EU Appeal Fails and Other Legal News

The European Court of First Instance has dismissed nearly every part of Microsoft’s appeal of a 2004 antitrust ruling. The judgment will have little short-term effect other than reinforcing Microsoft’s need to comply with the 2004 ruling, but it could bolster the chances of new antitrust and unfair competition complaints. Microsoft has also settled its long-running patent dispute with Eolas over Web browsing technology and has released new documentation explaining some planned changes to Vista’s desktop search feature to make it compliant with Microsoft’s 2002 antitrust settlement in the United States.

EU Appeal Fails

In Mar. 2004, the European Commission (EC), the administrative body that oversees competition law for the European Union (EU), completed a six-year investigation into Microsoft spurred by complaints from Novell, Sun Microsystems, and RealNetworks (among others). At that time, the EC ruled that Microsoft had monopoly power in the market for desktop OSs, and had “abused” this power by “deliberately restricting interoperability” between Windows computers (clients and servers) and non-Windows servers and by “tying” the Windows Media Player to the Windows desktop OS. The EC fined Microsoft 497 million Euros (then worth US$613 million), ordered Microsoft to license information that would allow non-Windows servers to achieve “full interoperability” with Windows PCs and servers, and ordered Microsoft to offer a version of Windows without the Media Player for sale in Europe.