Legal Archive

Internet search leader Google is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft's Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users. In a 49-page document filed April 18 with the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general, Google alleged that the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system impairs the performance of 'desktop search' programs that find data stored on a computer's hard drive. Besides bogging down competing programs, Google alleged Microsoft had made it too complicated to turn off the desktop search feature built into Vista.

"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."

"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."

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.

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.

"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."