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SCOTUS Ends Novell's Anti-Trust Cast Against Microsoft

Posted by samzenpus on from the end-of-the-line dept.

walterbyrd (182728) writes in with news about the end of the line for a Novell anti-trust claim against Microsoft. "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday brought an end to Novell Inc's antitrust claims against Microsoft Corp that date back 20 years to the development of Windows 95 software. By declining to hear Novell's appeal, the court left intact a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from September 2013 in favor of Microsoft. The court of appeals unanimously affirmed the dismissal of Novell Inc's claims that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act when it decided not to share its intellectual property while developing its Windows 95 operating system. Novell was seeking more than $3 billion."

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. way to over simplify the issue win the summery by thaylin · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was more to it than just not sharing its IP, such as deliberately misleading the company, and changing the APIs mid stream to break interoperability.

    --
    When you cant win, ad hominem.
    1. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Informative

      That phrase has quite a lot of bogus spin attached to it. They take something pretty mundane and turn it completely inside out. Based on the phrase as stated, you would think that Novell was expecting Microsoft to give up all of it's trade secrets when all it was really expecting was the details of a standard public interface.

      This is just one of the many bad side effects of an overly expansive notion of "intellectual property" and of corporate privelege in general.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    2. Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery by Sun · · Score: 5, Informative

      The Novel narrative is this:
      Microsoft shared the interface with Novel during the beta, encouraging it to rely on it. Then, a few months before release, and after WordPerfect was already dependent on those interfaces, Microsoft changed them and declined to share the new ones with Novel. When Windows 95 finally came out, MS did, in fact, publish those interfaces, but by then it was too late for Novel to ship WordPerfect with Windows 95's launch.

      Had MS not shared those interfaces to begin with, Novel could have worked with an internal implementation.

      Shachar