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| EU Judge Says Evidence Stays; Decision Likely December 18-21 |
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Friday, November 26 2004 @ 04:44 AM EST
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The EU judge handling the Microsoft case indicated to the parties at the special meeting yesterday that the evidence earlier presented by Novell and the CCIA stays in the case and that he expects to have a ruling by mid-December:"Vesterdorf said his decision would probably appear on Dec. 18 or Dec. 20, Wainright added. 'We have the impression that the order's already been done in French and it has to be translated into English,' he said.
"Lawyers for Microsoft and third parties also said Vesterdorf had said the decision would come before Christmas. . . . "'All the parties in the meeting agreed, as Microsoft has always maintained, that CCIA and Novell's past testimony should remain on the record, said Microsoft spokesman Tom Brookes.
'We look forward to the judge's interim decision and more importantly moving on with the broader appeal of the Commission's case.'
"Vesterdorf . . . will decide what sanctions if any should be suspended, but his decision will be separate from the main case.
Ultimately, Microsoft's appeal of the Commission decision will be heard by a three or five-judge panel of the Court of First Instance, which will not include Vesterdorf." A Microsoft spokesman said prior evidence can't be struck, they never asked for that, and they didn't approach Novell and CCIA with any such thing in mind. Of course, the company that the EU Commission found to be an illegal monopolist in March wouldn't dream of trying to tilt the balance unfairly in November. I think covering Microsoft is going to be even more fun than covering SCO.
Microsoft's spokesman said they so look forward to the judge's decision and then to pursuing their appeal. I take it they are not convinced they will gain a delay in implementing the EU order's penalties: "The commission ordered the company to sell a version of Windows without a music and video player and to license information on the operating system to rivals.
"The EU antitrust office said it sought to alter Microsoft's behavior because its investigation found that the software giant tried to squeeze competitors out of Windows-related markets, a practice it said was continuing." No kidding. I'm thinking the minute Microsoft or a lackey brings a patent infringement lawsuit against Linux, we tell the EU Commission all about it. I don't think it would hurt, actually, to tell them what we see happening right now. Of course, from Microsoft's perspective, governmental agencies are mere bumps in the road, but expensive bumps, at least. All the articles about this special meeting stress that RealNetworks is denying that it and the EU are becoming "isolated". Just think about that for a minute. Microsoft wishes to isolate the EU Commission? It represents 25 nations. Just who do they think they are? Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility for this mess. We kept buying their software. The vendors and other companies and organizations can at least plead that they were muscled into going along with Microsoft, or paid millions. But what's our excuse? Ed Black, who allegedly personally pocketed half of the millions Microsoft paid the CCIA, continues to refuse to comment, which is what you'd do if it were not true, right? Right? No? It's possible, of course, that there are factors preventing him from speaking at this time, but I'm sure it will all come out in the wash eventually. Things like that have a way of doing so in the Internet age, as he has recently learned. Meanwhile, in case you were wondering about how the Microsoft/Time Warner purchase of ContentGuard is going, which the EU Commission is looking into, note this news: "French technology company Thomson SA said Monday it was joining Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s proposed venture to make anti-piracy software, a move that could relieve European Union concerns about the pending deal.
"In a joint statement, the companies said Thomson has agreed to purchase a 33 percent voting stake in U.S.-based ContentGuard, changing the deal from a two-company joint venture to three.
"Together, they aim to develop new standards in so-called digital rights management technologies, which allow online access to movies, music and other digital content while protecting it from unauthorized copying and counterfeiting." The EU has expressed concerns about the MS-Time Warner deal. It sent a "confidential charge sheet" setting forth its objections to both companies this month, threatening to block the deal: "Thomson's investment adds a 'European-headquartered partner that will make this important technology more accessible,' especially in Web services and devices, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said in the joint statement.
"Although Microsoft spokesman Tom Brookes called the deal 'business driven,' it could also help Microsoft avoid another clash with EU antitrust regulators."
Hmm. Microsoft intends to develop "new standards" for DRM. You don't suppose they'll then patent them and license them in such a way that GPL software can't use them, they way they are trying to do with Sender ID, do you? I wonder if the EU Commission understands the whole anticompetitive patent strategy and how the community suspects Microsoft will use DRM and "standards" to try to destroy its real competition, Linux?
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:02 AM EST |
| Post corrections here [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:03 AM EST |
Off-topid posts here
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:08 AM EST |
Sorry PJ, but you are way off the mark...
Covering Microsoft is going to be *FAR* more frustrating....
They have smart people playing with the system and bending the rules...
They have enough at risk that they will smile happily to your face while 10
separate threads sneak up to thwart our efforts...
No - I'm not looking forward to the wounded MS fighting back... they have never
understood the idea of a clean fight.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- PJ Right, , Right, Right. - Authored by: Brian S. on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 06:09 AM EST
- Yes, M$ is going to be harder - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 06:30 AM EST
- PJ WRONG WRONG WRONG !!! - Authored by: jlar on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:29 AM EST
- Public perceptions of a public firm - Authored by: Mark Grosskopf on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:55 AM EST
- PJ WRONG WRONG WRONG !!! - Authored by: blacklight on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 10:25 AM EST
- PJ (not) WRONG WRONG WRONG !!! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 12:13 PM EST
- PJ is going to get her butte kicked, and she is not going to take it - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 12:25 PM EST
- PJ WRONG WRONG WRONG !!! - Authored by: darkonc on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 04:34 PM EST
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| Authored by: macrorodent on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:17 AM EST |
PJ: Microsoft wishes to isolate the EU Commission? It represents 25
nations. Just who do they think they are?
Recall that this is the same
EU Commission that on other occasions have been busily promoting software
patents and tightening copyright legislation, not to mention various other nasty
stuff pushed by big-business lobbyists. Microsoft does not need to have
delusions of grandeur, it probably only thinks it fouled up at some point in the
lobbying operations. Eventually this affair will have a Microsoft-friendly
ending, there is no doubt about it.
As a citizen of an EU country, I can say
that most of the time the EU Commission does not represent my, or my country's
interests.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:41 AM EST |
I think covering Microsoft is going to be even more fun than
covering SCO. Fun maybe, but I suspect its going to be a
lot tougher for Groklaw. Microsoft is a much smarter company, and I don't
think for one minute that they will indulge in some of the stupid courtroom
antics that SCO has done. Instead we will see much subtler techniques aimed at
twisting the legal proceedings to suit their objectives. Anyone remember the
carefully forged video showing that Windows could not operate without Explorer?
It took some effort to discredit that, and thats what we are likely to be up
against. Looking on the bright side of life (starts humming Monty Python tune)
when Microsoft is caught with its legal pants down, they are going to look
seriously stupid (as against SCO who just looked like idiots the first 20 or so
times). They are also unlikely to fully understand the effectiveness of the
Groklaw community, although I suspect that they may have a dim grasp of it
because of what Groklaw has done during the various SCO court cases. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Brian S. on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:42 AM EST |
| What do the French think of Thompson joining with Microsoft and Time Warner in
controlling their cultural intake and output?
Brian S. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: pesc on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 05:43 AM EST |
| Microsoft wishes to isolate the EU Commission? It represents 25 nations. Just
who do they think they are?
The New EU
Commission? Well, Neelie
Kroes who is responsible for competition once gave Bill Gates an
honorary degree. Politicians like big business... [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: cheros on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 06:05 AM EST |
Frankly, I don't expect anything to come from this at all.
Never forget that Microsoft has an almost obscene cash reserve that it can use
at will. The EU case is indeed just a road bump - Microsoft employs about the
best people on the planet for gaming the system and they are very, very good at
it.
Expect campaign donations, "charitable" contributions, extended
"dispute resolution meetings" somewhere very sunny and exotic,
surprise appointments at new, MS funded development bodies (and, say, University
buildings), astroturfing, the works.
The EU sacking their auditor for refusing to sign off their accounts shows that
they still have a long way to go with respect to developing a degree of
transparancy, and I'm sure MS is well aware of that. I'm sure Microsoft has
already worked out exactly which buttons to press: even if they receive a
judgement against them, expect either the charge or the enforcement to have
truck sized holes in it, or leave open the possibility to tie it up in court for
a decade or so.
The SCO case is (in comparison) pretty dumb bullying gone wrong. Don't expect
Microsoft to be as dumb - they've been playing this game for well over two
decades. They can genuinely claim to be an innovative company .. just not in
products.
= Ch =[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: FrankH on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 06:51 AM EST |
Ed Black, who allegedly personally pocketed half of the millions Microsoft
paid the CCIA, continues to refuse to comment, which is what you'd do if it were
not true, right? Right? No?
I have a problem with this. You, and
others, have made an accusation, the accused has the right to reply or not as he
chooses and when he chooses. Your accusation should stand on its merits. His
lack of an immediate response does not add weight to the accusation. Isn't that
what is meant when the accused is told "You have the right to remain
silent..."?
For what it's worth, I'd also like an answer to these
questions. I just think that somebody with legal training should be aware of the
difference between an accusation and a conviction.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:22 AM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:24 AM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: cybervegan on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:30 AM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: Wol on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 08:55 AM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: blacklight on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 10:35 AM EST
- This is the Court of Public Opinion - Authored by: darthaggie on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 10:44 AM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 10:45 AM EST
- "Right to Remain Silent" = No Self Incrimination - Authored by: Adam B on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 01:20 PM EST
- Whatever happened to "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: PJ on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 04:56 PM EST
- misperceived "You have the right to remain silent..." - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 29 2004 @ 11:09 AM EST
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| Authored by: AdamBaker on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 07:34 AM EST |
"Hmm. Microsoft intends to develop "new standards" for DRM. You
don't suppose they'll then patent them and license them in such a way that GPL
software can't use them."
It doesn't really matter what approach they take, a fundamental requirement of
any DRM software is that it isn't open and the OS it runs on isn't open. No
matter how good your DRM system is, if someone can modify the audio or video
card drivers to capture the data being passed to them the protection is broken.
With compressed content it is possible to arrange things such that decompression
and decryption occur within the same chunk of code so only the decompressed
content can be captured and of course with lossy compression that does make the
uncompressed content slightly less useful than the original but that still
requires that the decompression / decryption mechanism remains closed source and
that it remains too large a chunk of code to be easily reverse engineered.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 08:15 AM EST |
Have to disagree with you there: Government's ARE a big road block for
Microsoft.
Countries such as India and China have the desire to use Linux for purely
ideological reasons; payola does not have the chance to come into it.
Most other countries would recognises this fact if it wasn't for either 1)
Microsoft's ability to pay huge sums to secure their absolution using the money
gained from it's cash cows (Office and Windows) i.e. Sun; 2) The legal systems
inate ability to drag seemingly open-and-shut cases for years should one party
have either the will or the money to do so i.e. Netscape ; 3) The ability of the
government of the US to completely misunderstand (or should I say
misunderestimate) the damage Microsoft is doing to the US software industry
through anti-competitive actions, not through "innovation", i.e. the
US DOJ case against Microsoft.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 08:55 AM EST |
"Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility for this mess. We kept
buying their software. The vendors and other companies and organizations can at
least plead that they were muscled into going along with Microsoft, or paid
millions. But what's our excuse?"
I think my excuse is probably going to be along the lines of: Microsoft, through
its monopolistic activities, made it next to impossible for me to use
alternative software.
Or did I misunderstand what you meant? In which case please delete this.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 08:57 AM EST |
I can't believe that you, a person who supports FREE software would be EU
Commission's cheerleader. The fact is that MS's products are not yours/EU's for
splitting up. Only the owners of that company can do that. It's called property.
The fact that you and others here
contributed to making MS Windows most popular OS doesn't mean that you
have the right to demand this kind of thing. Nobody forced anyone to buy MS's
products. You made MS a “monopoly” and only you can put it out of business.
Don't promote using governments to make other people's life harder because it
goes BOTH ways. I hate MS but what I hate more is this kind of sick reasoning.
You don't need to have MS screwed by any government agency in order to promote
Linux.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 09:26 AM EST |
"Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility for this mess. We kept
buying their software. The vendors and other companies and organizations can at
least plead that they were muscled into going along with Microsoft, or paid
millions. But what's our excuse?"
I have always felt that some of the fault of the Windows monopoly lies with
software developers. (Flame Suit On)
It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when there was some competition
for DOS/Windows. But also-rans fell by the wayside because software developers
were content to let MS make the OS, while they themselves concentrated on
applications, where they thought the real money was. It wasn't that they
couldn't compete with MS, they didn't want to. MS took advantage of this,
naturally, and began developing their own competing applications. By the time
the other developers realized this, it was too late. They should have paid more
attention to what was going on. They let MS dictate which OS's they would
develop for.
Now, I do realize that most chose a single OS to develop for in order to keep
costs down. I do however recall Lotus and dBase being developed for OS/2 and
DOS at the same time.
The failure of OS/2 falls to IBM, who failed to market OS/2 like they should
have. IBM's "mainframe" model of marketing doesn't work for PC's, it
never has. They were used to customers coming to them, not having to go to the
customers. "If you build it, they will come" doesn't work in PCs.
IBM was also taken in by MS's promises to promote OS/2, and didn't find out the
truth until too late.
Yes, MS has done some dirty deals, but software developers are partially to
blame in all this for not paying enough attention to what was going on in their
own back yard. Some of them turned a blind eye figuring that MS would never
come after them. They were wrong.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: prayforwind on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 09:47 AM EST |
" Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility for this mess. We kept
buying their software."
Substitute the word "using" for "buying" and you've got it.
Even those of us who use Microsoft's products -without- buying them are still
supporting Microsoft - by interchanging data with other Microsoft users using
their proprietary file formats. This "encourages" people to stay on
the upgrade treadmill. (I know a university prof who insists on e-mailing
macro-laden .doc files to her students, by way of example).
I try and tell such users why I think it would be socially responsible to avoid
sending out proprietary file formats, but I don't seem to be able to make people
understand. And such people who receive .ppt files, etc seem to think there's
something "wrong" with their machines if they can't open them. If
anyone out there has found a way to explain this to non-geeks, I'd sure love to
hear it!
---
jabber me: prayforwind@jabber.org[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 11:34 AM EST |
There's a lot of news that a "routine software upgrade" caused 80,000 PCs in
the UK Department for Work and Pensions to crash. The head of the DWP promised
an inquiry to investigate the role of MS and EDS, who run the DWP's network.
news.google.com has some links; here's one.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 11:44 AM EST |
"... Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility for this mess. We
kept buying their software..."
Well, actually no. Perhaps you folks kept buying their products, I quit buying
Microsoft products back around late 1994 or early 1995 at the latest. I have not
forked out a dime for any Microsoft product since that time - even though this
meant that I had to purchase by part and assemble each new PC I've purchased in
the last decade (except for a laptop I once purchased from the now defunct
TuxTops.com that came with Linux pre-installed).[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Same here. nt - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 03:23 PM EST
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 11:50 AM EST |
Thomson ?
is this Thomson, one of the companies that sold hi-tech weaponry to Iraq during
the 80s ?
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo34/european_foreign_policy_iraq.htm[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Superbiskit on Friday, November 26 2004 @ 01:02 PM EST |
Microsoft wishes to isolate the EU Commission? It represents 25
nations. Just who do they think they are?
They are
Microsoft!
Resistance is futile, you will be
absorbed.
I suspect, to folks in Redmond, the question is "Just who do those
EU Commissioners think they are?"
And, sadly, I suspect many Americans
may ask the same question.
After all, isn't "what's good for (American)
business" good for America?
Would you want to give some foreign country a 'veto
power' over our business practices too?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Simon G Best on Sunday, November 28 2004 @ 01:38 PM EST |
(I've not visited Groklaw in about a week, due to spending most of last week
buying and installing a new HP Deskjet 3845 (because HP seem friendly towards FOSS). This involved
'upgrading' to RedHat Linux 9, which I find I do not like, but that's not HP's
fault.)
Folks. Let's face it. We bear some responsibility
for this mess. We kept buying their software. The vendors and other companies
and organizations can at least plead that they were muscled into going along
with Microsoft, or paid millions. But what's our
excuse?
Back in 1998, I purchased MS Windows 98 (for almost
half price). This was because some of the Open University's course software
required Windows. I would not have made that purchase
otherwise.
That was the only copy of Microsoft Windows I ever
bought.
So, my excuse is that it was either be a Microsoft customer, or
not study the stuff I wished to study. More specifically, it's that the 'Open'
University was not open when it came to operating systems.
I
was already a Linux user at the time, and enjoyed being able to use a
freely-redistributable, freely-customisable, open, Unix-like operating
system on the PC that I'd assembled out of spare, discarded and second-hand
parts. Having to put Microsoft Windows onto that machine (alongside Linux) was
not a happy thing.
---
Open Source - open and honest? Not while the
political denial continues.
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