Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

as a digital property owner, which will, to some extent, be definedby competition law. Refusal to deal, by itself, is not generallyunlawful, but other factors (consider Magill) will raise the level ofscrutiny; this is a difficult area in which to be confident that youwill not be liable. Judge Kirby’s approach of guaranteeing a rightto deal in core informational products, a little like essentialfacilities doctrine, may suggest that the time is upon us to moreseriously consider access to core informational products as part ofantitrust or competition law.2. The Microsoft CaseThe Microsoft case also highlights how intellectual propertyrights in software may be questioned in light of antitrust law.This case concerned the dominance of the Microsoft operatingsystem, Windows.245 An operating system is software thatallocates and manages the hardware resources of a computer. Theoperating system combined with the hardware is often called theoperating platform upon which many forms of applications(specific kinds of) software are built. To write applications thatwill run on a particular platform or operating system one needs toensure the application can interact with the operating system. Anoperating system will be programmed to allow such interactionthrough what is known as application programming interfaces(APIs). Therefore, to write code or software that will run on anoperating system you will need to know and obey APIs. This needto write applications for specific operating systems means that itis more difficult for a generic application to be written that can berun on all platforms. As Judge Jackson found, Windows was byfar the most dominant operating system in the market, with amarket share in excess of eighty percent depending on how youcalculated the figures.246The emergence of the Internet browser and the developmentof the Java programming language by Sun Microsystems openedthe way for diluting the dominance of the Windows operatingsystem. The browser developed with such speed and popularitythat the potential opened for people to write applications to run onthe browser platform, thereby reducing the control Microsoft had245. When joined with the Intel microprocessor or chip this is commonly referred toas a WinTel platform.246. Microsoft, 87 F. Supp. 2d at 36.