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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gbh who wrote (14102)	10/29/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: zbyslaw owczarczyk	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 18016

Now Newbridge lawyers are leveling the same accusation against Lucent. In court papers, they say Lucent misused the procedures of not only the ATM Forum but also the Frame Relay Forum, ITU and American National Standards Institute. Lucent "abused the standard-setting process by failing to disclose Lucent's alleged proprietary position on a proposed or adopted standard," and then "tried to extract anticompetitive royalties from those relying on the standards." nwfusion.com Now you tell us Some of Lucent's antagonists raise other questions about standards. For example, the two congestion-control patents that Lucent claims Newbridge and Cisco are violating were awarded in September 1988. They have proven key to the development of ATM and frame relay in the 1990s. But it was not until September 1996 that Lucent officially disclosed to the ATM Forum that it held these two patents. In letters available on the ATM Forum's Web site, Lucent said it was not prepared to waive its rights to these patents, adding that they related to two ATM Forum standards: User-Network Interface 3.1 and Traffic Management 4.0. The problem: Both these standards were already finalized - UNI 3.1 in 1994 and TM 4.0 in 1996. [See what ATM patents Lucent - and other companies - claim] And other companies have generally posted patent assertions while standards were still being considered. "That's a no-no as far as I'm concerned on Lucent's part," says Mary Petrosky, an independent technology analyst in San Mateo, Calif. Asserting patents so late in the game "is a hardball method for one vendor to distract a competitor, to slow down a vendor or just suck money out of them through the legal fees," she says. Cisco and Newbridge lawyers also cite a May 1996 antitrust consent decree between the Federal Trade Commission and Dell regarding a standard called VL-Bus. The FTC charged that Dell began asserting a 1991 patent on that technology only after the PC industry had shipped 1.4 million units using the approved VL-Bus specification. The FTC ruled that Dell "unreasonably restrained competition" by forcing rival manufacturers to "delay their use of the design standard until the patent issue was clarified." [Read more about the VL-Bus ruling]