Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

Posted Jul 13, 2006 8:13 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines by MarkVandenBorre
Parent article: Free Software Foundation Europe on Microsoft fines

The more I think about it, the less sense I see in a monetary fine for Microsoft. After all, as a monopoly, they can recoup the fine by raising the price of their products.

That doesn't work. It's not a one-time fine. It's a running fine. And the explicit purpose of the fine is to force changed behaviour.

Which means that if it's inadequate to acomplish this, it simply needs to be made an order of magnitude bigger, or more.

Besides, at some point you start facing contempt-charges. Following court-orders is not optional. Refuse to do so for long enough, and eventually "men with guns"(tm) show up and freeze your assets. Resist these, and they'll freeze you instead. (typically by putting you in jail)

It's a disgrace though, that we allow big companies with lots of lawyers to ignore court-orders for such a long time with so little consequence. If any of us had ignored a court-order for such a long time, we'd have had the men with the guns in our homes a long time ago.

Dunno about the EU, but in Norway, for example, it generally takes on the order of 2 months from final, unappealable court-order and until that order is physically enforced. Atleast that's how long it took from I won in small-claims court (over a non-working computer that the seller refused to fix) and until an officer of the state showed up by the seller and demanded that either he pay, or he'd simply walk away with whatever valuable items he could find in the shop and sell them to cover the expenses. (and any attempt at physically preventing this confiscation would be met with police-force)

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