Mike, MSFT might be a tasty one, some ambulance-chasers in SF are going to a first class-action lawsuit today per The SF Chronicle:
In a similar action last Monday, Orange County
resident Michael R. Wilson filed a suit in Santa Ana
charging that Microsoft violated state antitrust laws
and hurt consumers. His suit seeks class-action
status for everyone in California who bought a
Microsoft operating system in the past four years.
Such class-action suits, legal experts told the New
York Times, have the potential to cost Microsoft
hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even
billions, in damage claims.
``This is the start of the race to get to the
courthouse,' said Stephen Axinn, a partner in
Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider who is an antitrust
litigator. ``It could be like the tobacco litigation, in
the sense that you have lots of plaintiffs lawyers in
different states sharing information.'
The big software maker's vulnerability to private
suits increased sharply this month when Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact
in the government's antitrust case against Microsoft.
Jackson concluded that Microsoft is a monopoly
whose anticompetitive acts have stifled innovation
and harmed consumers.
Unlike conclusions of law, a judge's findings of fact
in a federal antitrust case are not generally
considered admissible as evidence in private suits.
But Jackson's findings agreed so strongly with the
case presented by the Justice Department and 19
states that antitrust experts say his final verdict,
expected early next year, will almost surely find that
Microsoft is a monopoly that violated the law.
sfgate.com |
