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Microsoft and the European Commission, the law enforcement body of the European Union responsible for antitrust initiatives, wrapped up at least one part of their sometimes-contentious relationship this week. On Dec. 16, Microsoft agreed to install an automatic “ballot screen” that would let Windows users in Europe choose between 12 different browsers.
Over the summer, the commission had voiced concern that preinstalling Internet Explorer on Windows PCs could give Microsoft an unfair advantage in the browser market. Originally, Microsoft planned to counter by releasing a version of Windows 7 in Europe without Internet Explorer 8 preinstalled, which would have been known as Windows 7 E. However, Microsoft then suggested in August that it would install a ballot screen allowing choice between IE 8 and rival browsers.
Microsoft’s rivals, including Opera Software, then asked the EC to make certain changes to the offer. Under the terms of the new agreement, the Windows 7 ballot screen will display 12 Web browsers that run on Windows, determined by usage share in the European Economic Area.
“Microsoft is also prohibited from circumventing free and effective browser choice by any contractual, technical or other means,” Neelie Kroes, European commisioner for Competition Policy, said at a Dec. 16 news conference in Brussels. Microsoft will be required to report to the EC, first within six months and then annually, about its ballot-screen implementation.
Microsoft and the EC had battled before on a number of occasions; the EC fined Microsoft about $631 million in 2004 for allegedly monopolistic business practices. Kroes is due to step down in January, and will reportedly be replaced by Joachim Almunia, the former Socialist Party candidate for prime minister of Spain in 2000.
Microsoft also agreed to “allow interoperability between third-party products and several important Microsoft products,” according to Kroes, who added in her remarks that, “The commission will carefully monitor the impact of Microsoft’s proposals on the market and take its findings into account in its assessment of the pending antitrust investigation regarding interoperability.”
Speaking of possible legal action, this week Microsoft also found itself in the crosshairs of a small Taiwanese tech company, Plurk, which alleged that the site layout and underlying code of its microblogging service had been largely stolen by Juku, a microblogging service developed for MSN China and launched as a beta in November.
Upon Juku’s release, Taiwanese bloggers started posting about the similarities between it and Plurk, eventually igniting an investigation by Microsoft. There had indeed been plagiarism of code, Microsoft eventually announced, and the Juku beta would be suspended indefinitely.
“The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied,” Microsoft said in a Dec. 15 statement posted on its Website. “This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.”
In the statement, Microsoft said it seeds its third-party developer contracts with “strong language” that “clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others.” Furthermore, Microsoft suggested it would re-examine its practices surrounding accepting application code from third-party developers.
Microsoft Faces Criticism, Updates Bing
When asked by eWEEK about its current policies for reviewing application code assembled by third parties, Microsoft declined to comment.
“Plurk was already Taiwan’s biggest microblogging service, 10 [times] bigger than Twitter in that market alone, and emerging as Asia’s answer to Twitter in many of the biggest countries in East [Asia],” Plurk said in a Dec. 14 post on its company blog, “so naturally Microsoft probably saw some potential in piggybacking off the success of our unique service and launching something similar to a related market in China.”
Plurk claimed that about 80 percent of its client and product code base had found its way into Juku, and said on its site that it was looking at “all possibilities on how to move forward in response.” Whether or not this will translate into a lawsuit remains to be seen.
The Plurk-Juku incident came a month after Microsoft was forced to address another intellectual property concern, this one revolving around its WUDT (Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool). Microsoft originally pulled the tool, used to install Windows 7 on netbooks via USB devices, after allegations that it contained improperly copied open-source code without acknowledgment.
After those allegations proved well-founded, Microsoft readjusted the tool to conform to GNU GPLv2 (General Public License Version 2). The company claimed that a third-party developer had lifted the code from the GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster project hosted on CodePlex.
Peter Vescuso, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Black Duck Software, a producer of tools for open-source management, argued in a Dec. 18 interview with eWEEK that while many large software organizations rely on the judgment and due diligence of their developers to ensure that inappropriately attributed open-source code stays out of a program build, ultimately many projects are too complex to not be vetted by a technological solution.
“If you look at the components, there are hundreds of components” in a large project, Vescuso said. “No development group could possibly track that.”
Vescuso could not offer any suggestions as to how Microsoft might be performing its own internal vetting. But in reference to Microsoft’s WUDT incident, he said, “These sorts of very public incidences are raising dramatically the issues related to use of open-source code.”
If that wasn’t enough in the lawsuit department, a small St. Louis design company filed suit against Microsoft this week, saying it had been using the name Bing as a trademark for over nine years before Microsoft launched its own Bing search engine.
Bing Information Design filed the case against Microsoft in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis on Dec. 16, alleging unfair competition and copyright infringement. According to a statement from Bing Information Design’s legal counsel, Microsoft’s use of the name Bing “causes confusion with regard to the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant, confuses the public with regard to the origin of the plaintiff’s services and reduces the value of the plaintiff’s trademark.”
Microsoft retorted that the suit was without merit.
“We have not been served with a complaint, but are aware of the suit based on media reports,” Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesperson, said in a Dec. 17 e-mail to eWEEK. “We do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant’s offerings and Microsoft’s Bing. We respect trademarks and other people’s intellectual property, and look forward to the next steps in the judicial process.”
Not all Bing news of the week was law-related. On Dec. 16, Microsoft launched a Bing application for the iPhone, through which users can carry out voice searches, find nearby points of interest and receive driving or walking directions. The application, which can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store, is another piece of Microsoft’s widespread updating of Bing over the previous two months. On Dec. 17, Microsoft announced in a post on the official Bing blog that it was fixing a few bugs in the iPhone application.