Judge dismisses part of AMD case against Intel
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A federal judge has dismissed a large   portion of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s antitrust lawsuit   against Intel Corp., saying that U.S. law does not cover many   of AMD's claims.
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The special master appointed to hear evidence from both parties in the AMD v. Intel antitrust case has recommended that Intel be compelled to produce documents for evidence that it had previously declined to submit. If Judge Joseph A. Farnan, Jr., agrees, Intel may be asked to produce evidence of what AMD alleges to be "foreign misconduct" on Intel's part.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel should have to share documents that could show it used monopolistic practices to force overseas PC vendors and retailers to shun Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) chips, the special master to a U.S. federal court recommended Friday. Intel is expected to contest the recommendation by Special Master Vincent Poppiti, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, before the matter comes before a judge on Jan. 12 for a final ruling. This is the latest round in aÂ long-running legal battleÂ that is scheduled to be decided in a case court beginning in April 2009. AMD has charged that Intel used its overwhelming 80 percent share of the worldwide microprocessor market to violate antitrust laws through coercive acts such as threatening to withhold incentive payments to PC vendors if they specified AMD chips in their products. In September, Intel got a boost when District Court Judge Joseph FarnanÂ ruled that Intel would not have to share those records, since U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over such actions alleged to have occurred in other countries. In return, AMD argued that foreign actions could also impact sales to U.S. customers, despite the fact that its chips are manufactured in Dresden, Germany, and sold to overseas customers. Poppiti's recommendation agrees with AMD's motion, reasoning that the market for x86 microprocessors is global, so Intel's behavior worldwide could serve as evidence in a U.S. antitrust case. Poppiti was appointed to make recommendations to the court related to the discovery phase of the case in which the sides share documents that can be used as evidence. "We are encouraged that the special master recognizes the importance of obtaining all evidence of Intel's wrongdoing, regardless of where it occurs, to demonstrate the impact it has had on AMD's domestic and export business," AMD spokesman Michael Silverman said in an e-mail. Intel lawyers are still reviewing Poppiti's recommendation, and have not yet decided whether they will file additional arguments by Dec. 27, Intel spokesman Chuck Molloy said in an e-mail. Â
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The documents in question were brought to court during Intel&#39;s legal battle with Intergraph. AMD believes they show its arch-rival to be guilty of anti-competitive behaviour, which is why it wanted the EC to take a look.
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A federal judge in Delaware has dismissed portions of a class-action suit that accused Intel of violating antitrust laws.
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For the second time, a judge has dismissed a lawsuit against a military contractor that whistleblowers accuse of scamming the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars in the first months of the Iraq war.
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Delaware judge limits scope of anti-trust case Intel's lawyers will have their laptops searched at one less airport, after a US district judge limited the scope of AMD's antitrust action against the company.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail messages from some of Intel's most senior executives are among those that should have been preserved but were not after the chip-maker was sued for alleged antitrust violations by Advanced Micro Devices, according to a court transcript released by AMD. IntelÂ revealed last weekÂ that some internal e-mails that may be important to the case were missing as a result of errors. The transcript, from a status conference on March 7, indicates that Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and President and CEO Paul Otellini were among those not in compliance with the company's document retention policies. The executives apparently deleted the e-mail messages, including some to Intel's largest customers, because they were under the false impression that Intel was automatically backing up their e-mail, according to the transcript. "But the last category that I am very worried about is the senior management -- and I'm talking executive level Barrett and Otellini," said AMD attorney Linda Smith, according to the transcript. "This is the absolute top level. And these are the folks that, even if there's only a two-, three-, four-month gap, they're the major players who are communicating with the heads of other companies." E-mail messages from several hundred Intel employees have been requested by lawyers for AMD. Some employee e-mail was lost because workers failed to move messages from their "sent" folder into other folders and it was automatically deleted, while others were lost because Intel failed to notify hundreds of employees to retain e-mails related to the case. Intel representatives in London declined to comment. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy told the Wall Street Journal that the missing information represents "a small proportion of the tens of millions of pages of documents" that Intel will provide in the case. "There is no evidence whatsoever that any relevant e-mails or documents have been lost," he told the Journal. AMD filed its lawsuit against Intel and its Japanese subsidiary, Intel KK, in 2005, alleging that Intel engaged in anti-competitive practices to support its monopoly in the PC processor market. The lawsuit claims that Intel coerced 38 hardware manufacturers, including Dell and Sony, into using only Intel processors and stopping the promotion of AMD products. Intel denies the charges. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, covers Intel operations in North America, Asia, and Europe. Â
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If canceling the Pentium-4 4GHz processor was not enough, AMD has come up with fresher set of problems for Intel. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices renewed the claims of being the maker of the fastest PC Microprocessors
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A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and top administration officials over the disclosure of Plame's name and covert status to the media.
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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by outed spy Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials.
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(InfoWorld) - AÂ federal judge in Delaware has dismissed portions of a class-action suit that accused Intel Corp. of violating antitrust laws. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Farnan, in a ruling issued Wednesday, said that a U.S. court has no jurisdiction over the foreign conduct claims in a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages for U.S. consumers and businesses who purchased PCs with Intel chips. Those consumers say they were forced to pay too much because Intel used its near-monopoly position to bar computer makers from using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) chips, thus eliminating competition and keeping prices artificially high. The case has no direct relation to the antitrust suit leveled against Intel in 2005 by AMD, but mirrors the same charges, said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. Farnan is hearing both cases, and in September made the same decision about the AMD version. The ruling means that even if the court found Intel guilty of forcing up prices, the plaintiffs could not calculate the damages they won by including PC sales by foreign vendors like Acer Inc., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp., Mulloy said. They would have to base their claim solely on sales by U.S. vendors like Dell Inc., Gateway Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Still, both AMD and the foreign consumers will continue pressing their cases because Farnan also ruled they could use foreign evidence to build a domestic case against Intel. "AMD and the class [action suit] would need to sue Intel in foreign jurisdictions to recover monetary damages that were incurred outside the U.S.," said AMD spokesman Michael Silverman. "From our perspective -- and I suspect the class would say the same -- the critical piece was to gain access to that foreign discovery. In both cases, the judge has allowed that access." In addition, the class-action suit concerns only the harm caused to domestic customers, said Daniel A. Small, a lawyer for the firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll, of Washington, D.C. who argued the plaintiffs' case. "We're pursuing very actively document discovery, both from Intel and from third parties," Small said. However, that effort hit a large hurdle on Monday, whenÂ Intel admitted it had lost many internal e-mail recordsÂ related to the AMD case, making it impossible to collect them as evidence. On Wednesday, the court gave Intel a deadline of April 10 to turn over an explanation of its e-mail preservation plan, a list of correspondence between the people responsible for following it and its plan to restore the lost data. Another challenge for the class-action suit is Intel's motion to dismiss the entire case because it says customers were never harmed by increased prices. Instead, Intel says it used its dominant market position to compete with AMD by decreasing prices, Small said. Farnan said Wednesday he would rule on that motion by the end of March. Â
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A Santa Clara County judge dismissed the remaining charges against three defendants in the Hewlett-Packard Co. boardroom spying case Thursday, calling their conduct a "betrayal of trust and honor" that nonetheless did not rise to the level of criminal activity.
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After two weeks of almost incessant bad news for Microsoft comes a ray of hope, courtesy of US District Court in San Diego: Judge Rudi Brewster has dismissed a series of patent infringement claims against Microsoft regarding technology Bell Laboratories developed for converting text into speech, in a summary judgment this afternoon.
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Intel may have lost internal e-mails it is required to present to the court.
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A judge yesterday dismissed a lawsuit against Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison and Chairman Jeffrey Henley that accused them of insider trading before the company announced an earnings shortfall in 2001.
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Worldwide&#160;lawsuits against Intel&#160;and&#160;four straight quarterly losses&#160;have distracted AMD during its integration of ATI Technologies, but the merger remains on track, according to industry analysts.AMD&#39;s acquisition of ATI&#160;for $5.4 billion, announced in July 2006 and completed one year ago Thursday, was viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market.The lawsuits against Intel and&#160;financial losses&#160;came at a critical time, when AMD&#39;s management needed help in integrating the ATI acquisition and making ATI employees understand AMD&#39;s culture, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.AMD filed antitrust lawsuits alleging monopolistic behavior against Intel in the U.S. and Japan, and lodged complaints with the European Commission, the Korean Fair Trade Commission and Japan Fair Trade Commission.The distraction was compounded by the departure of key executives, including David Orton, former president and CEO of ATI, who resigned as executive vice president of AMD in July after only 10 months.AMD didn&#39;t have any internal problems, Peddie said, and Orton left on his own accord. &quot;A little redundancy will always occur in all organizations. It&#39;s not surprising to see people shift,&quot; Peddie said. However, outside speculation about the departure may have distracted AMD during the integration, he said.AMD also took an acquisition-related charge of $76 million, or $0.14 per share, in the third quarter of 2007 ending Sept. 29. That added to the quarterly net loss of $396 million.Despite the distractions, AMD is pulling its resources together to ensure the ATI merger goes smoothly.&quot;The merger has allowed AMD to merge its plans with ATI, which were very similar prior to the acquisition.&quot; Peddie said. Both companies wanted to amalgamate the CPU with the graphics processor, and the acquisition puts them in a position to do so.A successful merger could help AMD reach profitability in a few quarters and position it for success in the future, wrote Doug Freedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, in a research report.&quot;We believe ATI is turning the corner, which is likely material to AMD&#39;s quest for profitability,&quot; Freedman wrote.The acquisition of ATI hasn&#39;t shown an immediate benefit, but could help&#160;AMD in the long term&#160;when the company&#39;s &quot;Fusion&quot; project comes to fruition, Peddie said. Fusion is the code name for is AMD&#39;s next-generation processor design that is expected to combine high-performance graphics and CPU processing on a single die. The project was announced when the merger was completed. AMD is not prepared to talk about Fusion yet, but it is intended to bring the cost of PCs down and reduce power consumption, Peddie said.AMD also announced the &quot;Spider&quot; platform, which will include AMD&#39;s upcoming Phenom chips and high-end graphics processors to provide users with the &quot;ultimate visual experience&quot; in computing, said Dirk Meyer, AMD&#39;s president and chief operating officer, on the company&#39;s third-quarter earnings call last week.With all the attention focused on Phenom and Spider, ATI&#39;s involvement in other businesses gets sidetracked, said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. AMD&#39;s ATI unit is a big player in supplying graphics to consumer electronics, set-top boxes and gaming consoles, Hester said. ATI supplies graphics processing units (GPUs) for Microsoft&#39;s Xbox 360 and Nintendo&#39;s Wii consoles, Hester said.&quot;Discrete GPUs will continue to be a good business for us,&quot; Hester said. AMD&#39;s graphics segment revenue grew 29 percent to $252 million sequentially, driven by the success of the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors.However, ATI&#39;s market share in the discrete graphics market has been hit by manufacturing problems and bad timing in bringing chips to market, Peddie said. Competitors such as Nvidia and Silicon Integrated Systems stepped up by shipping graphics chips on a timely basis, taking market share away from ATI.&quot;Market share could begin to swing back towards ATI even if it introduced simply comparable products to Nvidia in the near-term,&quot; wrote Doug Freedman in a research report. ATI&#39;s RV670 graphics card is competitive in the mainstream market with current Nvidia products, Freedman wrote.But AMD still has work to do to make the merger a success. Its biggest threat remains Intel, which maintains a stranglehold on the chip market.&quot;AMD must rebuild its brand value in the enthusiast market in order to garner better mainstream adoption and consumer recognition,&quot; Freedman wrote.