Missed Opportunities in U.S. v. Microsoft

cyberlaw writes "The Supreme Court's deadline for filing a final appeal in the landmark U.S. v. Microsoft antitrust case expired yesterday with little notice. But it's a day Andrew Chin has been anticipating for six years. Today Chin, a former legal extern who assisted Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson during the drafting of the November 1999 Findings of Fact in that case, makes his first public comments on the merits of that case, in keeping with the D.C. Circuit's admonition that officers of the court should not comment on impending cases. He has written an op-ed article in today's Raleigh News and Observer.

Chin is currently an associate professor teaching antitrust and intellectual property law at the University of North Carolina. According to his faculty biography, Chin also earned a doctorate in computer science in 1991 as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. After a few years of teaching math and CS, he picked up a J.D. at Yale Law School, and eventually ended up working behind the scenes on the Microsoft case.

Chin's article raises some new points about the Microsoft case that don't seem to have been considered by any of the parties, courts or commentators during the trial, such as the fact that the Windows and Internet Explorer software products actually consist of legal rights and technological capabilities, not lines of code. A longer piece by Chin is being published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology."

Comments

No axe to grind in this article at all

[cstec]

Gads, could you try and front page a slightly more biased article? This guy mentioned Explorer security flaws 5 times on that page alone.

Apparently no other browser ever has had a security flaw. Ever. Mozilla and Opera bugtraqs are empty files.

Microsft Lies

[Anonymous Coward]

We now have unrefutable proof that Internet Explorer is NOT inexorably linked to the operating system: You can run multiple versions of IE on one machine. There is also work going on to provide complete replacement for MSHTML with a COM wrapper for Mozilla - these are the sort of things that Microsoft should have been forced into - releasing source code for interfaces to allow anyone to swap out what is now 100% confirmed as a component of the operating system that could be removed just as Media Player will be for the European Union....

More ways Bush has fucked up the world... why has Europe not re-examined the browser issue or will they get round to it?