p2pnet.net News:- How can a hard-core (albeit very hard-core) commercial company ‘clash’ with a country – a number of countries, in fact?

OK – the entertainment industry does it all the time, warning entire nations to pull their socks up and use their police forces against activities which threaten its profits. But that’s Hollywood.

But back to the ‘clash’ situation, it can happen when you’re talking about Bill Gates and Microsoft, both or either of which which could literally buy a country or two and have money left over, and the European Union whose member states include Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

You’ll recall that the EU recently fined Microsoft almost $600 for abusing its monopoly on its Windows software.

Antitrust regulators also ordered it to come up with a version sans the digital media player software, and "to provide competitors in the low-end server market with more of its underlying software code so they can communicate with Windows-powered desktops as well as Microsoft’s own products do," says an Associated Press story here.

Apparently, the European antitrust office and Microsoft, "clashed Thursday over whether last month’s landmark ruling against the U.S. software giant would survive on appeal, in light of a new decision from the European Union’s highest court that set strict guidelines for monopoly cases," says AP.

"In its decision Thursday, the European Court of Justice spelled out three ‘exceptional circumstances’ that must be met before a dominant company can be found guilty of breaking antitrust law for refusing to license copyrighted material to rivals.

"Those circumstances were: if the refusal prevents the emergence of a new product or service for which there is a potential demand; if it has no ‘objective justification’; and if the license was so indispensable that withholding it could eliminate all competition in the relevant market."

The EU and Microsoft each say the decision supports its position.

The AP report has European Commission spokeswoman Amelia Torres saying Microsoft wasn’t the first entrant in the market but quickly gained what the commission found to be a "dominant position" in workgroup server operating systems, and "also insisted the rivals were different in ‘many aspects,’ such as ‘reliability, speed, security’."

She’s also quoted as saying "Thank God, we believe that in the case of Microsoft, we have intervened when there is still time to save competition in this market."

Microsoft’s appeal, expected in June, may argue among other things that the order violates its intellectual property rights, says AP.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2004 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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