After providing a safe harbor for twenty years, Judge Greene wrote a few pages of text (the Modified Final Judgement) that simply altered the 1956 decree. It was only intended to allow AT&T to enter the computer business. It actually gave them an instant monopoly over all of their Unix competitors works and a whole generation of CS students who had studied Unix concepts and methods. When AT&T's attempts at competition proved themselves to be financial disasters they resorted to the courts instead in USL v BSDI. Novell settled that suit, but never figured out how to profit from the Unix IP they had purchased either. They left the business for the same reasons AT&T did. It's not surprising to see that SCO Group is playing it's monopoly IP card in court. I find it odd that Intel CPU technology is considered an Essential Public Facility (Intergraph v Intel), but that neither of the two dominant operating systems you might need to operate one for desktop or server use are. Both operating systems were created and controlled by monopolies (or their successors in interest) that have had multiple consent decress imposed on them - AT&T and Microsoft. The world is so small, how can it contain this much irony?

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http: //twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SCOvsIBMLawEnforcement

And tell me if complaints to the FTC can take advantage of your observations. I already have a bunch of stuff about attempted monopolization, illegal means of getting a monopoly

With the addition of what you just wrote it seems like a cut-and-dried extension of the theory FTC is using in the Rmbs/Unocal cases.

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You may have noticed that many of these are still trying to replace encumbered code with something standard like Linux in their businesses today. At the slightest hint that AT&T had purchased 20 percent of Sun and was going to do further development work with them, many of these vendors felt threatened and founded The Open Software Foundation. It had the goal of creating a Unix specification and operating system that were free of any AT&T code or IP. Under the Modified Final Judgement the government simply abandoned it's controls and left the Unix market that it had created to the mercy of a monopolist. They did that, even though conduct remedies had failed to curb AT&T's illegal behavior in the past.

There is our first big problem. Copyright, trademark, and patents are always government granted monopolies. AT&T couldn't compete on a level playing field. Everyone familiar with the history recognizes that they weren't playing fair in the BSDI case. However, without "market power", they looked just like any other ordinary IP owner excercising their property rights. The government has conveniently forgotten how we all got on the hook in the first place. If Unix ever was an Essential Public Facility then it still should be unless something else has replaced it. If we look at Judge Nelson's comments in Intergraph v Intel you see the same things he mentions happening in USL V BSDI or SCO V IBM i.e. increasing returns, lock-in, monopoly leveraging, coercive reciprocity, unconscionable termination of access to technical data needed to develop interoperable products, and a host of other similarities. SCO has sold licenses to everyone that sells a Unix or a product that uses their API including Sun and Microsoft. They claim that Linux, the BSDs, OS X, place your ad here, and just about anything else you can think of might (or definately does) infringe on their "broad rights". That's some market. Unfortunately, the FTC or DOJ may challenge the enforcement of invalid intellectual property rights as antitrust violations, but only when some other element of an antitrust violation exists. I wish they would use what I call "Harlan's Rule of Reason". Under my rule attempting to enforce invalid intellectual property rights is like printing your own money, or impersonating a police officer. It's prima facia evidence of an antitrust violation because all IP protections are government granted monopolies and you are using them wrongfully.

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