Microsoft Legal Documents To Be Destroyed

el-schwa writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story that talks about the old Micrsoft vs. Caldera anti-trust lawsuit. During the trial Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to get 937 boxes of controversial documents kept private. Now it appears that Caldera is no longer interested in paying for storage on the boxes, and they are scheduled to be destroyed."

Comments

Re:Obligatory 1984 comparison

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Dude, you just violated copyright!

Christ. Just because there's so much misinformation out there, and just in case some ignorant and innocent soul takes you seriously, let me clear this up.

Title 17 of the United States code defines fair use rights in chapter 1, section 107. It says, in part and in summary, that you can make fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and comment as long as you use only a small fraction of the work. Infornogr's quoting of 1984 was not a violation of copyright under United States law, or the law of any other country signatory to the Berne Convention.

And clonebarkins, you're not funny.

Stuff Gates Wants Buried (Re:What's in them?)

[edward.virtually@pob]

For a good idea of what kinds of interesting things are in those documents, see The Microsoft File : The Secret Case against Bill Gates by Wendy Goldman Rohm. It will be a travesty of justice if these documents are allowed to be destroyed. These are the documents that prove that Microsoft sabotaged DR-DOS by putting a check in Windows to issue an error if you tried to use it with DR-DOS -- an action Microsoft liked to and probably will again (once these documents are destroyed) call an urban myth -- and many other key illegal actions that made MS a monopoly, such as the activities in Germany alluded to in the article. History is written by the winners, obviously. :-(

SOMEONE NEEDS TO SAVE THESE DOCUMENTS! EFF? ESR? FSF?

scanning that much stuff

[phr2]

I have some experience with scanning piles of paper. For about $5K you can get a production scanner that does 100 pages/minute or so. That means these 3 million pages would take 30,000 minutes or 500 hours to scan, about 12 weeks full time, assuming you could keep the scanner running flat out, which in my experience is not easy. The work is not very demanding but it's tedious. Despite the automated equipment you're constantly shuffling paper around and there tends to be a lot of pauses in scanning.

At $10/hour (salary+overhead for some clerical type in a low-wage state) that's about $5K in labor, plus the hardware. Plus there's the matter of 900 boxes of paper--a full trailer load, so another several K$ to get it delivered to where it's being scanned, plus then you have to store it. Overall, you're looking at $15-20K minimum to scan this stuff. It's sort of possible some organization is interested enough to throw that much cash around. I can't see many individuals willing to do it.