I guess they could claim it was exceptionally important, but not that exceptionally important
It would be pretty funny if Microsoft's spin doctors, trying to spin this into the case of the century, ended up getting quoted in the government's briefs!
I recently saw an article quoting some law professor from the University of Baltimore saying the breakdown on the D.C. Circuit is 4-3 conservative. I view the numerical breakdown with skepticism. There are different kinds of conservatives just as there are different kinds of liberals. After all Jackson was billed (excuse the pun) as a conservative, and we know how that prediction turned out.
Furthermore, the Supremes are not exactly flaming liberals. You've got Thomas, Scalia and Rehnquist on the far right, Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter on the left (well, sort of), and O'Connor, Kennedy and Breyer kind of in the middle. Remember that this is the same Court that said the Violence Against Women Act violates the Commerce Clause.
For amusement, read this obvious Microsoft plant:
news.morningstar.com
For amusement, I quote the following Choice cut:
My favorite part of Penny?s Folly, though, is Section 3.g.ii) Restriction on Binding Middleware Products to Operating System Products Without Properly Kissing Janet Reno?s Feet. This section mandates that anytime Microsoft wants to integrate a program like Outlook with Windows, it must also offer a version of Windows without Outlook. The wacky part is the percentage discount that Microsoft must give to the buyers of the inferior version of Windows: it?s the ratio of the number of bytes in Outlook to the bytes in Windows.
The single molecule of economic wisdom embedded in this part of the order is this: If Outlook takes a lot of code, it must be good; so if you don?t get it, you should get a big discount. Using the court?s pricing formula, however, Microsoft can actually continue to give away add-ons almost for free. All Microsoft must do is add a few million lines of worthless code to Windows every time it wants to add a valuable feature. The bigger Windows gets, the smaller the discount for giving up the added feature. The Justice Department?s legal genius has simply given Microsoft an incentive to be highly inefficient in programming Windows.
Needless to say, like all Microsoft toadies, this guy's got it all wrong. The government has it all figured out and won't let Microsoft get away with such an obvious ploy. They'll just have Judge Money Penny, or whatever this guy thinks his name is, appoint a Roving Judicial Commission On Software Design, which will consist of ex-politicians convicted of election finance reform law fraud. Their punishment will be to spend ten years at hard labor, going through Windows source, line by line, looking for superfluous lines of code. ;) |
