| Landguy said: I didn't see anything in the documents indicating price fixing. That was conjecture by either the OP or the person who wrote the article. What I did see was a number of companies that have many different divisions that work together in business. Because of those relationships, they have an understanding about communicating if they want to poach an employee or to not "raid" (exact word in the documents) their companies and take large chunks of emploees at one time. Sure, if the companies had no involvement with each other, this would be criminal in nature. But, even then it is common to let companies know that you are fishing in their pond - out of courtesy. |
Agreements between execs at two separate companies not to poach employees to keep wages stagnant, is in fact the very definition of price fixing:
"We don't have a no raid agreement with Sony, we have set one up with ILM and Dreamworks which has worked quite well."
This is illegal, under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act:
"The Sherman Antitrust Act (Sherman Act,[1]26 Stat. 209, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1–7) is a landmark federal statute in the history ofUnited States antitrust law (or "competition law") passed by Congress in 1890. It prohibits certain business activities that federal government regulators deem to be anticompetitive, and requires the federal government to investigate and pursue trusts."
"... [a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist..(but was if) it involved something like the use of means which made it impossible for other persons to engage in fair competition."
When companies collude, in the manner such as the emails describe, it creates an anti-competitive environment. Which, again, is illegal, and precisely why this court case is currently being argued.
"The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.[5] This focus of U.S. competition law, on protection of competition rather than competitors, is not necessarily the only possible focus or purpose of competition law. For example, it has also been said that competition law in the European Union (EU) tends to protect the competitors in the marketplace, even at the expense of market efficiencies and consumers."
