Legal Archive

In the SCO case a new order severely limits SCO's claims. finding that 186 out of 294 items in SCO's final disclosures are not up to the standard ordered by the court. IBM disputed 198 items for not being specific enough and the court granted the motion on 186 of the items limiting the case to 107 items.

The European Commission is ready to impose a fine of 2m Euros ($2.5m; £1.4m) a day on Microsoft. The Commission is expected to rule that Microsoft has failed to fully implement its 2004 antitrust decision. Under the ruling, Microsoft had to supply rivals with information about its Windows operating system.

Adobe, not content with Microsoft's decision to cut certain PDF functionality out of Office 2007, also wants changes in Microsoft's new document display and printing technology. Will the pair's failure to resolve differences result in more antitrust action?

"In a decision that could set the tone for journalism in the digital age, a California appeals court ruled Friday that bloggers, like traditional reporters, have the right to keep their sources confidential. A panel of three judges said in a 69-page decision that a group of bloggers did not have to divulge their sources to Apple, contending that the same laws that protect traditional journalists, the First Amendment, and California's Shield Law, also apply to bloggers." My take: You already know how I feel about this, but I still need to say it, and I do not care if I get flamed for saying it: this is a clear-cut victory for the freedom of speech and press in the US (I live in The Netherlands, though), and you should all be happy Apple did not win this case. Update: Ars has an analysis and history of the case.

It's court time again, people. "Symantec filed a lawsuit in Seattle today alleging Microsoft committed a host of business misdeeds, including misappropriating trade secrets and violating a contract that covered code used in part of the coming Windows Vista operating system. The suit, filed in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, relates to a contract between Microsoft and Veritas, which merged into Symantec last year, dating to 1996."

"The US government has given its thumbs-up to Microsoft's search box plans for Vista, shrugging off concerns raised recently by Google. While criticizing Microsoft for its implementation of its existing antitrust accord, regulators appear satisfied with the software maker's plans for Windows Vista, including a new search box that is part of Internet Explorer 7." On a related note, "the Justice Department is seeking to extend the term of its landmark antitrust settlement with Microsoft by two years, blaming Microsoft's slowness in providing technical documentation to rivals."

"D-Link and Poul-Henning Kamp announced today that they have amicably resolved their dispute regarding access to Mr Kamp's GPS.Dix.dk NTP Time Server site. D-Link's existing products will have authorized access to Mr Kamp's server, but all new D-Link products will not use the GPS.Dix.dk NTP time server. D-Link is dedicated to remaining a good corporate and network citizen."

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now US Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

"Microsoft and its critics agree that the future of innovation is at stake when the US software giant challenges a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling next week before the European Union's second highest court. But they will take opposite tacks on what that means before a special 13-judge panel of the Court of First Instance, which starts five days of public hearings on Monday."

Apple Computer faced tough questioning Thursday in its bid to gain access to electronic records of Mac enthusiast sites that published leaked details of an unreleased product. Although a lower court ruled last year that Apple should be able to gain access to electronic records of the enthusiast sites, a three-judge appeals panel in the State of California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, peppered Apple's lawyer with questions. The judges wanted to know whether the information at issue represented a genuine trade secret as well as whether journalists' right to protect their sources outweigh Apple's right to protect its trade secrets.

Microsoft and the European Commission will clash in court over innovation and intellectual-property rights when the software giant appeals a 2004 antitrust decision, according to court papers seen by Reuters. Microsoft wants to turn around the Commission's decision that it abused the dominance of its Windows system to muscle out rivals who did not have enough detail of the operating system to create efficient software that could run with it.

Jason O'Grady, who runs PowerPage.org, one of the websites Apple is forcing to disclose sources, has reacted to all of it at ZDNet. "My position on the Asteroid postings is that I didn't steal the information and I didn't ask for it. Someone volunteered it to me and it looked credible, so I posted it. It wasn't marked confidential, trade secret or any such thing but it looked legit to me, so I ran it. When Apple later asked me to remove it, I complied. Apple feels that independent online journalists are not protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that a journalist's confidential communications and sources should be exposed to them or any large corporation that doesn't like what they publish - at will. I think that this is completely wrong on several levels."

A bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require all Executive branch agencies to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats." While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards.

A company called eSoft was recently granted a patent for "systems and methods for selecting, ordering, installing, managing, updating, and if necessary, uninstalling software applications." Their first step has been to sue their major competitors, but it appears that online software update systems of all kinds could be covered by this patent, which would mean that Windows Update, OS X Software Update, Redhat's up2date, and YUM, among others, would be infringing.