Microsoft vs. Burst.com

rocketjam writes "Robert X. Cringley has an interesting story on one of Microsoft's many little-known legal cases. Burst.com is suing Microsoft, claiming MS negotiated in bad faith for over a year before stealing Burst's patented technology for increasing the efficiency of video and audio streaming. After Microsoft submitted all emails associated with the their dealings with Burst to the court, Burst's lawyers discovered a 35-week gap of missing mail during a critical portion of the negotiations. When the judge learned the Sun vs. Microsoft antitrust case had revealed that MS keeps backups of all emails on over 100,000 tapes stored offsite, he ordered them to come up with the missing messages."

Comments

hitech

[hey]

The lawyers printed out all the message (140 boxes) then sorted them by hand it seems to find the missing dates. Maybe they should have used a computer.

Re:hitech

[Waffle Iron]

If I were billing $250 per hour to sort papers, I wouldn't use a computer either. In fact, I would put on a pair of oven mitts. (We wouldn't want to get a paper cut, after all.)

In other news from the future

[Timesprout]

Seattle Firefighters will tomorrow be engaged in a struggle to supress a fire after a large explosion at a data center used by Microsoft to store their offsite backups. I cant understand it the Fire Chief will state, the building seems to have flooded with acid and the 2 tons of explosives which were being stored there for some reason exploded, very unusual.

A spokesman for Microsoft will say "its unfortunate" without a hint of irony.

Software Patents vs Microsoft

[levram2]

I forget, is it odd days or even days that software patents are worse than Microsoft on Slashdot?

Coincidentally...

[Sophrosyne]

When the judge learned the Sun vs. Microsoft antitrust case had revealed that MS keeps backups of all emails on over 100,000 tapes stored offsite, he ordered them to come up with the missing messages."

Coincidentally a large shipment of magnets were just shipped to the address of a S. Ballmer...

Clippy.

[zCyl]

Maybe they should have used a computer.

Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to sue us, would you like me to delete all of your files?"

Re:Penalties?

[rusty0101]

[sarcasm] You mean something like putting the legal representitives for Microsoft or the head of the company in jail for contempt of court until the judge's orders are carried out? Why would any judge order something like that? It's not like the people failing to follow those orders are accused of witholding their source of information for a story, or their encryption keys.

I mean all that Microsoft is accused of doing is committing software piracy. Stealing another companies pattented technology and embedding it within one of their own products.

Surely this doesn't rise to the level of a felony or anything do you think?

[/sarcasm]
-Rusty