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| Today's YouTube: US v. Microsoft 10 Years Later |
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Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:01 PM EST
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I found a treasure on YouTube. Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has a channel on YouTube now. And they held a conference in September on the US antitrust trial against Microsoft, collecting many of the players in that famous litigation, including David Boies. So it's your opportunity to see him in action. As usual, he's impressive. I think you'll find his explanation of trials as morality plays intriguing. He talks about highly technical trials, and how the judge finally has to decide who he believes, based on credibility. In the SCO context, I'd say that might not be a winning strategy.
: D Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, was there too, although he wasn't at Microsoft at the time, but he is refreshingly candid about that trial, saying you can't put lipstick on that pig. He goes on to talk about his efforts to start a new chapter for Microsoft, which I found interesting in that it provides some context into Microsoft's efforts to be less obviously horrible about interoperability, even if you view what is said with one cynical eye open. In any case, fairness alone would cause me to mention it to you. Truth is complex and multi-faceted, and it's really fascinating stuff.
In passing, I'll mention that EFF has highlighted some privacy issues with YouTube and one solution they came up with. With regard to referrer information being sent, Opera gives you the option to turn referrer logging off. Just saying. You can view the videos on the Berkman site also. So here are some of the videos in the series: - Phil Malone's Opening Remarks - Phil Malone is Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard and former lead prosecutor on the Microsoft case for the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice. He opens the conference and sketches the long history of Microsoft's antitrust battles. He is a co-founder of the Berkman Center's Citizen Media Law Project and is co-director of the Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw. Phil came to the Berkman Center after 20 years as a federal prosecutor with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He is also
one of the author's of the amicus brief in the Lori Drew case.
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Roundtable Panel 1 with Smith, former DOJ Antitrust head Doug Melamed, and BU law professor Keith Hylton,
moderated by Harvard Law antitrust professor Einer Elhauge. There are some interesting comments from the audience, many of whom were involved in the case. The contempt case that they talk about is here.
- David Boies, founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and the DOJ's special trial counsel in the Microsoft case. A member of the audience asks him about his favorite moments in the trial.
Brad Smith.
- Panel 2, the more techy panel, moderated by Andrew Chin, with David Heiner, Edward Felten, and Steve Holtzman. They talked about tying.
- Panel 3, Frank Fisher, Doug Melamed, Harry First, Keith Hylton, and Jay Himes debate the meaning of the Microsoft case and remedy in: Assessing Market Power and Anticompetitve Conduct in Dynamic, Innovative Driven Markets: Economic and Legal Lessons from US v. Microsoft.
- Panel 4, a discussion among three journalists who covered the Microsoft trial, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, Joe Nocera of the New York Times and Fortune Magazine, and John Wilke of the Wall Street Journal, and Microsoft's chief spokesman at trial and current general manager of public relations and public affairs, Mark Murray.
If you get intrigued by it all, and you want to read transcripts from the trial that Boies references, for example the Richard Schmalensee and Daniel Rosen testimony, you can find them here, direct testimony here and deposition transcripts here. The last two are on the DOJ's site, and their security policy is here: For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this Government computer system employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage. Anyone using this system expressly consents to such monitoring and is advised that if such monitoring reveals evidence of possible abuse or criminal activity, such evidence may be provided to appropriate law enforcement officials. Unauthorized attempts to upload or change information on this server are strictly prohibited and may be punishable by law, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996. Hasn't someone invented a tool to do transcripts from videos yet? If not, we should at least do the Boies video, don't you think? All the videos are released under this Creative Commons license, Attribution 3.0 Unported. That's the human English version. Here's the legal language. I'm not positive what "unported" means, in connection with either language, but the terms are clear enough that I think it means we could do a transcript as long as we follow all the steps in the terms. Update: I found one more video, Jonathan Zitrain's, who picked your brains some time ago in connection with his book, if you recall. He introduces the series by taking the audience through the context of the trial. I had to smile at two places, first finding out he used to work at Microsoft as a kid, and second, where he says that in ten years we'll be reuniting to remember the SCO v. IBM case.
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| Authored by: warnold on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:16 PM EST |
If needed.
Please include the correction in the title.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: warnold on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:17 PM EST |
| clickies please... [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: warnold on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:18 PM EST |
| Subject in the title please. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: warnold on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:26 PM EST |
"unported" means in this context that they didn't fill in the
"Jurisdiction of your license" choice in the
http://creativecommons.org/license/ wizard.
Compare http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode (their choice) with
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/legalcode (the equivalent US
jurisdiction version)[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Re: Unported - Authored by: PJ on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 01:51 PM EST
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 03:18 PM EST |
Well, Microsoft still has not been split into 'OsCO' (Windows) and 'AppCo'
(Office).
Nor have they been persuaded to offer the same price to 'Small Business' as they
do to 'School'.
IBM OS/2 has gone; to be replaced in the 'Commercial OS for Personal Computer'
stakes by Apple OSX. Good luck to them.
But the rest of the world has moved to Linux and OpenOffice.org . Monopoly is
over.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: caecer on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 03:55 PM EST |
| PJ comments that "Opera gives you the option to turn referrer logging off".
There is an
add-on
in Firefox that gives you control over both the default behavior and allows
control on a per-site basis.
Another allows
you to choose to not send referrer information.
(Note: I have not tested these
addons.) [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, December 01 2008 @ 05:04 PM EST |
... at least in part (it's very long) because it gives a flavor of what this
very prominent courtroom lawyer is like, as a person.
He's obviously very
smart, and comes across as a very straight, credible guy (of course, coming
across like that is an essential skill for a courtroom lawyer). But I also got
the impression that he would not be an effective bullshitter. If you are partly
lying, or don't really know what you are talking about, then Boies'
cross-examination will just rip your testimony apart. But if you are on top of
your material, and are totally honest, Boies is not the kind of lawyer who will
do a great job of confusing you (or the judge). Some lawyers do that well.
Boies' style is too methodical.
Therefore I think SCO had unrealistic
hopes of hiring Boies, great courtroom performer though he is. He'd be at his
best appearing for the side that is being honest and straightforward. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, December 02 2008 @ 12:27 AM EST |
MS folks offer insight, but it seems that what they say is still tilted with
some spin?
Like the claim that they want to inter-operate (it seems they only want to do
THAT when they are dragged by a court to do so). And the patent threats by
Balmer vs Linux are OBVIOUS that they still hate their competition AND that the
SPIN that they want to inter-operate with competitors in a friendly way, is a
bald headed lie.
The MS underhanded efforts to fight ODF and promote MSOOXML are a prime example
of their endless lies and that the depths of their designs to still be a
monopoly go well beyond their "spoken words" of friendship knowing
that the event was being reported on, and that future lawyers were in the
audience. MS is the dark side.
Actions speak louder than words, and to date, all we hear from Microsoft is
words. It seem like they have no confidence in their marketing department to be
able to compete by using their brand and name to compete where the competion is
to be on a level FREE TO USE standards based "patent free" playing
field.
It is sad that the BUSH administration made a deal with MS and that their
Justice Dept threw in the towel on this case and did a deal with MS in the way
that they did. The US consumer has suffered as a result of this behavior by
those who wish to throw politics onto the scales of justice.
It is good that the EU has take up where the US legal system failed.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, December 02 2008 @ 01:04 AM EST |
Hasn't someone invented a tool to do transcripts from videos yet?
Yes they have...
http://www.thdl.org/xml/showEssay.php?xml=/tools/quilldriver/quilldriver.xml&
;l=d1e229
"Source code for QuillDriver is available under the terms of the GNU
General Public License. To get it, please visit the Tools for Field Linguistics
site on SourceForge."
Hope this helps
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| Authored by: celtic_hackr on Tuesday, December 02 2008 @ 08:27 AM EST |
Truth is complex and multi-faceted, and it's really fascinating
stuff.
I have to say, when I read that, my first thought was
my Mother would disagree with that statement. Then I thought that this is what I
might expect a lawyer to say.
In any event, I have to disagree with
that. The truth is simple and brutally hard like a diamond. Many people try to
shape it, but generally all that one succeeds in doing is shattering it.
I would probably agree that justice is complex and multifaceted, but the truth
is steadfast, immovable, and resolute. When you try to put shades on the truth
or coat it in sugar, all you succeed in doing is hiding the truth in layers of
increasing complexity. But the truth in itself remains plain and simple. While I
agree that not many things in life are black and white, the truth is one of
them. There may be many facets to the reasons and circumstances to which any
particular truth applies, but that has no relation to any complexity of the
truth. Microsoft is either innocent or guilty. IBM is either innocent or guilty.
SCO either owns Unix or it doesn't. The earth circles the sun or it doesn't. Of
course not all things can be quantified so starkly. Such as the statement that
David Boise is either good or bad. Can probably never be simply true, because in
most all things there is some good and some bad. So, to speak of the truth as
multifaceted and complex is simply false and not necessarily relevant to the
application of morality. The truth has no morality, it simply is. Many people
simply can't handle the truth in all it's raw glory.
I usually comment as
anonymous, because I can never remember my account, then recently discovered I
had it stored away in a safe place.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, December 02 2008 @ 12:05 PM EST |
I can't get over how many people think fairness applies to Microsoft. How many
times does Lucy have to yank away the football before Charlie Brown gets a
clue?
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Shakespeare was a content provider.
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