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As of 2003-01-31, jr owned 18,268,202 shares of Micron. Not exactly sold off.

Wal-Mart has asked artists and their labels to clean up records for years, but the issue crystallized with a recent New York Times article and the retailer's banning of Sheryl Crow's new album because of the lyric: "Watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores." Crow refused to change the verse. Her' new single, "Every Day Is a Winding Road," is stocked by Wal-Mart, and so is her' previous album, but the new self-tided disc is not.

[and later on, talking about other bands coerced by Walmart;]

The Butthole Suffers agreed to change their name to B*** II*** Surfers on CD jackets. John Mellencamp recently agreed to airbrush out images of Jesus Christ and the devil on his latest CD, "Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky."

Jackson was the 2nd judge. Remember the 1995 Consent Decree?

Judge Sporkin's comments on the consent decree:
"It is clear to this Court that if it signs the decree presented to it, the message will be that Microsoft is so powerful that neither the market nor the Government is capable of dealing with all of its monopolistic practices. The attitude of Microsoft confirms these observations. While it has denied publicly that it engages in anticompetitive practices, it refuses to give the Court in any respect the same assurance. It has refused to take even a small step to meet any of the reasonable concerns that have been raised by the Court."

Judge Sporkin: Microsoft's Unwitting Ally, an interesting article from The Computer Lawyer (March 1995).
"On February 14, 1995, Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin refused to approve the consent decree negotiated between the U.S. Government and Microsoft to settle the antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft by the Government. Many think that this denial is a harsh blow against Microsoft. In fact, it may be very helpful to Microsoft for several reasons:
*It started an appellate process during which Microsoft will not be bound by any decree and after which any decree might be obsolete.
*It has caused an important adversary of Microsoft -- the government -- to become an advocate for Microsoft.
*It may well lessen the likelihood that the Government will investigate or take enforcement actions against other Microsoft anticompetitive practices.
*It may focus on a practice -- vaporware -- which is not illegal and which is fairly commonplace."

Civil Action No.: 94-1564, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff, vs. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Defendant. Stanley Sporkin, Judge.

The Judge Who Rejected Microsoft / Stanley Sporkin is known as aggressive, unpredictable , S.F. Gate, 2/16/95
"Assigned to review the settlement, he could have rubber-stamped it, which was what both sides wanted. Instead, he peeled the respectability off the agreement like layers of skin off an onion, exposing it as an unenforceable deal that let the government save face while letting Microsoft off the hook.
In his lengthy, fiercely worded ruling, Sporkin characterized Microsoft as having monopolistic practices that pose ``a potential threat to the nation's well-being,'' and he called the consent decree ``too little, too late.''"


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It's called price dumping, and it's usually illegal within certain industries but I don't think the software-industry is one of them. Or perhaps it's only illegal when it is used as a weapon against weaker competitors? IANAL and thank god for that!

Since all the "What is CERT for?" and "Bugtraq rocks my scary little world" posts seem to have been made, I thought I would point my slashbot tendencies at the Treaty of Rome.

<SLASHBOT>
The EU will soon be *easily* the largest economy on the planet (except China. OK, Maybe India. You know what I mean). 500 million eager consumers with shedloads of cash. Enough cash to support some *very* fat lawyers. In the EU, we send our fattest, most offensive lawyers to Strasbourg, where they can do most harm.

Then we have this little thing called the Treaty of Rome, which has much the same purpose as the US Constitution, except you can't fit it on a sheet of A4, no matter how 'leet your PostScript skillz are.

Article 85 of the Treaty of Rome says some interesting things.

One of the things it explicitly forbids is arrangements to establish contractual conditions that bear no direct connection to the subject of the contract, like tie-in clauses.

Now, If global giants like Sun, Cisco, Microsoft etc. use a forum like the one they have just set up to restrain trade, you wouldn't need a lawyer to win an antitrust case against them My blind old dog (if I had one) could win it.
</SLASHBOT>

So, there you go. If they do *anything* that pisses off the EU commission, they'll get nailed to the proverbial tree.

For those too stupid to work out how to get rich here, all you need to do is to start up a tech company that relies on one of their products in a way that directly competes with them or one of their "valued partners", wait for a security flaw to be announced, prove that they did not disclose it to *all* their customers at the same time and *BLAMMO!* a lot of fat lawyers get even fatter over a period of several years.

If I had ~50 million Euros to burn, I'd do it.

Share and enjoy.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) pled guilty (and paid a fine) in 1996 to charges of conspiring to restrict trade in the lysine (an amino acid added to animal feed, among other things) market. You can read the court verdict. This was the same year two Korean companies and two Japanese ones pled guilty to similar charges. Read more over here.