Microsoft Admonished by U.S. District Court Judge

An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle Times reports that the judge in the z4 'product activation' patent infringement case has increased the jury's original $115 million verdict against Microsoft by $25 million. Both Microsoft and Autodesk (another defendant) were admonished by the judge for misconduct. The judge wrote 'The Court concludes that Defendants attempted to bury the relevant 107 exhibits ... in a massive pile of decoys' and called one failure to disclose evidence 'an intentional attempt by Defendants to mislead z4 and this Court.'"

Comments

Can't help but think of SCO

[Weaselmancer]

He cited several examples in which the defendants failed to fully and promptly disclose evidence, calling one instance "an intentional attempt by Defendants to mislead z4 and this Court."

Ok, so if this is an actionable item - why hasn't SCO been nailed with something similar? They've been doing the smoke and mirrors thing for years now.

What gives? Why can a judge nail MS with this, but not SCO?

Re:Microsoft acting unethically?

[rizole]

I read it like this:

It's critical that no one person in a company ever appears to be above a code of ethics

It's okay to have no ethics, as long as no one notices.