The German journalist Monika Ermert wrote an intresting piece for IP Watch: New antitrust investigation against Microsoft. IP Watch is a high quality resource for independent and unbiased views on matters of intellectual property. Based in Geneve it also translates the WIPO negotiation diplomacy very nicely into human-readable plain English. This article is about an event in the framework of the UN Internet Governance Forum in Rio which is a follow-up of the World Summit for the Information Society. The UN likes to invite civil society contributions to death. It is of certain significance that the IGF process now seems to bear some pragmatic fruits which may be closely tied to the people involved. Here they invited a top competition lawyer from Europe.
The open standards coalition invited Clifford Chance lawyer Thomas Vinje to Rio to give insights into a new antitrust case of the European Union against Microsoft. Vinje represented the European Committee on Interoperable Systems (ECIS) in the first antitrust case against Microsoft. Vinje told a press conference that the EU Competition Commissioner’s office, with the first case decided by the EU Court of First Instance, now has started working intensively on the second case.
It seems that legal experts that work on such a complex case generate their own little antitrust lawsuit industrial complex. ;-) Imagine the company would finally just comply. Thomas Vinje would miss a perfect income source.
The new case involves three main aspects. First, Microsoft allegedly barred providers of other text document formats access to information that would them allow to make their products fully compatible with computers running on Microsoft’s operating systems. “You may have experienced that sometimes open office documents can be received by Microsoft users, sometimes not.”….
I must admit that I have absolutely no problems to import Doc files with OpenOffice.org and MS Word. But experience may differ depending on your requirements and available applications. I am very curious. What is your experience.
Vinje said a slight effect on the case could result from the decision of the ISO [International Standards Organisation] standardisation process for Microsoft’s OOXML software currently under discussion.
I am puzzled. Monika Ermert and Thomas Vinje should both know that Open XML is no software. Anyway, I am curious what further trouble the standardization process will generate for the noooxml lobby award winner. Also on the EU antitrust front. They should hire a Richelieu for their future public affairs: smart and evil.
Pieter Hintjens, FFII wrote:
The question is, how far can the EU Commission act when it comes down to the use of Microsoft patents? Microsoft's patent promise for OOXML leaves GPL software developers in the cold. The EU Commission's last deal with Microsoft appears to do the same. How far can competition authorities actually move when firms use patents, instead of other levers, to control a market?
Good question. A question your MEP could officially ask the Commission for you.
