Legal Archive

Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities. He argues that no company in America gets away with selling a "defective" product the way Microsoft does.

Today, Novell has answered SCO's complaint alledging Novell slandered SCO's ownership of the Unix copyrights. Novell claims that SCO approached Novell in 2003 to try and pursuade them to go along with the Linux Licensing Scheme. When Novell refused, SCO attempted to talk Novell into transfering the Unix Copyrights to SCO, which Novell also refused to do. Novell has also filed four counterclaims against SCO, one of them being Slander of Title (for SCO slandering Novell's ownership of the Unix Copyrights).

SCO's CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals. An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera's Michael Davidson reported the results.

Hot on the heels of an AMD antitrust lawsuit against Intel and a recent ruling in Japan that found that Intel abused its monopoly power, European Comission officials and competition authorities from several European countries raided the offices of Intel and several computer manufacturers. These "inspections" were probably carried out under article 81 of the EU Treaty, which prohibits price fixing and other distortions of competition within the EU.

Sweden has outlawed the downloading of copyrighted movies, games and music in an attempt to curb rampant piracy. About 10% of Swedes freely swap music, games and films on their computers, one of the highest rates in the world.With no law banning file-sharing, Sweden had become a hotbed of piracy where films, music and software were readily swapped.

On Friday, Microsoft and IBM said they had settled many of the outstanding antitrust issues between the two companies raised during the United States Department of Justice vs. Microsoft antitrust case during the mid-1990s.

In a long-awaited decision that could have stark repercussions for P2P networks, the United States Supreme Court on Monday gave record labels and movie studios a green light to sue file-sharing services such as Grokster and Morpheus, which maintained they were not responsible for the actions of their users.

AMD has filed an antitrust complaint against Intel. On a 48-page complaint AMD explains how the company thinks Intel has maintained its monopoly in the x86 microprocessor market by engaging in worldwide coercion of customers from dealing with AMD. It identifies 38 companies that have been victims of coercion by Intel. AMD claims that Intel's share of this critical market currently counts for about 80 percent of worldwide sales by unit volume and 90 percent by revenue, giving it entrenched monopoly ownership and super-dominant market power.

"If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman.

A U.S. District Court judge let stand two of the six counts in Novell Inc.'s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., which accused the software giant of damaging Novell's business through monopolistic behavior. The remaining counts were dismissed. Novell's case is that Microsoft wielded its OS monopoly to prevent Novel's office applications from competing fairly in the marketplace.

The U.S. patent system will undergo its most substantial overhaul in decades if a bill introduced on Wednesday becomes law.

In an editorial at Newsforge, Richard Stallman notes that, unlike IBM's announcement last year granting open source software authors amnesty from 500 patents, Nokia has only made its recent pledge about the Linux kernel, leaving the door open for an attack on other software projects. Meanwhile, Nokia continues to push for more software patent protection from government. He says their gesture isn't nothing, but it's next to nothing.

Developers on the Windows compatibility project Wine have been forced to abandon an important feature due to the existence of a Borland patent.