Free Republic

A 9-0 Supreme Court rebuke ought to be a teaching moment. So it is amazing to behold that -- notwithstanding the unanimous recent reversal of its 2002 Arthur Andersen conviction -- the Justice Department may well make the same mistake all over again. We're referring to the news that Justice may indict the entire KPMG accounting firm for obstruction of justice and the marketing of legally questionable tax shelters. As Andersen's fate made clear, an indictment against a corporation is usually a death sentence, whatever the ultimate legal outcome.... The purpose of criminal law, we had thought, is to punish...

Lockyer's Criminalizing of Energy Firms Under California’s 'Alice in Wonderland' Antitrust Laws Almost 45 years ago current Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan prophetically wrote: “The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland: everything seemingly is, yet apparent isn’t, simultaneously. It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as ‘enlightened’ when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge’s verdict...

Easement acquisition stirs anger By RITCHIE E. STARNES - WEDDINGTON Several property owners in Weddington are still fuming about how Union County officials seemingly fast-tracked the condemnation of their land to help build a sewer-trunk line for developers in 2002. Exercising eminent domain typically strikes an emotional chord among most property owners, but mix in what the residents see as poor communication, insulting compensation and allegations of conspiracy theories, and the result is raw feelings. That's the situation for the majority of 40 land owners who had swaths of their land condemned to make way for the West Fork Twelve...

Judge critical of Bush, Congress One of the appeals court judges rebuked the White House and lawmakers Wednesday for acting “in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers’ blueprint for the governance of a free people — our Constitution.” “Any further action by our court or the district court would be improper,” wrote Judge Stanley Birch Jr., appointed by President Bush’s father.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D88OTL0O0.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down Burst.com, Microsoft reach tentative deal By FOSTER KLUG MAR. 11 12:51 P.M. ET A California software company suing Microsoft for allegedly stealing its multimedia streaming software said on its Web site that it has reached a tentative settlement with the world's largest software company. The agreement between Burst.com and Microsoft Corp. should be completed within a week, Burst said in an announcement on its Web site. Stacy Drake, a Microsoft spokeswoman, declined to provide specific details until the agreement was finalized, other than to say the companies had "reached a settlement in principle which resolves all the issues between...

Boeing Co. on Tuesday agreed to sell off a key part of its commercial jet-building operations and a rocket engine unit in two separate deals worth about $2 billion. The deals come as Boeing tries to sell off manufacturing capacity and cut costs amid fierce competition from European rival Airbus, the world's top aircraft maker, in the commercial airline market. Boeing sold its commercial plane manufacturing operations in Kansas and Oklahoma to Canadian leveraged buyout firm Onex Corp. for $1.2 billion including $900 million in cash and the transfer of certain liabilities, such as employee pension costs. The sale to...

A tiny upstart in the cigarette business threatens to topple a comfortable cartel engineered by big tobacco companies and their strange bedfellows, the state attorneys general.Big tobacco was supposed to come under harsh punishment for decades of deception when it acceded to a tort settlement seven years ago. Philip Morris, R.J.Reynolds, Lorillard and Brown & Williamson agreed to pay 46 states $206 billion over 25 years. This was their punishment for burying evidence of cigarettes' health risks. But the much-maligned tobacco giants have subtly and shrewdly turned their penance into a windfall. Using that tort settlement, the big brands have...

Microsoft Corp.'s 2001 antitrust settlement with the Bush administration hasn't reduced the dominance of the company's Windows personal computer operating system, a Justice Department lawyer said yesterday. There has been "no demonstrable change in the operating system marketplace," government lawyer Renata Hesse said in Washington in response to a question from the federal judge overseeing the accord. "Microsoft continues to have a large share in that market." The 2001 agreement resolved a suit that at one point threatened the world's largest software maker with a breakup ................................................... Kollar-Kotelly, who approved the settlement in 2002, said she wasn't concerned about Microsoft's...

Carrying over from last year, I predict that Burst.com will beat Microsoft in their current lawsuit. But to avoid having to eat crow again over timing, let me put this in greater context. IF a trial actually takes place, as it is now scheduled to do this summer, Burst will easily win. Microsoft is at a disadvantage already as a bully. Burst will probably get Judge Motz to tell the jury that Microsoft deliberately destroyed evidence, and it doesn't hurt, either, that Burst is just plain right on all counts -- Microsoft DID violate their patents, DID violate Burst's non-disclosure...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A European Union court ruled Wednesday that Microsoft Corp. must immediately divulge some trade secrets to competitors and produce a version of its flagship Windows operating system stripped of the program that plays music and video. The 91-page ruling effectively thwarts Microsoft's attempt to delay, pending appeal, implementation of the EU's landmark antitrust decision in March that demanded changes in the software giant's business practices. The implications for Microsoft are huge, though the company did not immediately disclose whether it intended to offer a version of Windows without the Media Player in Europe alone or more broadly....

...Ashcroft.... will go down in history as the Attorney General who led the legal fight against terrorism. Every wartime AG has had to make tough calls about the balance between civil liberties and national security, and in a better world Mr. Ashcroft would be retiring to bipartisan accolades for taking on these difficult issues.... Yet no one in this Administration has endured more personal and political abuse. Granted Mr. Ashcroft isn't the smoothest public spokesman, and his cultural conservatism and strict interpretations of the law on the death penalty, partial-birth abortion and sentencing guidelines incensed liberals.... The irony is that...

...Mr. Gonzales has many things going for him, not least his relationship with the President, whom he has served for more than a decade starting in Texas. These personal ties -- much like those between Californians Ed Meese and Ronald Reagan -- will give him a stronger influence in the Cabinet than Mr. Ashcroft had. But his job will nonetheless be to build on the Ashcroft legacy. That includes moving ahead with terror cases, riding hard on the FBI as it reshapes itself to fight terrorists, and working for the renewal of the Patriot Act, portions of which expire next...

... Burst, a two-person dot-com survivor from Santa Rosa, Calif., where I used to live, has been suing Microsoft for two years for anti-trust, breach of contract, restraint of trade, and patent infringement. In the great panoply of Microsoft civil anti-trust lawsuits, Burst's might be the last, and for Microsoft, it has to be the worst because Redmond looks so bad. This week, the news from recently unsealed court documents is that Microsoft may have deliberately lied not only to Burst, but also to the other anti-trust litigants right up to and including the U.S. Department of Justice. You will...

LOS ANGELES -- Shell Oil Co. has agreed to delay the planned closure of a Southern California oil refinery that produces 2 percent of the state's gasoline to allow more time to find a buyer and negotiate a sale, state officials said Friday. "I'm extremely pleased with Shell's decision," state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said in a statement. "It's a welcome show of cooperation with our effort to keep open this refinery, which is crucial to helping protect California drivers from even higher gas prices than they already pay." Lockyer's announcement came after a state-hired consultant questioned Shell's decision to...

Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned. Opera disclosed the payment last week in a terse press release that omitted other details, including the name of the settling party and the nature of the dispute. But a source indicated that the payment came from Microsoft in order to close the books on a clash over obscure interoperability problems. On at least three separate occasions, Opera has accused Microsoft of deliberately...

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — The European antitrust office and Microsoft Corp. clashed Thursday over whether last month's landmark ruling against the U.S. software giant would survive on appeal, in light of a new decision from the European Union's highest court that set strict guidelines for monopoly cases. In its decision Thursday, the European Court of Justice spelled out three "exceptional circumstances" that must be met before a dominant company can be found guilty of breaking antitrust law for refusing to license copyrighted material to rivals. Those circumstances were: if the refusal prevents the emergence of a new product or service...

update Microsoft ended another long-standing legal dispute on Monday, announcing a $440 million settlement and licensing deal with InterTrust Technologies, which markets digital rights management tools. The settlement marks the end of the nearly 3-year-old patent infringement suit. InterTrust's suit contended that virtually all of Microsoft's products--from the company's flagship Windows operating system to its multimedia software--trespassed on InterTrust's content protection holdings. The deal opens the door for Microsoft to expand the array of antipiracy tools it provides with its digital media software, including Windows Media Player.

<p>SAN ANTONIO -- The men's and women's basketball tournaments are over, but the NCAA is about to play some defense in another kind of court.</p> <p>At issue is the legality of an NCAA rule requiring all teams invited to its basketball tournament to participate.</p>

<p>Regulators say software maker broke antitrust rules, to propose hundreds of millions in fines.</p> <p>BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Microsoft has broken European Union antitrust law and could face sanctions and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, according to a draft decision expected to win endorsement on Monday from an advisory committee to the 15 EU states.</p>

<p>Be careful what you wish for. These days, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (search) must find himself stewing over those words every night before he turns in for bed.</p> <p>A few years ago, Ellison stood as one of the biggest champions of the government’s antitrust action against Microsoft (search). Today, his company stands squarely in the crosshairs of the same Justice Department that targeted Bill Gates.</p>