Judge backs action against Nvidia and AMD on price fixing
IN A BARELY-REPORTED development, a judge has lauded evidence in a case against apparent arch-rivals Nvidia and AMD which stand accused of artificially keeping the price of graphics cards high.
A San Franciscan law suit combines "at least" 51 separate civil complaints against the GPU makers, according to a report here.
District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California was shown an email that had passed between the two firms which suggested ways of appearing to compete with one another while keeping prices high.
"This is not a bad document for you," he told the plaintiffs after reading the email during a hearing held on July 1st. "It is not a home run, but it is a base hit," he said.
Lawyers from Nvidia and ATI were told off by the judge for claiming such documents were trade secrets.
"This court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of your companies. I am against you hiding information from the public," he said, adding, "If we get to summary judgment in this case nothing will be under seal."
Even, "if it is under seal and it is the recipe for Coke, you have my permission to blurt it out," he said.
We like the sound of this judge already.
Some nine million documents have been put before the court. One, a 2002 e-mail written by Nvidia senior vice president of marketing, Dan Vivoli, to ATI's president and chief operating officer, Dave Orton said: "I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect."
"A jury would like to see this," the judge remarked.
Complainants against the pair include Microsoft, Dell and Apple amongst others. µ
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looks like the green teams in for another rough ride lol :O)

the e-mail refered to is from 2002, daamit aquired the red team in 2006, the e-mail is FROM Nvidia senior vice president of marketing, Dan Vivoli, TO ATI's president and chief operating officer, Dave Orton, so therefore unless an equally damning REPLY can be produced FROM the red team, the green team are not only stuffed but could be accused of conspireing to corrupt poor daamit, awwww :O)

besides is daamit responsible for what those nasty ati peeps did waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2002 ?? looks like graphzilla gets it either way lol :o)

"Even, if it is under seal and it is the recipe for Coke, you have my permission to blurt it out," ROFLMFAO, sounds like my kind of judge lol, this is gonna get real interesting :O)
Oh yeah, ATI im sure you want to sit down with Nvidia and have a chat. How about last 2 years of Nvidia thrashing? Letz just sleep over it, ATI guess!

Anyway what microsoft got to do with this lawsuit, AND DELL?????
I think that also Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini,... Sony, Samsung,... everybody has some sort of agreenment and everything we buy is overpriced
DAAMMIT is about to be spanked too. Woot! Down with the duopoly! Maybe we'll get some real competition if this happens.

You don't think DAAMMIT (ATI at the time) would have jumped at this while they were bleeding? Pfft. Should Nvidia be guilty of this, we'll find ATI in the same boat.

/suck it green AND red fanbois
maybe someone can come forward with an email or somthing from the oil companies. Then everyone can get in the act and sue.
You may be a techie, but you don't know anything about the law in the US of A.

AMD buying ATI absorbed ALL liability, including any legal liability, when they bought ATI. This means that, yes, they are on the hook. They can argue substantive hierarchy change, good faith change, et al., all they want. Won't make any difference, but they can try.

Should Graphzilla be in line for a punishment, then DAAMMIT will be spanked just as hard.

/down with the Duopoly
//S3, Intel, et al, are all probably laughing right now
Come on...if this is all they have, there is NO evidence.

As an industry, they have a reasonable goal of promoting graphics in general. Industry consortiums do this all the time. People wanting high-end graphics benefits all players who produce them.

If there is no market, how can there be competetion? This sounds like they want to push the industry forward, not agree on set prices...
"I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect."

I think that email is right. It is a sign of no respect. Facebook (and other network externality sites, technically speaking) get valued for billions, while companies that produce most of the computers in the world get valued at only two times that, including all thier fabs patents, and research.

There is nothing that Nvidia or Ati have done wrong, as far as prices are concerned when the economists at Wall Street write down engineers as worth less than a fanbase of slow teenagers who like poor quality music, and publish self-fullfilling advice to "not buy" their stocks because "the computer market is weak." 

Its weak because companies there actually have to invest in research, as opposed to marketing thin air and self-entertainment(!?)

-Robert S.
nonsense is talking nonsense. you cant compare the elite car industry with electronics. 
if lambo reduces their prices, they'll lose prestige. and they churn out...what....1 car in 2 months?? so no they cant reduce their prices

nvidia and ati most probably use six-sigma manufacturers, which means their error rates are miniscule. we are actually paying for all that R&D. so yes they can reduce prices. and they are
the alledged overpricing means we all paid too much for the product. Dell buys loads of these chips, so Dell paid out a lot of money it didn't have too.

MS also makes gaming hardware, PS1, PS2, PSP etc, so perhaps they were affected by that. Also, if the price of pc's are higher due to artificially high graphics card prices, then MS possibly sell less Windows licences if people are buying less PCs.
This entire issue is silly. Graphics cards overpriced? I'm not a gamer but a software developer, so my needs are met by pretty middle-ground hardware. I just checked NewEgg and I can get a 512 MB ATI 3650 for $49! That's a tremendous amount of GPU for almost nothing. I suppose if you are a gamer and have to have the latest top end hardware, you are shovelling out some serious cash. But for the other 99.99% of us, the price of graphics is not even worth thinking about.

Now if that judge would turn his attention to the INQ and fix those interminable delays because of click tracking, that would be good use of his time.
If this judge was worth his salt... He'd plainly see just what he had on his plate. Two rivals sitting down together over a quiet candlelit dinner and perhaps a Coke, discussing 
egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes in a mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam! 
The important thing is that the quality of the spam not suffer, even if it is eaten off of another's plate. The trencher is that this is what makes the graphic business so fabless! Thus variety is à la cartel. The candidness of Ravioli though is quite apparent for he insinuates spam may have no stock value. Truth be told it has a very long selflife. He is Not the Messiah... he's a very naught boy from Spamalot. He should at least be given 20 lashes of a wet frumenty and spam.
Vice Presidents (like this one for NVIDIA) sometimes make stupid, poorly-worded or wholly unauthorized statements in e-mail. It's a risk in the information age. I argue companies like NVIDIA can diminish this risk (albeit imperfectly) by <a href="http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/nix-smoking-gun-e-discovery.html">taking proactive steps</a> that discredit the VP from the moment he sends that e-mail. For example, the VP's e-mail could include an automatic disclaimer at the bottom that disowns any stupid or illegal things he may say. What do you think? --Ben <a href="http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/nix-smoking-gun-e-discovery.html">http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/nix-smoking-gun-e-discovery.html</a>
Come on people, why would MS be interested? Does the name X-box mean anything to you? Is it ringing a bell? You do know that it's powered, at least in part, by an Nvidia chip... right? Am I right? I swear, people have absolutely crap memories when it comes to these things... and I thought I had to be worried about my ADD...
Also, what is with half the commentators having no grasp of the English language? Who taught you people how to speak? the cookie monster?
The only damaging evidence so far is the e-mail but after googling a little and reading what else they had. From pdf found on techpowerup.com :

I kept coming back to:

"In contrast, ATI struggled throughout the pre-conspiracy period to turn any profit at all and suffered losses or no profits in every quarter after the second quarter of 2000. With the exception of a two quarter dip, ATI enjoyed growing profits during the conspiracy period and enjoyed record profits at various points in the conspiracy period. Likewise, immediately prior to the conspiracy, Nvidia’s profits fell to near zero and then during the conspiracy period grew steadily and reached record levels."
ok what is going on here DAMMIT's cards are not low price enough... the 4870 and 4850 tend to have performance to price ratios that dominate. The reason why Nvidia e-mailed them is DAMMIT can easily destroy them they are trying to strike a deal with them and DAMMIT doesn't want to loose Nvidia's tech support for their products (could you think what would happen if the people that like Nvidia only able to use them with Intel CPUs DAMMIT would be &%#*$}). William Alsup your a joke do research before you point fingers what a dumb $*#.

Tech is a war zone every company is interconnected what one does will have an effect on one or more to try to cut costs or rush production hell it can even affect more than one company. You'll see team ups and fists waving AMD and Intel hate each other but they work together with Havok. AMD is fond of Nvidia for tech but not for CUDA it goes on back and fourth.
Distict Court Judges are so far from a DoJ Antitrust Attorney as to be unreal. I don't find anything about the email compelling. Every industry has a group that promotes its industry (milk, autos, etc.) and there is zero in this email thats suggests any of the factors that equal collusion.

What would be provocative is a letter saying: lets dont compete in the same segment of the business, or lets agree to set prices to be equal to this, or lets agree not to introduce more than so many types of GPUs a year, or lets agree you sell to Dell and we sell to HP, etc.

This says nothing like that. Sorry for those of you that believe in conspiracies or hate one company, the other or both. But if this is a single, then 3 more of these would guarantee a score. Not only does this judge not know baseball, but this case (email in question x 4) would not even pass the Circuit Court, much less the Supreme Court.
There are some seriously uneducated people on here. Calling the ATI-NVIDIA duopoly uncompetitive shows unbridled ignorance of reality. AMD and Intel anlong with ATI and NVIDIA are extremely competitive. You wouldn't be able to buy a 512MB graphics card for $100 if they weren't. Compare what you can buy today to what you could buy 2 years ago. If they are the same, you have a classic monopolistic situtation where innovation is stagnant. That isn't the case, therefore there must be competition between them. Don't confuse your irrational misunderstanding of profit with greed with the reality of profit as the price for an efficient market.

Further, the judge is a total moron. The public has no general right to the communications between businesses unless they can produce probable cause and get a warrant. To say they do is like saying that the public has the right to look through your emails. Complete balderdash. A business is not subject to FOIA requests, they are a private entity, not public, they have plenty of legitimate reasons to keep their documents private just like you.

Also, trade secrets are a legitimate government recognized protection extended by legislation to promote business investment. Blurting out the Coke recipe would be irresponsible and stupid. The judge's job is to rule on law, not make up a pretense for handing out his opinion and calling it legitimate judicial review. Moron in a black robe, in California, no surprise there at all.