Conspiracy at the HIGHEST LEVELS!
 

I've apparently been involved in a Class Action lawsuit against a HUGE number of memory manufacturers, who have been accused of conspiring to stabilize and raise the price of DRAM. The case being made, then, is that they forced the price of DRAM up through an illegal trust.

Anybody else receive one of these notices? What's the deal with that?

Is this a joke? Considering that memory is dirt cheap, especially DDR SDRAM, I would say they failed miserably in their efforts to raise prices. Hell, even prices for DDR2 are not that unreasonable. I think I was seeing $200-$300 for high speed 2GB sticks recently, which is not that outrageous.

Unless this had something to do with memory manufacturers conspiring with vendors such as Dell, Compaq, IBM, etc to increase markup on pre-build PC's.

I've always wondered about class-action lawsuits myself, especially when they're trying to claim money from someone or something. I've seen those informericals on TV (you know the ones that start out like, "Did you or anyone you know buy a [brand/company] [something] between the dates of [insert two dates here]? If so, you may be entitled to compensation, blah, blah, blah, so call the law offices of [whoever] at [phone number].") and seen ads in certain magazines about class-action lawsuits.

From what I understood reading those class-action announcements in magazines they automatically include you in lawsuit without your consent, no matter if you wanted to be in it or not. Are they even allowed to do this? What if I don't want to be apart of some frivolous lawsuit to get some easy money? I wouldn't want to travel to another state or be summoned there to participate in court just to get a small pittance of money.

And for that matter, what about in general of announcements and other official notices that no one ever told you about but you were supposed to know anyway?* I'm pretty sure there are many local and state ordinance, statutes, or laws that people don't know about and unknowingly break them. WTF mate?

Like in the movie The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where there are plans for demolishing Arthur's house or even the planet Earth that were put on display in some obscure basement level of a city council or galactic council building or whatever. How many people even know where their city council building is?

Plenty of class-action lawsuits are over legitimate concerns, such as drugs with severe side effects that somehow failed to get recognized during testing. Such things do happen due to irresponsibility. That said, these lawsuits are cash cows for lawyers who take thousands of "clients," go for a minimal settlement (which is still huge due to the number of cases), take a percent as a fee, then hand out the small sums to each client.

I haven't heard of anyone being represented without at least calling the number. I'm suspicious.

I once received a check for $5.00 for some class action lawsuit against CDR manufacturers, I believe. Something like that.

Yeah, I got in one against record labels, something about price gouging or some such.

Of course, lawyers skim off like 60% of the settlement, so instead of getting $5, you could be getting $15.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-action_lawsuit

I seem to remember a famous one involving...I dunno, Blockbuster?...where all that the plaintiffs got were more coupons to get more products. Never mind that the problem was that the products were defective and the plaintiffs were unhappy and that's why the law suit came about. Never mind that while the plaintiffs got stuck with coupons, the lawyers got cold, hard cash.

Ah yes that was it. Knew it had something to do with CD's.

Conspiring to raise the price of a product doesn't simply mean the base price that the consumer pays for. It could also mean that the profit margin for the product is increasing. I mean, arguing that the price of DRAM has actually gone down over the last decade is immaterial when the lawyer can argue that the cost of manufacture decreased faster than the markup on the product.

THUS CONSPIRASPY

Has anyone considered that these kind of trusts could exist to keep products cheap in order to reduce competition?

Standard Oil did just that. That among other things to eliminate competition in the pursuit of profits. One of the reasons why there's anti-trust laws. I guess AT&T would fit too.

Ironically enough both Standard Oil and the old AT&T trust are slowly coming back together through various corporate mergers. The latter moving quicker then the former in it's assimilation efforts.