14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has had its share of legal troubles, but one of the more outstanding lawsuits against it has been dropped, following a ruling passed in December 2011.
Back in November 2009, the New York Attorney General filed an antitrust claim against the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant.
For those that haven't been keeping up with all these legal tussles, the claims were that Intel employed various means to discourage its partners from using competing CPUs from Advanced Micro Devices.
To ensure exclusive contracts, the Attorney General said, Intel offered “payments totaling billions of dollars,” and even threatened “retaliation against any company that did not heed its wishes.”
To sum up, Intel allegedly took to “bribing or coercing OEMs either not to offer, or severely limit, AMD CPUs.”
The antitrust case continued until last December (2011), when a court ruling favored Intel.
At the end of it, the chip giant held to its stance (it did not admit to any sort of law breaking) and does not intend to change the way it does business.
“Following recent court rulings in Intel's favor that significantly and appropriately narrowed the scope of this case, we were able to reach an agreement with New York to bring to an end what remained of the case,” said Doug Melamed, senior vice president and general counsel at Intel.
“We have always said that Intel's business practices are lawful, pro-competitive and beneficial to consumers, and we are pleased this matter has been resolved.”
As expected, Intel's final response to the NYAG's complaint was particularly pointed, expressing a high level of offense at the repeated use of the word “bribery” in the latter's complaint.
“Rather than setting forth a clear statement of facts upon which its claim is based, the NYAG's allegations are deliberately inflammatory, apparently made for the political purpose of providing sound bites for media attention. The NYAG's conscious decision to use repeatedly the legal term 'bribery,' to characterize Intel's discounting, for example, is an outrageous hijacking of the meaning of language,” the company wrote.
Intel still has to pay $6.5 million (4.9 million Euro) to cover some of the costs incurred by the New York Attorney General in the litigation.