SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft urged a US Appeals Court panel on Wednesday to overturn a temporary injunction that bars it from shipping software containing a version of Sun Microsystems' Java technology.
"We're being treated like a pirates," said senior corporate counsel for Microsoft, Linda Norman, referring to the November 1998 order issued in Sun's copyright-infringement lawsuit.
"The US District Court decision didn't show there was irreparable, monetary damage," said Norman, who claimed it was necessary to show "actual harm" in order to prove copyright infringement. The lawsuit accused Microsoft of making changes to Sun's Java programming language in violation of its licensing agreement with Sun.
In her oral argument Wednesday before the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Norman claimed the case was about that contract, rather than about copyright infringement, and that Microsoft has a right to distribute products that employed its own version of Java.
But Sun's lawyer claimed there was "massive literal copying" by Microsoft of thousands of lines of code produced by Sun.
"Microsoft exceeded the scope of license of the agreement," said Lloyd Day, who represented Sun. "A licensee who exceeds the scope of the license is subject to copyright infringement."
"Microsoft is arguing that they neither violated the agreement nor operated outside the agreement," either of which is illegal, Day claimed.
In its October 1997 lawsuit, Sun claimed that Microsoft breached its contractual obligation to deliver products that compatibly implement Sun's Java technology.
Microsoft maintains the contract required compatibility only to Java, not Java native code, which it says is the intellectual property in dispute.
The three-judge panel heard 20-minute oral arguments from both Microsoft and Sun on Wednesday.
