At Long Last, with Summary Judgment Against Novell, Microsoft and S&C
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APRIL 2, 2010 At Long Last, with Summary Judgment Against Novell, Microsoft and S&C Wrap Up Private Antitrust Litigation By Alison Frankel On March 30, Baltimore federal district court Tulchin told Main Justice reporter Aruna judge J. Frederick Motz granted summary judgment Viswanatha (an Am Law alum) about the benefits of to Microsoft Corp. in what he rather wistfully called his years of toil for Microsoft: “a half-dozen arguments “the last action pending in MDL 1332, In re Microsoft in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, another half Corp. Antitrust Litigation.” In his 36-page ruling, dozen in state supreme courts, two state court trials, Motz concludes that Novell didn’t have standing to visits to 40 states, and a goldmine of unused frequent sue because it transferred the relevant claims against flier miles.” He also noted, however, that he originally Microsoft to the company now known as SCO Group. thought the cases would be wrapped up in five The ruling disposed of Novell’s five-year-old case, years–not 11. which had accused Microsoft of blocking competition from Novell’s word-processing program WordPerfect. The Novell case, Viswanatha notes, lingered on for so long because it wasn’t filed until 2005, a year We won’t focus on the oddity of two rulings in a after Microsoft and Novell reached a $536 million week in long-running Novell cases involving its settlement of most of Novell’s antitrust claims but dealings with SCO. (You’ll recall that on Tuesday, failed to agree on claims involving WordPerfect. a Utah federal district court jury found that Novell didn’t transfer copyrights to Unix software code to Is it really over now? Judge Motz offered a long SCO back in 1995.) Instead, we’ll tell you about a explanation of his reasoning in anticipation of nice interview at Main Justice with Microsoft outside an appeal by Novell, which is represented in the counsel David Tulchin of Sullivan & Cromwell, who’s case by Dickstein Shapiro and Adams Holcomb. slogged through all of the 200 or so private antitrust We called Dickstein partner Jeffrey Johnson to ask actions that followed the U.S. government’s antitrust about a possible appeal, but he wasn’t available prosecution of Microsoft in the late 1990s. for comment. Reprinted with permission from the AMLaw Daily featured on April 2, 2010. © 2010 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. For information, contact 877-257-3382, [email protected] or visit www.almreprints.com. # 002-04-10-02.