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the best justice money (and politics) can buy
I really do not believe this --this is bought justice as appeals courts never, or at least rarely such as a blatant in the case of a blatant error in a capital murder criminal trial, interfere with a sitting federal judge. the damage is immense; it delays the first round of adjudication by at least 5 months. if I were Joel Klein I would go for the jugular and file action for an immediate divestiture of M$ including injunctions against operations and management by Bill Gate$ and Steve Ballmer. the appeals court would probably suspend the actions, but they would still be there and on the table. Jackson at this point will be furious --hopefully he keeps total cool. the obvious next move on the part of M$ will be to have Jackson disqualified for bias. that will make 2 judges in the DC circuit who M$ has wasted. Royce Lambert refused to accept the 1994 plea bargain --obviously M$ would ask him to recuse if his name came out of the barrel; theoretically, cases are assigned by lottery --in reality, you can influence the choice of a judge as the cases are assigned at the time of filing by rotation. --M$ obviously is capable of shopping for a judge. at this point, I would say M$ has won the game. W98 will be released with IE4 as the desktop, complete with push channels and www.msn.com --at that point, Jackson --if he is still the sitting judge-- will be forced to make a bad law decision if he tries to block it on the 1994 agreement: the product is 'integrated' --M$ had the foresight to hoodwink the DOJ --Royce Lambert saw through the smoke screen but the appeals court removed him from the case. so... we will have multiple choice of OS: M$ on Intel, M$ on SGI, M$ on Alpha --and SUN goes down the tubes as they will never capitulate. M$ will bury IBM with their NT alliance with Ahmdal who clones all the IBM iron --which is fading against the clustered servers. IBM long since gave in on OS/2 versus M$ --it may figure in their corporate strategy, but unless they are willing to update past Netscape 2.02 they will lose that as well --in fact you can no longer any of the IBM PCs with OS/2 preloaded --except by special order: in quantity. Bill Gate$ for President? might as well... maybe Lee Harvey Oswald will come to the rescue. Lessig appointment suspended By Dan Goodin, C|Net February 2, 1998, 6:40 p.m. PT A federal appeals court has immediately suspended the appointment of a contested computer expert charged with collecting and weighing evidence in the antitrust case the Justice Department has brought against Microsoft. In a ruling handed down late Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia granted Microsoft's request to halt, pending further review, the proceedings before visiting Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson appointed Lessig a "special master" in mid December, giving the computer and Internet law expert until May 31 to recommend factual and legal findings in the high-profile case. The one-page ruling is a significant--but by no means final--win for Microsoft, which repeatedly has objected to Lessig's appointment. In briefs filed first in district court and then with the court of appeals, Microsoft strenuously has opposed the designation of any special master in the case, but has argued further that Lessig is an inappropriate choice because he appears to be biased against the software giant. In a sternly worded order issued two weeks ago, Jackson denied Microsoft's request, calling the allegations of bias "trivial" and "defamatory." Today's ruling by the court of appeals is in stark contrast to Jackson's order, and may indicate that the three-judge panel assigned to hear matters in the case sees things in a different light. Rather than permanently halting the proceedings, today's ruling is an agreement only to consider Microsoft's challenge to the special master--known in legal parlance as a writ of mandamus. In a sign that the judges may be inclined to agree with Microsoft's arguments on the issue, however, they handed Redmond an additional win by immediately halting the proceedings scheduled to take place before Lessig while the challenge is being heard. "It is extremely unusual for a court of appeals to reach down and stop what a district court has ordered," said Rich Gray, an antitrust attorney at Bergeson, Eliopoulos, Grady & Gray. "The court of appeals is saying, 'We're interested in hearing more about this, and in the meantime, we're going to put the special master on hold.'" A Microsoft spokesman agreed. "This is a very positive step, but it's only one small step in a long process," said Jim Cullinan. "We look forward to presenting our evidence to the appeals court as well as the trial court." The court of appeals already had agreed to hear a separate appeal, in which Microsoft is fighting a preliminary injunction Jackson issued in December that requires Microsoft to separate browser software from its Windows products. Today's ruling consolidates both motions into the same April 21 hearing. It also requires both sides to file additional briefs concerning the special master challenge by April 7. Moreover, the government must file its opposition to Microsoft's appeal of the preliminary injunction by March 2, and Microsoft must respond to that brief by March 9. Justice Department representatives were not immediately available for comment. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQBVAwUBNNc8R7R8UA6T6u61AQH3swIAtVNkbSk80Crg/dseQOP4pPpIbEDGchsl rWj/sEmXn/2EnWxXBTp4OnkRpJlFbobhbkT3lJqE4Jj2V+MnEGUFzw== =9S7I -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----