has it been upheld by a court. "It does not itself amount to a finding that there has been a violation of law," he said. "As such, any conclusions about our business practices are at best premature." A senior deputy director at South Korea's FTC said the investigation against Intel remains ongoing. The next step for the world's largest chip maker is to respond to the letter of objection, after which the FTC will rule on the case. South Korea could become the third place to rule on an Intel antitrust case. In 2005, Japan's Fair Trade Commission helped kick off the recent spate ofÂ investigations against IntelÂ by ruling that the company's Japan unit stifled competition by offering rebates to Japanese PC makers in return for agreements to limit purchases of or not buy rival x86 microprocessors. Earlier this year, the European Commission ruled similarly,Â alleging that Intel violated EU antitrust lawsÂ by giving rebates to customers that enabled the company to win sales from rival Advanced Micro Devices. AMD filed an antitrust suit against IntelÂ in June, 2005 at the U.S. District Court in Delaware, shortly after Japan's FTC revealed its allegations against the company. "Following formal action in Japan and Europe, global scrutiny is increasingly focused on Intel's harm to competition and consumers alike. Governments around the world must enforce antitrust laws to bring fair and open competition that will benefit computer manufacturers and buyers everywhere," said Tom McCoy, AMD's executive vice president, legal affairs and chief administrative officer, in an e-mail. (Ben Ames in Boston contributed to this report.)
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When can workers sue against acts of retaliation by employers? Two cases slated for hearing this week may help clarify.
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The U.S. technology industry has faced dozens of lawsuits by &quot;patent speculators&quot; in recent years, and it&#39;s time for Congress to fix problems with the patent system, Intel&#39;s general counsel said Monday.In the last 21 months, U.S. technology vendors have contended with 193 patent infringement lawsuits, and 70 percent of them came from patent speculators -- &quot;people who buy up patents for the purpose of litigating them,&quot; said Bruce Sewell, Intel&#39;s executive vice president and general counsel, at a patent forum.By contrast, companies in the pharmaceutical industry have been defendants in 28 patent infringement lawsuits during the same stretch, and 24 of those lawsuits have been between competitors, he said.Patent lawsuit reform is needed to fix the problem with patent speculators -- called patent trolls by some people -- Sewell said, speaking at a&#160;patent reform&#160;forum in Washington, D.C. Patent reform legislation pending in the U.S. Senate doesn&#39;t target legitimate inventors, he said.&quot;We&#39;re not talking about individual inventors who sue for patent infringement,&quot; Sewell said. &quot;We&#39;re talking about patent speculators who warehouse patents and use those patents to go after successful companies.&quot;But Hans Sauer, associated general counsel at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), called the Patent Reform Act, a version of which&#160;passed the House of Representatives&#160;in September, a &quot;very patent-hostile bill.&quot; In the Senate, the bill has&#160;stalled over objections&#160;from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, as well as inventors and some labor unions.The House version of Patent Reform Act, supported by several large tech vendors including Microsoft and IBM, would allow courts to change the way they assess damages in patent infringement cases. Currently, courts generally consider the value of the entire product when a small piece of the product infringes a patent; the bill would allow courts to base damages only on the value of the infringing piece.&quot;Not all patents are identical,&quot; Sewell said. &quot;Some patents are more important in a product, and some patents are less important.&quot;The bill would also allow a new way to challenge patents within one year after they&#39;ve been granted.Changes in the way patents are enforced could hurt innovation, Sauer said. The bill could diminish incentives for the health industry to innovate in the coming years, he said.&quot;Will I, 30 years from now, pay $10 less for an iPod and have a 10 percent less chance that Alzheimer&#39;s medicine will be available?&quot; he said.It is difficult to predict the effects of the patent reform legislation, added Anat Hakim, a patent lawyer with Foley &amp; Lardner, the law firm that sponsored the patent forum.Sewell complained that there&#39;s a small &quot;cottage industry&quot; of patent speculators that have sprung up. &quot;The concern is that we don&#39;t end up encouraging another cottage industry,&quot; Hakim said.The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on several patent questions in recent years, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is instituting new rules later this year, Sauer noted. Adding a patent overhaul bill on top of those changes is &quot;a lot to happen at once,&quot; he said.But Sewell said the changes are needed for the IT industry, if not biotech. &quot;You have a group of companies that are happy with the status quo, and are saying, &#39;Don&#39;t change it; it&#39;s not broken,&#39;&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s fine, but it&#39;s broken for a lot of other people.&quot;
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(InfoWorld) - Intel may have lost some internal e-mails that the company is required to produce in aÂ lawsuitÂ brought against it by Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD), lawyers for the company said Monday. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan Jr., one of Intel's lawyers revealed that some internal e-mails were missing, despite the company's efforts to preserve documents related to the case. "Intel is taking this matter very seriously. It very much regrets this happened," wrote Richard Horowitz, a partner at Potter, Anderson & Corroon, which represents Intel. Horowitz blamed the possible loss of e-mails on human error. For instance, when Intel employees were instructed to retain e-mails on their hard drives, some employees did not move e-mails from their sent folder to the hard drives, assuming that the company's e-mail servers would preserve them. Instead, the e-mail servers regularly delete e-mails after a certain amount of time has passed, he said. Other employees wrongly assumed that Intel's IT department was automatically saving their e-mails, while some may not have saved all of their e-mails, Horowitz said. In addition, Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case, he said. The allegedly lost e-mails were generated "primarily" after AMD filed suit against Intel on June 27, 2005, but earlier e-mails could not be ruled out as among those missing, Horowitz said. In a related filing to the court, AMD blasted Intel's apparent failure to preserve the missing e-mails. "Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed," AMD said, noting that Intel continued to allow e-mails to be deleted from its servers after the lawsuit was filed. "Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong," AMD said. AMD and Intel are scheduled to discuss the document retention failures at a status meeting on March 7. AMD demanded in its letter to the court that Intel be required to give a full accounting of its document "preservation problems" no later than March 21. AMD's 2005 suit alleges that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to bolster a monopolistic position in the PC processor market. AMD claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including DellÂ and Sony, into using only Intel processors or discontinuing use or promotion of AMD products. The alleged threats include forcing manufacturers into exclusive relationships, or offering deep discounts or marketing subsidies in exchange for discontinuing the use of AMD products. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. The suit was based in part on the findings of a Japanese anti-trust investigation, which found in March 2005 that Intel had abused its market position to restrain competition in Japan's microprocessor market. Â