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Every time you think the monster of crazy antitrust has been locked securely in the basement, you are awakened by the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
The WSJ (subscription) says Adobe is now threatening to sue Microsoft because MS plans to include in Office a feature that allows a user to save a document in PDF format, which was, of course, created by Adobe.
"So what?" say you; "surely Adobe can protect its intellectual property?" So it could, except that Adiobe dedicated this particular piece of IP as a public highway upon which anyone may travel. It has a 1236-page reference manual on how to make the trip, which says (sec. 1.5):
Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to the conditions stated below, to:
• Prepare files whose content conforms to the Portable Document Format
[NOTE: The "conditions" relate to copyright notice, and do not limit use.] This is not a stealth provision, either; during the recent discussions of the Open Document Format in Massachusetts, Adobe said:
Adobe publishes the PDF standard in its entirety and makes it available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it. No one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard. Nonetheless, Adobe told Microsoft that it wanted the PDF writer excised. Microsoft agreed to distribute it separately, free, as an add-on, but Adobe objected to this as well, saying Microsoft should charge a fee for it.
Microsoft declined this suggestion, baffled as to why it should try to charge for a program that anyone else in the world can distribute for nothing.
So what is Adobe's legal theory? Antitrust -- predatory pricing and tying; that it is illegal to add a publicly available free product to an existing program. And, since a U.S. court might be skeptical of such a claim, the likely venue would be Europe, where nuttiness in an antitrust theory is considered part of its old-world charm.
Adobe is not spelling out its logic, so one awaits future developments with interest. Nor is Adobe's motivation clear. If it thinks that wide and free use of the PDF writer promotes its interests, then why is it not ecstatic at the idea of having a PDF writer included with Office? Indeed, the antitrust argument would make more sense if the facts were reversed -- if Adobe asked Microsoft to include a PDF writer in Office and Microsoft refused to do it.
And if Adobe wanted to restrict the use of the PDF writer, why didn't it offer a license that spelled out the restrictions? It could have foiund a Creative Commons license, perhaps.
The whole affair is a puzzlement. But perhaps it will soon be clarified. Or, better yet, disappear.
And oh yes -- Microsoft: Include that functionality, for free.
posted by James DeLong @ 10:30 AM | Antitrust
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