A federal appeals court today suspended an injunction requiring
Microsoft to make its products compatible with Sun Microsystems' Java language, holding that a lower court erred in finding Microsoft infringed the
copyrights of archrival Sun.
The ruling, issued from the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, vacates a preliminary
injunction issued in November in Sun's high-profile lawsuit over the Java programming
language.
A three-judge panel sent the case sent the case back to U.S.
District Judge Ronald Whyte for further consideration.
Whyte's ruling held that Sun was likely to prove that Microsoft's Java
products violated Sun's copyrights. Whyte, of San Jose, California, found
that the omission of a technology known as JNI, or Java native interface,
kept Microsoft's Java from passing a compatibility tests required in its
licensing agreement with Sun.
The order required Microsoft to immediately
add the technology and make other changes while the case continued.
Microsoft had argued that the decision harmed Microsoft customers by
allowing them access to only one version of Java and depriving the public
of innovations Microsoft had legally made to Java. They also argued that
Whyte applied standards based on copyright law in justifying the injunction
when in fact the standard should have been based on contract law.
Sun has billed Java as a language that will run on many different
computers, regardless of the operating system they use. The company sued
Microsoft in 1997 accusing it of intentionally trying to thwart Java's
"write once, run anywhere" promise by shipping incompatible versions with
its widely distributed Internet Explorer.
The Justice Department and 19 states have
echoed similar charges in Microsoft's antitrust trial, arguing that the
software giant illegally sought to protect a monopoly in operating systems
by killing Java's cross-platform ability. Microsoft has vigorously denied
those charges.