Bedford, Massachusetts-based Prime Computer Inc reports that the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has reversed a lower court decision and ordered that court to enter judgement in favour of Prime in the anti-trust case brought by Virtual Maintenance Inc in 1989 concerning Prime’s service policies for PDGS, a software design program developed by the Ford Motor Co and marketed exclusively by Prime: in the lower court case, a jury found that Prime’s sale of software support services in conjunction with hardware maintenance for Prime’s 50 Series minicomputers amounted to an illegal tying arrangement in violation of US antitrust laws and awarded Virtual Maintenance $8.45m in compensatory damages which were punitively tripled to $25.4m; the Court of Appeals vacated the damage award and injunction against Prime.
