Federal Court to Hear Microsoft Appeal of Internet Explorer Case
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Software giant contesting order to pay $521 million in patent infringement verdict.
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The Mozilla Foundation&#39;s launch of its open-source web browser last week prompted Microsoft to break its silence about Internet Explorer.
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Microsoft has acknowledged that a bug fix for its Internet Explorer browser last week did, indeed, cripple the browser for some users. Rather than re-release the patch, it's telling users how to modify Windows' registry to get IE back up and running.
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(InfoWorld) - A group of state plaintiffs in the U.S. Microsoft antitrust case will ask for a five-year extension of a large portion of the 2002 judgment against the company, the group's lawyer said Tuesday. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia -- known as the "California group" -- want an extension of most of the middleware portions of the judgment, said Stephen Houck, a lawyer for the group. Microsoft still retains a huge lead in the operating system and Web browser markets, he said. "Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold over the two products ... that nearly all consumers use," Houck said during an antitrust compliance hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Very little has happened in five years ... in those markets." The California group of states -- the larger of two groups of states that sued Microsoft for antitrust violations -- will ask for an extension of all the middleware portions of the antitrust judgement, except for a section that governs the royalties Microsoft can charge PC manufacturers for the Windows operating system. Most of the antitrust judgment was scheduled to expire in November. Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule said the company would need time to respond to Houck's proposal. Microsoft first heard of the plan to ask for an extension on Friday, he said, and the California group plans to file a formal extension request with the court in mid-October. Rule seemed to suggest Microsoft would fight the five-year extension. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly declined to impose a 10-year judgment in 2002, he said. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," Rule added. "We think it's clear that the decree has done its job." Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company will respond in more detail after it has seen the extension request. "We're a bit surprised that a few states are now requestingÂ an extension of the consent decree because they indicated just last month that they're not too fond of it," Evans said. In August 2006, Microsoft already agreed to an extension of the section of the judgment requiring it to make its communications protocols available to other software vendors. Microsoft's efforts to fix technical documentation for the protocols have run into several delays. Houck on Tuesday asked Kollar-Kotelly to extend the communications protocol section of the judgment until 2012. The California group does not "have any confidence" Microsoft will continue to improve the communications protocol program without oversight, Houck said. An independent auditor's report just issued questions whether Microsoft has released all the protocols mandated in the judgment, he added. The California group's extension proposal comes afterÂ the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York group of states filed briefs last month saying the antitrust judgment has done its job. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report from the DOJ and New York group, which includes five states. But Houck disputed that assessment on Tuesday. At the time of the judgment, a handful of PC vendors were preinstalling a competing Web browser on PCs, he said. Today, no major ones are, he said. In addition, the communications protocol program was supposed to be finished early in the judgment's life, and its delays have kept software vendors from fully using the program, Houck said. "The whole thing ... doesn't have an opportunity to work as the court intended," he said. "It's very clear that the product markets at issue in this case have not moved rapidly at all." Kollar-Kotelly said she would delay final reports on the judgment while she considers the California group's request. Microsoft and the plaintiffs were scheduled to meet with her Nov. 6 to discuss the final reports, but she will now consider the extension request on that date. Before Houck made his request, the judge said she was opposed to extending the judgment without a good reason. It was hard to predict the impact the judgment would have, she added. "The final chapter of the final judgment has not been written," Kollar-Kotelly said. The California group wants Kollar-Kotelly to extend all of section 3 of the judgment except for section 3B, dealing with manufacturer royalties. The extended provision would include: *Â A prohibition against Microsoft retaliating against PC vendors for including competing software on PCs; *Â A prohibition against Microsoft restricting PC vendors from putting competing middleware in the start menu or making them defaults; *Â A requirement that Microsoft give APIs for its middleware to PC vendors and independent software vendors.
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Like it said it would... Microsoft confirmed today that it will appeal the second part of the fine imposed on it by the European Competition Commission.â¦
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A European Union court will rule Sept. 17 on Microsoft's challenge to an order that that imposed hundreds of millions of dollars of fines on the world's biggest software company for what the regulators said was anti-competitive activity, the court said Tuesday.
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US software giant Microsoft said Monday it will abide by whatever ruling is handed down by a European appeal court hearing due this week against an EU condemnation for abusing its market dominance.
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A lawsuit alleging that Microsoft Windows Vista Capable users were misled about the capabilities of the operating system will go to trial Oct. 28, 2008.
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Microsoft lost its antitrust appeal.  Will this change anything?
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Microsoft Corporation lost a major appeal today in a European court, which ruled that the world&#39;s largest software company must comply with sanctions imposed by regulators and strip features from its Windows product.
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A European Union court will decide on  Monday whether Microsoft abused its near-monopoly position on  the world's 1 billion computers and servers to push smaller  competitors out of the marketplace.
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Google&#39;s browser toolbar is back in court on patent infringement charges, after a U.S. court of appeals overturned part of a lower court decision. Google&#39;s AdSense contextual advertising service, though, is in the clear.Hyperphrase Technologies filed suit against Google in April 2006, alleging that Google&#39;s AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin rejected the allegations in a summary judgement in Google&#39;s favor, and Hyperphrase appealed.On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the parts of the summary judgement relating to AdSense, and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the part of the ruling dealing with AutoLink&#39;s alleged infringement of two of the patents. It remanded the case to the district court to be reexamined.AutoLink parses Web pages for text fragments in certain formats, and transforms them into links to Web pages it deems appropriate. For instance, it will link publication International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to a corresponding listing on Amazon.com&#39;s bookstore, or link package tracking numbers to pages showing delivery status. It will similarly process U.S. street addresses and U.S. vehicle identification numbers.In its ruling , the court of appeals found that the district court had considered an inappropriate interpretation for &quot;data reference,&quot; one of the terms used in the patent claims to describe the way a link is made between a fragment of text and an element in a database. The court of appeals remanded the case to the district court to determine whether AutoLink infringed the patents under the new interpretation it suggested.Some have likened AutoLink, introduced in early 2005, to an earlier initiative from Microsoft called Smart Tags, which sought to add links determined by Microsoft to certain keywords appearing on Web pages viewed through its Internet Explorer browser. The feature, included in beta versions of the browser bundled with Windows XP, was roundly rejected by users for the control it gave Microsoft over the appearance of Web pages, prompting the company to&#160;remove the feature&#160;from production versions in June 2001. However, it left the function in its Office XP productivity software suite, released in May 2001, where it became the subject of another patent lawsuit brought by Hyperphrase. Microsoft won a summary judgement in that case in 2003.In Wednesday&#39;s ruling on the Google-Hyperphrase case, the court of appeals upheld the judgement of the district court regarding AdSense. The way AdSense infers the topic of a Web page to associate it with keywords that may not appear on the page, and link those keywords to advertisements, did not constitute use of a &quot;data reference&quot; in the sense of the Hyperphrase patents at issue, the district court had found, and the court of appeals agreed.A Google representative reached in London would not immediately comment on the court of appeals ruling.The company&#39;s latest quarterly financial report warns that is subject to intellectual property rights claims, and may face more in the future. Such cases are costly to defend and could require it to pay damages or prevent it from using certain technologiesOne such case, brought by Northeastern University in Boston and by Jarg, a company in Massachusetts that develops distributed search technologies,&#160;charges Google with infringing a patent&#160;for a method of breaking database queries into fragments and distributing them to multiple computers to get search results faster. Google has until Jan. 11 to file a response in that case.&#160;
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The Bush administration appealed a court decision Monday that allowed a lawsuit to go forward challenging the president's warrantless domestic spying program.
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America Online, Inc. is reported to be developing a Web browser based on Microsoft Internet Explorer technology. It is not known when the browser will be released
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A federal judge has set a December date for a patent suit challenging &quot;AutoPlay&quot; technology included in recent versions of Microsoft Windows.
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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 also called the additional fine unfair, and blasted the EC for being vague.
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Appeals judges ask lower court to revisit dispute between the U.K. organization and an Illinois marketing company fighting its placement on the popular site's blacklist.