on 19 February 1999There were fresh surprises in the Microsoft trial today, as lawyers for the US Department of Justice uncovered more flaws in defence evidence.
Microsoft officials had earlier been embarrassed when a videotape they claimed showed problems with a program that claimed to do something they’d claimed couldn’t be done was shown not to have shown that program not doing that. Ordered by the court to do it again, they did, but it didn’t do it. Microsoft claimed, however, that although it hadn’t done what they’d said it did, that didn’t mean it couldn’t not do what they’d said they couldn’t have done.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson at this point requested an adjournment for refreshments.
When the case resumed today, prosecution counsel further attacked the credibility of the video evidence, claiming that not only did it not show the program Microsoft said it showed, but that it showed Microsoft officials sitting around a cardboard box with a hole cut in the front, through which a Microsoft engineer could be seen holding up pieces of coloured paper and moving them around to simulate the unsuccessful removal of components from an operating system under a graphical user interface.
Microsoft countered that Edward Felten, author of the program and a key prosecution witness, was not in fact a Princeton professor but the former British ski-jumper Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, disguised using a plastic mask representing Groucho Marx, and that since Mr Edwards had no qualifications in computer programming, his evidence could not be relied upon.
Rebutting this claim, the Department of Justice submitted that the whole trial was an illusion created by the entertainer David Copperfield on the orders of Bill Gates, who believed a faked monopoly suit would preclude any real-life action against his company, and that all the participants were the victims of hypnotically induced mass hysteria.
Judge Jackson ruled this submission invalid since, if true, it wouldn’t really have been made, and after further consideration pronounced that the court itself, the State of Washington, the Earth and the Solar System, the Milky Way and the observable universe were all but fragments of a dream in the mind of God. Ordering Microsoft to pay into court, in advance of judgement, $60 million in non-consecutive notes, a Learjet, and a pint of good bourbon, he retired, assisted by court official Lolita Babeorama, to consider his verdict.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper