E-greeting card firm wins Microsoft case

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

Pretty interesting story about MS's use of a spam filter to harm a rival
content provider.
Jamie

     E-greeting card firm wins Microsoft case 
     By Reuters
     Special to CNET News.com
     December 21, 1998, 7:30 p.m. PT 

     A California judge ordered Microsoft to help a Colorado company
revise its Internet greeting cards so they aren't blocked by message
filters.

     Judge Robert Baines of Santa Clara County Superior Court ordered
the software giant to work with Blue Mountain Arts so its electronic
greeting cards pass through spam filters found in Microsoft's new
Internet Explorer browser. The filters, which must be switched on, are
intended to block junk email.

    
[snip]	

	One industry source said it was the first time a judge had ever issued
a restraining order against software that was still in a beta testing
phase, reflecting the influence of even preliminary versions of
Microsoft products.

     Blue Mountain, which employs about 100 people, may seem an unlikely
rival to mighty Microsoft, but it offers free electronic greeting cards
through a site that has become one of the 15 most popular on the World
Wide Web, according to Media Metrix. 

     Schutz, whose parents founded the company about 30 years ago, said
there were no problems with the free electronic greetings until last
month, when Microsoft set up a competing service as part of its Internet
portal. Shortly afterward, Blue Mountain notifications began to get
filtered out by a feature in the latest version of Outlook Express, an
electronic mail client offered as part of Internet Explorer. 

     Blue Mountain also says its cards failed to get through to
customers of Microsoft's WebTV unit for several days.

    [snip]


-- 
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
202.387.8030; f 202.234.5176
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org