Microsoft Corp filed a motion in a federal court on Friday asking the US Department of Justice to clarify the language of the 1995 consent decree which it was ordered to comply with last month. The filing came just four days before Tuesday’s hearing on whether Microsoft should be held in contempt of court for not complying with the spirit of the order, which says it cannot force its customers to license Internet Explorer along with the Windows operating system. The logic behind the consent decree is that Internet Explorer is a standalone product and the DOJ has, Microsoft asserts, been nebulous in its definition of what constitutes a standalone product and what components of IE fall into that definition. In essence, Redmond is asking the court to offer (and thus tie itself down to) specific language on these aspects of the consent decree which should give it steadier ground from which to attack the government’s case. In issuing his temporary injunction against Microsoft last month, Judge Thomas Jackson himself said that the language of the consent decree was ambiguous.
