Top legal writer Alison Frankel wrote a first class piece on Rambus's stunning loss this week of a price-fixing case against two chip makers that, ahem, had confessed to fixing prices. See .

Rambus accused Hynix and Micron ruined a sweet deal with Intel, which agreed to build Rambus technology into Intel chips. Micron and Hynix said Rambus only pretended that the price-fixing hurt it. In fact, they alleged, Rambus made bad stuff.

Rambus’s stock price fell 61 percent after the verdict.

The thing that seems to have made the difference? As often happens, it involved testimony by a third party, in this case an Intel engineer, who told the jury that Rambus itself messed up its standing with Intel by not putting enough effort into makng the deal good for both parties.

[Hat tip to David Shank.]