by Al Massey
“The Beast From Redmond that wants to see us both dead”
– wrote Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to AOL’s head digit Steve
Case. The Microsoft case is proving to be more about
e-mail than anything. All sorts of dirty linen is getting aired out in Judge
Jackson’s court room. This may well be to e-mail what DNA was to the O.J.
trial.
Human testimony is taking a backseat to electronic information. We see talking heads take the stand to mumble, shrug and forget or disremember, as one put it but the e-mail messages are there in all their profane glory. We are getting a rare glimpse at how corporate America truly communicates in the digital age. The e-mail is alive with ideas and competitive zeal, punctuated with profanity and exclamation points.
The second week of the trial ended with the prosecutors putting on their best Marcia Clark impersonation feigning frustration because a lengthy cross-examination by Microsoft’s lead lawyer left no time for the government to show several hours of a videotaped deposition of Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman.
The mouthpiece for the guv’ment and the twenty states suing Mickysoft believe the tape will be the mortar binding their case together because it shows the dark Duke from Redmond saying he was not involved in plans to take what the DOJ alleges were illegal steps to stifle competition in the Internet Browser market. The DOJ’s big cheese David Boies said the Gates video will offer an “opportunity to judge Gates’ credibility.”
Well I’m here to tell you this so-called credibility gap will become an issue not because of the videotape but because his taped remarks can be compared and contrasted with the e-mail he wrote and received. The e-mail record, the government insists, shows Gates up to his digits in plotting the anti-competitive deals and bullying tactics that he denies or professes to have never heard of in his taped deposition.
So why not just call brother Gates to the stand and ask him to explain the discrepancies between his videotaped testimony and electronic messages? “The government does not need to put Gates on the stand, because we have his e-mail and memoranda,” Stephen Houck, a lawyer for the states, told the court. Yeah Right! I’ll bet the real reason is the guv’ment truth squad recognizes they are out of their league when it comes to cross examining Gates.
The Microsoft legal team has for months been preparing its e-mail defense. First, Microsoft argues, anything that looks damaging is taken out of context. “ I urge your honor,” John Warden, Microsoft’s lead lawyer, told Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, “to view with considerable skepticism the crazy quilt of e-mail fragments that seem to form the core of the government’s case.”
That bit of righteous indignation aside, the Microsofties set in motion their own e-mail counterattack by sorting through several million messages they subpoenaed from competitors in pretrial discovery.
While it is true that e-mail has played an important role in legal inquiries for years, like the Iran-contra case in the 1980s when e-mail found in Oliver North’s computer proved crucial, the Microsoft case is the result of a sweeping government antitrust investigation of a high-technology company where e-mail has supplanted the telephone as the most common instrument of communication. “E-mail has just revolutionized investigations of this kind,” one senior Justice Department official said.
To date Microsoft has handed over approximately 30 million documents, mostly e-mail. In addition both sides have prepared some 3,000 exhibits that are mostly e-mail. The e-mail trial of the century!
The immediacy of the electronic medium is such that people are not burdened with a heavy thought process and often communicate more frankly and informally than when writing a letter or a report — tap it out, punch a button and it’s gone into cyberspace.
But e-mail communication is proving to be documentary evidence, which in legal cases provides a rich, contemporaneous record of what people were thinking and planning at the time.
It can be a sharp contrast to formal oral testimony, so often coached by lawyers and crafted by selective memory. “The e-mail record certainly makes the I-don’t-recall line of response harder to sustain,” said Robert Litan, a former senior official in the Justice Department’s antitrust division who is now at the Brookings Institution.
It can also be powerful ammunition for pointing to contradictions in testimony. And that is what the government will do in attacking Gate’s credibility with his videotaped deposition.
To be sure, it is what Microsoft did — not what it said in e-mail communications — that counts most. “But once the e-mail that looks bad gets in the record, you end up doing what Microsoft’s lawyers are going to be spend much of this trial doing — trying to explain it away,” said one leading antitrust litigator.
Software Piracy is paying for terrorist operations.
Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel international, says he has seen a still more ominous element in the software piracy food chain. “I’m not prepared to talk about specifics,” he says, “but we have seen organized criminal groups using the proceeds from software counterfeiting to pay for terrorist operations overseas. We have seen a couple of terrorist organizations get involved in software counterfeiting.”
It’s not the first time terrorists have been mentioned in connection with software counterfeiting. Testifying before Congress in October 1995, Dempster Leech, a detective who has investigated counterfeiters, implicated terrorists.
According to a summary of the hearings, Leech discussed counterfeiting in general. The summary reads, in part: “Money generated from counterfeiting supports organized crime,” Leech said, adding that “recently, several high-level players indicted in a counterfeiting organization were financially tied to terrorist groups such as the one that bombed the World Trade Center.”
Internet telephony—or Internet tele-phoney
About every 7 days for the last four years I have been receiving information from some new start-up or other apprising me of the virtues of an exciting new technology that is going to sound the death knell to AT&T and all the other traditional long distance carriers.
This always revolves around Internet Telephony. Yes sir all you have to do is use your regular Internet connection and talk to Uncle Ned across the pond for free.
I guess the thing that really raises my hackles is they all proclaim this is something new and radical, or better yet “represents a paradigm shift.”
Well the plain fact is we proved way back in the ice age of packet-switched networks during the ARPANET days that the mother of all networks could carry telephone calls.
The only problem is that packet-switching used in the Internet is that data signals consists of short burst. Which means that lot of users can share a small amount of transmission bandwidth.
Each users data is broken into many short packets, which are then routed then routed separately over different paths to the final destination where the entire message is reassembled, frequently with some delay.
This delay prevents the simultaneity of a two-way telephone conversation.
Voice calls tend to be long in duration and require a continuous connection with no delay. That is where the rub comes in.
I don’t want to belabor the point here, or talk about the various compression techniques used by the Telephony wizards.
Indeed, at some point in time Internet IP Telephony will probably work, and work well, but for now let’s just put it back on the shelf.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member who can be reached at almas@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.