WASHINGTON, D.C., September 16, 1998 — Microsoft today filed a detailed statement in Federal District Court in support of its earlier motion urging Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to reject the government’s last-minute attempt to expand and rewrite its antitrust case against the software company.
Today’s statement provides a comprehensive list of extraneous issues Microsoft argues should be excluded from trial because they were not part of the original complaint and would require a long delay to give the company sufficient time to prepare its defense in response to the new allegations. The trial is scheduled to begin October 15.
The Justice Department recently made an eleventh-hour attempt to expand its case to include new issues that have no relationship to the original complaint. Microsoft’s motion filed on September 2, and supported by today’s detailed statement, seeks to limit the issues and evidence in the trial to matters that the government included in its original complaint.
