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While new accusations have been brought to Microsoft, the giant company
announced on 9 May 2008 that it has appealed, at the Court of First
Instance in Luxembourg, the 899 million euro fine imposed in February
2008 by the European Commission (EC) for having abused its dominant
position on the market.
"We are filing this appeal in a constructive effort to seek clarity
from the court," was the company's statement. The basic question of the
dispute is the way in which patents and interoperability protocols are
licensed by Microsoft to competitors. In February, Microsoft announced
a series of interoperability initiatives that would provide more
interoperability between Microsoft's products and those of competitors,
including publishing all details of application programming interfaces
for its most widely used products. EC argues that the terms of the
licensing are unusable for open source software projects, as they are
still subject to royalty payments. In its turn, Microsoft considers
that the terms requested by the EC violate its intellectual property
rights.
On 13 May 2008, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA)
also filed a complaint to the EC against Microsoft's "anti-competitive
licensing practices" after having previously made the same complaint in
UK with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the British competition
regulator.
BECTA considered that the lack of compatibility between Microsoft's
OOXML document standard and alternative codes, such as ODF, were
deliberate as the giant "refuse to offer equivalent support for the
ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF)". Stephen Lucey, executive
director of strategic technologies for BECTA, also stated: "It is not
just the interests of competitors and the wider marketplace that are
damaged when barriers to effective interoperability are created. (...)
Such barriers can also damage the interests of education and training
organisations, learners, teachers and parents".
In its complaint to OFT, BECTA has argued that Microsoft supported its
own technical protocols far better than it supported the industry
standard ones. "This decision had the effect of requiring users to
download and install a range of converters to enable them to
interoperate with those competitor products" also said the agency
statement.
As a response to BECTA's complaint, CompTIA, an industrial association
of which Microsoft is a member, published on 14 May a statement where
it emphasized that "the working ICT marketplace fosters immense choice
and solutions, which boost the overall interoperability and widespread
use of competing ICT products and services".
Although OFT has agreed on BECTA's filing the complaint with the EC as well, it has not yet given its decision on the matter.
Microsoft appeals record EC fine (13.05.2008)
Microsoft's EU legal troubles continue (14.05.2008)
Education agency complains to Brussels about Microsoft (15.05.2008)
Microsoft challenges 899 million fine(12.05.2008)
EDRI-gram: Opera complains to the EC on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (19.12.2007)
Source: EDRi-gram "Microsoft appeals the EC fine but faces even more complaints" Number 6.10, 21 May 2008
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