The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit holds that the avoidance of a RAND commitment leading to higher prices for licenses does not by itself amount to anticompetitive harm (Rambus)

On April 22nd, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals set aside the FTC’s 2006 decision that Rambus Inc. unlawfully monopolized four technology markets through deceptive conduct during the JEDEC standards development process for two widely-implemented computer memory standards. The Court held that Rambus’s conduct, even if deceptive, was not exclusionary and did not cause anticompetitive harm if it merely prevented the JEDEC standards body from extracting a binding RAND commitment, leaving Rambus free to charge higher royalties to license its patented technologies necessary to implement the resulting standards. By contrast, if the FTC had been able to find, as it expressly did not, that but for Rambus’s deceptive conduct JEDEC was certain to have excluded Rambus’s patented technology from the