Posted on Wednesday, June 27 2012 @ 18:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
In 2008 the European Commission gave Microsoft a 899 million euro fine for failing to comply with the previous antitrust ruling in 2004. Today the EU's General Court rejected Microsoft's appeal of the 2008 ruling but lowered the fine 4.5 percent to 860 million euro:
Today's ruling (full text) upheld the fine and rejected all of the arguments put forward by Microsoft. "Microsoft has failed to invalidate the Commission’s assessment that 166 of the 173 technologies relating to the interoperability information were not innovative," the court said.
Microsoft got one piece of good news from today's ruling. The Court lowered the fine 4.5 percent to €860 million ($1.07 billion) because of a letter the Commission sent to Microsoft on June 1, 2005. In that letter "the Commission accepted that Microsoft could restrict distribution of products developed by its ‘open source’ competitors on the basis of non-patented and non-inventive interoperability information until delivery of the Court’s judgment," or until Sept. 17, 2007. But the letter was relevant only to a marginal part of the case and did not affect the ruling as a whole.
More details
at ARS Technica.
