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Microsoft Responds to EU With Another Question
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has responded to the latest round of EU requests by asking how much the EU thinks they should charge for Windows Server Protocols. The EU has stated the Microsoft should charge based on 'innovation, not patentability' and that they have 'examined 160 Microsoft claims to patented technologies' concluding 'only four may only deserve to claim a limited degree of innovation.' The EU is also starting to discuss structural remedies as opposed to the behavioral remedies they are currently enforcing. At what point has/will the EU overstepped its bounds?"
The EU has been very heavy handed recently using any and all trade laws to hurt tech companies. It would be nice to have one or two of them say "screw you" and pull out of the market. A EU without Apple, Hitachi, Toshiba or Microsoft?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
That is a ridiculous statement. Microsoft is the one over stepping the bounds. A company is an artificial construct that is licensed to do business by a government. Hence the business has a duty to follow the legal rules.
From the US DOJ finding that Microsoft purposefully breaks Kerberos interoperability.
----[quoting]----
For example, Kerberos is an industry standard for encryption, in which certain fields are reserved for optional use. Microsoft, however, has used one of those fields to produce its own proprietary version of the standard. In itself, this is unobjectionable.
Microsoft, however, has gone one step further: it has manipulated its operating systems and middleware so that they will use and accept only the Microsoft version of the Kerberos standard.(16) This is diametrically contrary to the purpose for which standards, even with optional fields, are developed. Optional fields are included in standards to enable firms to add information to a message. Ordinarily, if an optional field is used in creating standard messages, those messages can still be sent and received among all products that comply with the standard. In such cases, the information included in the optional field may simply be ignored. Optional fields are never, however, intended to enable a firm -- i.e., Microsoft -- to subvert the standard and preclude its widespread usage.(17)
16. The CCIA explains that "[w]hile the Kerberos Version 5 Microsoft uses for their security services is a standard, the way they have implemented Kerberos is not a standard and renders it nearly inoperable with any other implementation." CCIA White Paper, supra, at 24.
17. Not content with Microsoft's corruption of the Kerberos standard, Microsoft has filed for a patent on its proprietary version. Consequently, not only will Microsoft products fail to interoperate with non-Microsoft products (because of the modification), but Microsoft will not allow anyone else to use its version unless they purchase a license from Microsoft.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
That is probably exactly the reason why Microsoft doesn't pull out of Europe. Their biggest fear would come true: Linux would become mainstream. Ack!
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
This is the dumbest thing I've seen on Slashdot today. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. How is it socialism for a government to attempt to find remedy against a company found to have abused its monopoly? If the government didn't do this then capitalism would stop functioning as key markets became monopolized over time. The EU's actions aren't socialism at all, they are practicing responsible capitalism.
Not monopolies, but closely releated are cartels. The EU fines these with fairly hefty sums regularly (over 2 billion in 2007 so far) See http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/overv iew/index_en.html and http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/stati stics/statistics.pdf
This is the European Union, not the United Republicrat States of Corpo-fascism wonderland of America.
We have a Human Rights declaration, and plutocratico-aristocratic capitalistic sons of bitches aren't listed on it as a protected species.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
At what point has/will the EU overstepped its bounds?
The EU is a government. They will have overstepped their bounds when their constituents say they've overstepped their bounds. Note that Microsoft is not one of those constituents, nor are any Americans or American companies. This is a concept Microsoft and it's supporters seem to be having a problem getting their heads around.
EU regulators have gone a *lot* further against some European companies. Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, KONE and Schindler have got huge fines for anti-competitive practices recently, way more than Microsofts 497 million fine, which they only got after refusing the settlement where they got away for free if they would just stop breaking the law.
GDP growth rates higher than the US, positive balance of payments, higher life expectancy and literacy, lower infant mortality, lower crime rate, TEN TIMES less people in prison, much higher savings rate, lower personal debt, ...
Oh yeah, you're right, unemployment is higher. Great. You know what? It doesn't mean shit.
4th quarter 2004, unemployment rate men aged 25-54: 7.4% in France, 4.6% in the US.
You're right, it (look)s bad.
At the same quarter, the employment rate, that is, the number of people working vs. the total number of people in that sex/age group was 86.7% in France as opposed to 86.3%. That's right, more people working in France than in the US. (Source: OECD Employment Outlook 2005 (pdf))
There's a few reasons for this discrepancy, one being that we don't put 1.5% of our active population in jail, most of whom are poor blacks, likely candidates for the "unemployment" row.
Copyright exists by government mandate.
It can therefore be withdrawn by government mandate.
If the EU says "we ought to punish this company, but it is too powerful for us to tangle with", then it completely undermines the EU's credibility as a government and regulator of companies.
But let's call a spade a spade, and recognize that both the US gov't and the EU have a "homer" agenda that pushes them to punish 'foreigners' far more than they scrutinize themselves.
Where did you get this idea from?
Record EU fine for lift 'cartel'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6383913.stm
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Exactly. Since the CII (Computer-Implemented Inventions) directive (a.k.a. software patent directive) was voted down, there has been no harmonization between the countries. The EPC (European Patent Convention) forbids patents on software "as such", but in certain countries they are allowed if combined with a computer (just like in the US, IIRC). In Sweden, where I live, it appears that software patents are valid. Patent och Registreringsverket (the equivalent of the USPTO) states:
Vilka datorprogram kan patenteras?
När det gäller datorprogram får man inte patent på programmet i sig utan på kopplingen till den tekniska lösningen, alltså den funktion, metod eller process som blir resultatet av programmets körning i datorn.
Man kan även få patent på program som styr fysiska processer eller som behandlar fysiska signaler, eller program som styr kommunikation. Datorprogram som styr operativsystem kan patenteras.
Which roughly translates into:
Which computer programs can be patented?
Computer programs cannot themselves be patented, rather the patent covers the connection to the technical solution, that is the function, method or process that results from executing the program in the computer.
You can also patent programs that controls physical processes or (programs) that processes physical signals, or programs that controls communication. Computer programs that control operating systems can be patented.
The problem with the analogy is not in comparing MS to the electric company as both are monopolies and the same rules do apply similarly. The problem is with the nature of the abuse. MS is not being punished for raising prices on their monopolized product. They are being punished for tying their monopolized product to another product in a different market and then charging others to remove that tie.
At the end of the day if you want to insulate yourself from a 3rd party vendor price changes don't go with a 3rd party vendor and develop it all yourself, or go with something from OpenSource. These are other options.And you can bypass the electric company with solar panels or a generator, but it is not cost effective or most people at this time.
Allow me to try to extend the analogy presented to fit with what MS has done. Imagine if the electric company decided to get into the television business and somehow changed the nature of the electricity coming into your house to be a proprietary pattern. This pattern would cause normal televisions to not function, but televisions from the electric company would still work because they could predict the spikes or whatever. Now assume the law caught up with them and told them they had to publish the specs as to when these spikes would occur so other television manufacturers could compete again (after the electric company went from a few percent of the market to more like 50%). So the electric company after years of going through the courts and being fined for not complying says they will publish the pattern, but they want to charge money for it, since it took them a lot of time to come up with. At this point they're haggling over how much they are going to charge other TV makers to get around the problems they intentionally created in order to break the law in the first place.
Now there are obvious practical issues with the analogy above, but it at least presents the spirit of what is happening in the MS antitrust case here. They're haggling over charging for the details of the interface between MS's monopoly(desktop OS) and another product(server OS), not MS's monopoly product itself.