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Strategies & Market Trends : Strictly: Drilling II -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (29621)	3/19/2003 6:26:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36161

One can't second guess the courts, but the fact that the Supreme Court has already ruled on the validity of UCL patents makes it harder for the Justice Dept. to prevail. At worst, they might affect revenues from gasoline using the UCL patents in California, where the fraud accusation is made. But what about other states? The Justice Dept. contends that UCL got California regulators to adopt a set of regulations on reformulated gasoline that just happened to be the same as a UCL patent application for low pollution gasoline--without telling California officials of the patent application. UCL says that CA officials knew, and what's more, a CA official seems to have confirmed this. Therefore there was no fraud, and California adopted the clean fuel regulations because it WANTED to adopt them. Unless I'm way off base, I don't see how even an adverse ruling regarding the California standard would affect similar standards adopted independently by other states. Furthermore, the UCL patents are not anticompetitive because there are other ways (more expensive of course) to get the same low pollution fuels. Unocal's position is that you can pay them a royalty of about a cent a gallon, or you can use some other method for providing gasoline designed to minimize nitrous oxide and other pollutants, particularly in urban areas subject to a lot of smog. Though the outcome may eventually be in favor of UCL, it could take a while. Art