Just a couple of days after the English Court of Appeal ruled on an aspect of the legal dispute between Intel Corporation and VIA Technologies (see this news-story), the latter filed another complaint against the former with Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC), accusing the microprocessor giant of unfair competition due to numerous technology licensing requirements and loads of anticompetitive actions.

According to DigiTimes, VIA filed a class action lawsuit, what means that other companies, including AMD (who tried to prove that Intel used unfair methods of competition in mid-nineties), may also join the case as plaintiffs. VIA continues to state that they have all legal rights to develop and sell Intel Pentium 4 processors intended core-logic chipsets due to the cross-licensing agreements between Intel and certain VIA’s subsidiaries, such as S3 Graphics.

Although it is now hard to believe, in case VIA and other plaintiffs, if there are some, are able to prove that Intel uses unfair licensing policy, the whole chipset, and maybe even microprocessor business will change dramatically. First of all, VIA will be able to supply all kinds of Pentium 4 chipsets to the market and mainboard makers will utilise them, given that VIA’s offerings can provide high performance and are sold for reasonable price. Moreover, let us not forget that VIA wants to make Socket 478-compatible CPUs, as the Socket 370 is a dead duck now. In case the court will rule that VIA has all the rights to sell products for the Pentium 4 platform, VIA will definitely make its best to roll out its own Socket 478 platform as soon as possible.

When the number of competitors increases the price war usually starts. As a result, there should be more interesting, feature-rich and powerful products for lower price. Isn’t it just what end-users want? Unfortunately, VIA and its manufacturing partner TSMC will hardly be able to provide significant quantities of its products in order to fulfill the demand of large enterprise consumers, hence, the situation in general is not very likely to change much.

We should point out that in case anyone is able to prove that Intel Corporation really uses unfair methods of competition, a lot will change in this world of hardware business. However, it does not seem to be very likely now, just like the anti-monopolistic case against Microsoft.

See the following news-stories to learn more about Intel vs. VIA legal dispute: See also:

- Intel vs. VIA: the Lawsuit Begins
- Intel and VIA: They Simply Love Lawsuits!
- The Mainboard Makers Welcome VIA's Lawsuit against Intel
- VIA Sues Intel for Patent Infringement
- Intel Vs. VIA: 2:1 in Intel’s Favour
- Intel vs VIA: One More Lawsuit
- VIA to Get Intel's Blessing?
- VIA Carries the Case against Intel