Microsoft facing four-front legal war
After a 13-week hiatus, Microsoft's defense of charges that it doesn't play by the rules is about to go into hyperdrive.
As if its landmark antitrust trial against the Justice Department and 19 states wasn't enough to keep defense attorneys busy, two new fronts are expected to open in the next week. The escalation kicks off tomorrow in federal court in Salt Lake City, as the first of five pivotal hearings starts in a lawsuit brought by Caldera.
today, yet another front will open when trial begins in a lawsuit brought by Danbury, Connecticut-based Bristol Technologies.The two suits heat up as the trial in the government's antitrust lawsuit in Washington is scheduled to resume, and as Microsoft asks a federal appeals court in San Francisco to overturn a preliminary injunction to Sun Microsystems in its suit over the Java programming language.
"It's a very big job for one or two people who have to be the central coordinators," said Peter Detkin, an Intel vice president who heads the company's litigation team. "If you take a position in one case [you have to consider] how a creative attorney [will] take advantage of that statement in another case."
Tomorrow's hearing in the Caldera case concerns two of nine motions Microsoft has filed seeking to get various parts of the case dismissed. Another motion will be heard on Thursday, and three more motions are scheduled over the next few weeks. Caldera alleges that Microsoft used its market dominance in the late 1980s and early 1990s to freeze out the rival DR-DOS operating system, which the Utah-based provider of Linux services bought from Novell in 1996. The suit revives charges that Microsoft settled with the government nearly five years ago. The case is scheduled to go to trial in January.
Already, Microsoft's multi-front war has posed challenges to attorneys defending the software giant. Last January, for instance, Justice Department lead attorney David Boies used evidence submitted in the Bristol case to challenge contentions by Richard Schmalensee, an economist testifying for Microsoft, that the Internet Explorer browser is seamlessly integrated into the Windows operating system.
Beth Finnerty, an attorney overseeing the Microsoft trial for Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery, said prosecutors would be watching the proceedings carefully to "see if there is anything useful to comes to light" in them. "It should make for an interesting summer," she added.
Similarly, Microsoft's case against the government is vulnerable to charges leveled by Sun that it flooded the market with versions of the Java programming language that were dependant on Windows. Attorneys for Sun and Microsoft will square off on June 16 over a U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte's preliminary finding that the practice violated unfair competition laws. "A final judgment of unfair competition with regard to Java would have very negative consequences for Microsoft," said Rich Gray, an antitrust attorney at Bergeson, Eliopoulos, Grady & Gray.