Legal Archive

"Details of a controversial patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell have been revealed in Novell's SEC filings. The text of the agreement is now publicly available, but some parts - including one whole page - have been redacted. Although most of the details surrounding the agreement have already been disclosed, there are a few aspects of the deal that weren't previously known. Of particular interest is the language that describes exceptions to the patent indemnification agreement."

Microsoft has said it will not sue Linux users with regards to the company's patent claims. "We're not litigating. If we wanted to we would have done so years ago," said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's VP for intellectual property and licensing, in an interview. When asked for a reply regarding the claim of Microsoft that the Linux kernel infringes 42 of its patents, Linus Torvalds replied: "Can you get a list of which ones? Before that, it's just FUD, and there's not a whole lot I can say or do. Is there prior art? Are they trivial and obvious to one skilled in the art? Would we need to work around them? We don't know, because all I've heard so far is just FUD. If MS actually wanted us to not infringe their patents, they'd tell us. Since they don't, that must mean that they actually prefer the FUD."

"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."

Little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation this week became the latest to claim that Apple had abused a patent they hold. Filed April 18th in a US district court in Marshall, Texas the four-page formal complaint purports that Apple has engaged in 'willful and deliberate' infringement of a computer control patent by selling its current Tiger operating system. On a related note, Microsoft has similar problems.

Microsoft reached an undisclosed settlement in a lawsuit claiming it used its monopoly position to overcharge Iowa consumers for software products including Windows and Word. Microsoft reached the deal with a statewide class of consumers who had purchased Microsoft products since 1994. The plaintiffs claimed the company violated Iowa antitrust law to charge inflated prices by taking advantage of its monopolies in personal computer operating systems and software applications.

"A new investor lawsuit against Dell accuses the computer maker of improperly accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from long-time partner Intel, a plaintiffs' attorney said on Friday. The lawsuit accuses Dell of artificially inflating profits "by secretly receiving approximately $250 million a quarter in likely illegal rebate kickbacks payments" from Intel in return for an exclusive deal to purchase Intel's microprocessors, class-action lawyer William Lerach told Reuters.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California is investigating the stock options backdating activities of computer and consumer electronics manufacturer Apple. The federal action comes in the wake of the disclosure by Apple last month that it completed an internal investigation of options backdating and concluded that, although Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs recommended some backdating of stock options for himself and other Apple employees, he wasn't aware of the accounting implications of those recommendations. Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, confirmed the existence of the investigation, but did not provide additional details.

Cisco has sued Apple over the use of the 'iPhone' brand. "Cisco today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Apple, Inc., seeking to prevent Apple from infringing upon and deliberately copying and using Cisco's registered iPhone trademark."

"It's been a good week for Microsoft's documentation efforts as the company achieved important milestones with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. US antitrust authorities signed off on Vista and IE7 and announced that Microsoft was making good progress in its efforts to document certain server protocols in Windows. In Europe, where Microsoft has encountered more problems and increased fines over the state of its documentation, the company got a rare bit of good news as the European Commission completed its initial review of the revised documents."

US prosecutors say Windows Vista and the latest version of Internet Explorer apparently comply with the requirements of the 2002 antitrust judgement against Microsoft. In a joint status report filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., prosecutors said Microsoft appeared to be complying with the judgement, which found Microsoft abused its Windows monopoly and set down rules for the software maker to follow to avoid future anti-competitive behaviour. Prosecutors and Microsoft have been submitting joint reports on compliance to the court every six months.

The EU has accumulated enough evidence to charge Intel with antitrust violations, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anonymous sources quoted by the paper claim that EU lawyers have prepared a draft of their case against the company, but are waiting to make it public until after an interior panel of legal experts meets to consider the arguments in the document.

As expected, Microsoft said Tuesday it has appealed a July fine by the European Commission with the Court of First Instance, the European Union's second highest court. It accuses the EC of prolonging the case while the Redmond company attempted to comply with the ruling. Microsoft vowed to appeal after the EC handed down the 280.5 million euro fine on July 12. Before that ruling, he regulatory body had never fined a company before for failure to comply with an earlier order.

European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said the US government tried to influence its decision over a 280.5 mln eur fine for software giant Microsoft, newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad said. The US embassy in Brussels had contacted Kroes and asked her to be a bit 'nicer' to Microsoft before she had taken the decision to fine Microsoft in July, Kroes said in an interview.

The European Union's antitrust commission plans to investigate complaints regarding Microsoft Office, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Thursday. Kroes, who was speaking at the Fordham Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, did not elaborate on the investigation.