SCOTUS Ends Novell's Anti-Trust Cast Against Microsoft

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."

Comments

way to over simplify the issue win the summery

[thaylin]

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.

Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery

[Sun]

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

Re:way to over simplify the issue win the summery

[hAckz0r]

No, what they did was to dup Novell into developing a complex product using an API that they provided, but planned on changing at the 12th hour to defeat their competition out of the gate. Their goal was to make Novell look so bad in the eyes of the consumer that nobody would ever trust the product again. This is pure maliciousness and way over the top. Its one thing to simply not give information, its entirely another to mislead and make your competition do what you tell them, and then change it so that it is guaranteed not to work.

.
Bottom line: If you shake hands with Bill Gates you had better count your fingers.

Re:What would this ruling have changed, today?

[thaylin]

I am not sure it is fully about the company when it gets to that level, but society in general. They are sanctioning MS's action and it tells these companies they can do those things and just drag out the case long enough that it no longer matters, just because they have more money.