By Barbara Morgan, 1 March 1999 14:53
NEWS Intel goes to court next week to begin its defence against anti-trust charges brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Although both sides have agreed to keep the trial focused on three issues, they have announced witness lists that could mean up to 60 people taking the stand. Microsoft's ongoing trial has called only 24 witnesses so far in its 62 days of testimony. The focus of the trial is that Intel abused its dominance of the microprocessor market to force Compaq and Digital - which has since been taken over by Compaq - to surrender their intellectual property rights, and attempted to do the same to Intergraph. Top Intel lawyer, Peter Detkin, summed up the chip maker's defence: "At a high level, there isn't a dispute about the facts in the case. The FTC will say we withheld our intellectual property in these specific cases, and we did. Our argument is that we had a right too." Intel's list of 34 proposed witnesses include Andy Grove, Intel's co-founder and chairman, and Craig Barrett, the firm's present CEO. Executives from Compaq, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, and Hewlett-Packard are on the FTC's list, as is Intergraph chairman, Jim Meadlock, who may have to split his time between Washington and Alabama, where his company is suing Intel over alleged infringement of its cache-management patent.
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