Major Electronics Vendors Accused of Price Fixing 125
Lucas123 writes "After the DOJ launched an investigation last fall into price fixing by major optical disk drive manufacturers, a home electronics retail store filed a class-action lawsuit this week seeking triple damages for what it is claiming to be long-standing collusion among Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Hitachi to raise and fix prices on the drives. The suit claims the vendors used trade organization forums as meeting places to discuss the price fixing. 'These are big Asian smoke-stack industries where they're investing in big fabrication plants. You can't have a technology destroy the business,' said the attorney representing the plaintiff. 'If you fire up a big fab plant with CRT tubes, and the next generation technology destroys it, then you have a big fab plant manufacturing buggy whips. So they have to make sure the price points for these [newer] technologies ... don't destroy existing markets.'"
Re:ZOMG (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ZOMG (Score:2, Informative)
No, you are paying for the research. Optical drive companies have just spent incredibly sums of money researching, designing, and putting into manufacture blu-ray drives, they are not going to sell them at the same price as technology which has paid back all of its investment years ago.
If they have been colluding on prices, then that is a totally different matter, and they should be made to pay dearly for it.
Fines for Beta tapes collusion were not enough (Score:3, Informative)
If found guilty, I hope the fines go well beyond damages and are punitive enough to give CEOs pause before repeating.
Sony in particular--it was only 2+ years since their fines part for collusion for price fixing for Beta-type tapes.
http://broadcastengineering.com/news/eu-fines-betacom-1126/ [broadcastengineering.com]
Sony got an extra dose of fines in that one for obstructing justice with employees shredding documents. However, fines still weren't enough there since Oops they did it again. Most large corporations are amoral, they respond only to the shareholders. If guilty this time, need a heavy enough fine to be a real deterrent when the CEO is facing angry shareholders looking at the reason why there was such a loss that year.
Re:Turn to big-scale recycling (Score:3, Informative)
Don't always have to ship them so far: http://www.freecycle.org/ [freecycle.org]
Re:ZOMG (Score:5, Informative)
When you're selling hundreds of millions of units the R&D is soon recovered.