Bring back Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

We might not have imagined, as our children drove us mad with the pizza-eating cartoon characters and the spin off toys, that ten or so years later, we would be wishing they were real. And reason we need them is that they fought a character who had a tendency to destroy things by cutting them up - aptly, he was called Shredder.

Post Enron, and the dire warnings that lawyers have dished up in general articles and specific advice, the cult of the shredder remains a problem, it seems. The USA's Federal Trade Commission has asked a court to find against Rambus Inc. without presenting evidence. The basis of the claim is that Rambus employees, acting on instructions from senior staff, destroyed documents, the FTC alleges. One employee, it is alleged, put many documents into plastic bags and the were taken away "I suppose to be shredded."

The FTC has produced evidence from an unrelated trial where on employee said: ``I definitely made an attempt to go through my files and look for things to keep . . . as [we were] directed us to do. And everything else I couldn't justify keeping, I put in a burlap bag that they gave us,'' said Richard Crisp in an affidavit taken for another lawsuit last year and produced in evidence by the FTC. ``I presume they shredded it,'' he added. Rambus lawyers say that there was nothing sinister about the actions, and that in 1998 and 1999, they went through a major housekeeping exercise and that they cleared out old papers which were shredded for security and cleared old hard drives. It is, says Rambus, just what any sensible company should do.

The FTC filed a complaint in June 2002 alleging that Rambus, a chip manufacturer, attended industry standards meetings at which agreement on the future direction of computer hardware development was discussed but did not disclose that it held patents on some of the technology discussed. When Rambus claimed royalties based on its patents, several customers refused to pay, embroiling Rambus in a number of large and complex litigation cases. The FTC alleges that Rambus anticipated a new litigation blast and that it set about destroying documents in the hope that litigation could be contained. Rambus counters that this is nonsense as there remains a large mass of evidence being produced in discovery in various law cases and that in one case, Infideon, a significant part of Infideon's case was based on e-mails that predated the purge.

The FTC on the other hand says that the findings of document destruction, and a finding of fraud in one case that Rambus is appealing, mean that Rambus should forfeit its right to defend itself against the FTC's claims.

In the meantime, look out for a green and yellow VW caravan and pizza being delivered to residents under manhole covers.