Novell-Microsoft Trial Over WordPerfect Ends With Hung Jury
A judge declared a mistrial in Novell Inc. (NOVL)'s antitrust trial against Microsoft Corp. over the WordPerfect computer program after jurors said they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Context & Ripple Effects
The hung jury closes another chapter in Novell's long legal campaign around its 1990s productivity-software business, a company that has spent years litigating and partnering with Microsoft at the same time — it detailed a Microsoft patent pact back in 2007 and won the right to Unix copyrights that same year. Microsoft's courtroom record is itself mixed: it absorbed a $200 million patent verdict in 2009 but beat Alcatel-Lucent in a second suit in 2007.
A mistrial leaves the WordPerfect antitrust claims unresolved rather than rejected — jurors simply could not agree — so the case returns to the judge's docket with both sides' trial spending unrecovered and no precedent set either way.
First-order effects
- Novell must decide whether to bear the cost of a retrial or negotiate from a position where it proved nothing, while Microsoft walks away with no liability finding and no damages exposure from this jury.
Second-order effects
- A deadlocked jury weakens the template for other legacy plaintiffs pursuing 1990s middleware antitrust claims, since Microsoft can now point to a jury that could not even agree the conduct was actionable.
Third-order effects
- If retried cases keep splitting this way, decade-old software antitrust disputes will increasingly resolve through settlements and cross-licensing pacts like the one Novell and Microsoft already operate, rather than through verdicts that clarify the law.
The trend: Juries are proving unreliable arbiters of 1990s-era software antitrust claims, pushing legacy disputes between old-line vendors and Microsoft toward negotiated licensing outcomes instead of clean legal precedents.