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Microsoft Appeals Anti-Trust to Supreme Court
wicket2001 writes "The AP is reporting that Microsoft has appealed their anti-trust case to the Supreme Court.
Microsoft sent the petition to the high court two days before the case was to be sent to a new judge to decide what penalty the Redmond, Wash., firm should face."
This decision was upheld unanimously by a very conservative lower court, there is no way the Supreme Court would overturn that. There are no higher judges, but even Supreme Court Justices will respect a lower court's decision if made that emphatically. I expect this to be denied cert, which essentailly means that the Supreme Court has voice their agreement with the lower court's decision without actually hearing the appeal.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
"Microsoft Appeals Anti-Trust to Supreme Court"
They may not have liked it, but the movie never mentioned the company Microsoft. I don't see what the Supreme Court will do for them at this point, I mean, it's already in rental anyway.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
The Supreme Court is unlikely to do anything about this. They are unlikely to overturn Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law made by a federal judge and upheld by a circuit court of appeals. They are unlikely to agree to hear the case. This is more a holding action designed to make the whole process as slow as possible.
It will go to the Federal Circuit Court again, to the Appeals Court, and on back to the Supreme Court at least one more time before things are done. Microsoft needs to give the Supreme Court a reversible error or Constitutional issue before the Supreme Court will agree to hear it.
It is interesting (if you are into legal wrangling), but hardly an important story. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, THEN it is news!
The Supreme Court hasn't exactly been lying low since the Bush v. Gore fiasco, but they they're not going to touch this one with a ten-foot pole. There's just no need for them to do so.
The Supreme Court's docket is entirely discretionary. They only hear a couple hundred cases every year, out of the thousands that get submitted. It takes years for a case to make its way up to the Supreme Court from the lower courts precisely because the Supreme Court's policy is to let all lower remedies get completely exhausted first and to let all the difficult legal issues receive one or two decisions from below.
They might someday hear a Microsoft antitrust case, but it's not going to be this one right now. Why would they jump into the fray now before the breakup measures are even decided? The case is even dimmer for Microsoft in light of the unanimous circuit court ruling. It's not unheard of for the Supreme Court to overturn a unanimous ruling, but they've almost never gone out on a limb and done so when there were alternatives like waiting for the wheels of justice to turn some more.
Instead of focusing on the Supreme Court, we should be focusing again on the upcoming battles in the district court. While it's decided that Microsoft is guilty of antitrust violations, whether that fact will create any lasting legal or economic ramifications has yet to be seen. It still could go either way: they could be broken up and fined, or they could just get another slap on the wrist with another toothless consent decree.
And with the possibility still open that Microsoft and the DOJ could settle out of court, well, we've got bigger things to worry about.
I don't know, I've never found them that appealing...
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Something cleverWinXP ships, and the injunction is imposed against it after it has already started to move copies?
My ideas of the consequences - legal minds feel free to correct me:
1. Walmart, Babbages, Everyone else who sells software is required to 'yank' shelf copies to comply with the injunction. Most stores will be slow to comply, and then claim that they sold out before the injunction hit.
2. We'll have a 'limited edition' of WindowsXP in the wild. Pirate copies will run rampant online and on Ebay because 'the most popular OS' cannot be legally bought in stores, and MS will be in the odd position of having to try enforce their own injunction because they can't be seen as encouraging piracy, can they? The other members of the BSA would scream if they did.
3. After a few months, Microsoft will release something like Windows IR (Injunction Release!) online as an 'update' to existing copies of WinMe and Win2k. It will be an Internet Explorer 4.0 type release -- all the funcitonality of a new OS, all the FUD and anticompetitive bullshit, but Microsoft will give it away as a new product just to spite the Fed and its competitors.
4. ANOTHER LAWSUIT over whether or not MS violated the injuction by releasing WinIR (Say that one out loud!)
5. Microsoft releases much of WinIR under their 'shared source' license, locking hundreds, if not thousands of developers into MS-only development. Hey, if it's free, code for it, right?
6. After months and months and months, a judge finally gets the breakup to stick.
7. Because they won't let him make the rules, Bill takes his toys and goes home. Microsoft 'exits' the home operating system market, and concentrates solely on a 'Software as Service' business market. They sell Win200x releases on a yearly basis to people who want or need server software and are too dim to use a *nix.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Their delay tactics have already resulted in the demise of the Netscape browser before relief could be granted. They know that if they can roll out XP and .NET before the district court can stop them it will be too late. You can't put the egg back in the shell. The district court will still be able to consider other remedies, but Microsoft will have already been successful in widely deploying new proprietary standards and other agendas such as new activation techniques, killing USB 2.0, strangling MP3, anddiscourage Linux/Windows dual boot systems.
Because these new standards and agendas will have been adopted by other hardware, software and service companies, the district court's ruling will have limited effect on the standards and agendas themselves.