The Court of First Instance, Europe’s second-highest court, has begun hearings on the EC’s claim that Microsoft failed to comply with its order to provide its rivals with Microsoft software code. The EC had said Microsoft needed to make this information available to its competitors so that non-Microsoft work group servers operating systems would run as well as Microsoft’s on Windows PC and servers.

Microsoft did release technical documentation to its competitors, but the EC ruled it was inadequate and late last year threatened Microsoft with potential daily fines of as much as $2.4m backdated to mid-December.

Microsoft lawyer Ian Forrester told a 13-judge panel that Microsoft had acted legally and that the EC was attempting to shutter market forces.

Forrester said the law does not allow the pursuit of a regulatory policy favoring one business model rather than another.

[The decision] condemns a company for not saying yes to a competitor who requests a huge amount of valuable, secret future technology. And the remedy is to help anyone with an interest build a replica, a functional equivalent, Forrester told the judges.

But EC lawyer Anthony Whelan pointed to an EU directive that states a company’s secrets cannot take precedent over antitrust violations by a dominant market player.

Whelan also said the EC was just asking Microsoft to return to its previous way of doing business, which is to share more of its technical information with the market it leads.

Microsoft broke a previous pattern of conduct by refusing to supply this information Whelan said, according to reports. He also said that this type of sharing was standard practice and countered Microsoft’s arguments that the EC had changed and increased its demands for the type of information Microsoft had been asked to provide.

But Forrester argued that interoperability between the different systems already exists.

He also said rival technologies had survived and grown in the servers business despite not having access to the secret details of communication protocols used by Windows servers; and have declined without asking for them. And Linux servers entered after the ‘abuse,’ survived and grew steadily in a short time.

He also said there had been a remarkable absence of consumer harm and implied that Microsoft’s big competitors were merely seeking a better outcome in the European courts than they received in their domestic jurisdictions.

Just days beforehand, Microsoft defended the EC’s claim that by bundling its audio and video software into its Windows operating system it hobbled the ability of rival media players to compete, for which the EC fined Microsoft $617m.

The final outcome of the case is likely to take months.