Legal Archive

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.

Microsoft has submitted documents required by the European Commission in an effort to avoid further fines for breaching an antitrust ruling, a spokeswoman for the European Union regulator said on Monday. "We received the technical documentation from Microsoft. The competition services are currently analyzingit with the help of the trustee. It's too early to say whether they complied with the decision," the spokeswoman said.

The European Commission plans to raise the ceiling of future fines on Microsoft to 3 million Euros (USD 3.8 million) a day if the company continues to defy an antitrust decision, a diplomatic source said on Monday. He was speaking as European competition regulators met to discuss the amount of a fine the European Union's executive arm will impose on the software giant for failing to comply with the 2004 decision that it abused its dominant market position.

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.