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from the wheels-of-justice-grind-slow dept.
The spindles of justice have turned and you may be eligible for (up to) $10 per computer purchased between April 1, 2003 and Dec. 31, 2008:
Do you remember the computer you owned a decade ago? Did it have an DVD drive? That little trip down memory lane may have just earned you $10.
This past December, Sony, NEC, Panasonic and Hitachi-LG settled a class-action lawsuit that's been in the works for over seven years. The companies were accused of colluding to inflate the prices of optical drives sold to big computer companies and retailers.
When HP and Dell placed orders for lots of optical discs, the lawsuit alleged, competing drive makers would share their bids with each other to keep prices high. When the US Department of Justice investigated the issue, at least one Hitachi-LG executive was sentenced to serve six months in prison after pleading guilty to the conspiracy.
Also at the Consumerist and The Verge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 09 2017, @05:23PM
This is great and all, but will anyone go after the copyright cartel for region encoding? Region encoding always struck me as blatantly anti-competitive and incredibly stupid because it is so easily circumvented. I am amazed they're still getting away with it. It is ridiculous that DVD drives are hardware limited to 5 region encoding changes over their lifetimes. An easy and entirely legal circumvention for that is to buy 6 DVD drives, one for each region. That suggests a fair compensation for the region encoding scheme is 5 times the value of a DVD drive, whether or not the customer bought 5 additional DVD drives.
$75 trillion is not enough!