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BanxCorp Files Antitrust Complaint Against Microsoft Corp.'s And NBC
Universal's MSNBC Interactive News LLC And Other Media Companies
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| BanxCorp announced that a federal antitrust
| complaint was filed against nine firms
| including Dow Jones & Co., The New York
| Times, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC and others, for
| engaging in unlawful per se horizontal market
| division, customer allocation, and price
| fixing agreements with competitors in the
| market for bank rate websites throughout the
| United States. The complaint filed by
| BanxCorp in the U.S. District Court for the
| District of New Jersey, accuses the firms of
| entering into a conspiracy in restraint of
| trade and forming a cartel with their
| competitor Bankrate.com together with
| approximately a hundred competing bank rate
| website operators including some of the media
| conglomerates in the United States. The
| complaint estimates that the damages caused
| by the price-fixing cartel may exceed five
| hundred million dollars, to be trebled under
| the antitrust statute. The harm to the
| competitive marketplace and consumers is
| alleged to be of equal or greater magnitude.
| The defendants named in the complaint are
| Dow Jones & Company Inc. and Fox News Network
| LLC - both subsidiaries of The News
| Corporation, The New York Times Company, CNBC
| Inc., a unit of General Electric's NBC
| Universal, Time Warner Inc.'s Cable News
| Network Inc., MSNBC Interactive News LLC - a
| joint venture of Microsoft Corp. and NBC
| Universal; AOL Inc., Tree.com Inc.'s
| LendingTree LLC and Move, Inc.
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http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/keyDevelopments?rpc=66&symbol=MSFT.O×tamp=20100603132000
Recent:
Company Sues MPEG-LA, Claiming Antitrust Violations Over Patents
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| It's no secret (though certain copyright
| and patent system defenders insist
| otherwise) that copyrights and patents are
| monopoly privileges, granted by the
| government. In fact, some of our elected
| officials have made the argument that
| antitrust law should be used against the
| worst abuses of intellectual property law.
| While it's unclear how successfully that
| will play in courts, we may soon have a
| bit of a test case. Slashdot points us to
| the news that German company Nero AG is
| suing MPEG-LA, claiming abuse of monopoly
| power with its patent pools for licensing
| digital video codecs.
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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100524/1451239553.shtml
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