Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fooled. This legal face-off between the music industry and Napster may turn out to be one of the great trials of the digital age. Earlier this year the Microsoft antitrust case spelled out the rules for how high-tech companies can and can't compete with one another. The Napster case may make an equally bold statement about what intellectual property rights will exist in the new economy. If the ruling goes the industry's way, as many expect, it could bring an end to the brief era in which all sorts of music were readily available for free...
...threatening phone call made on its lines, Napster argued that it shouldn't be responsible for piracy its users engaged in. But Judge Patel rejected that claim. Napster responded with a bold move of its own. It hired star litigator David Boies--fresh from his victory in the Microsoft antitrust case--to represent...
...gray area, to put it mildly; one of its distributors is currently in court for violating copyright law.) In the next step the movie is squeezed down to a manageable file size. Your average movie takes up about four gigabytes in digital form. Using a compression standard developed by Microsoft, of all companies, and hacked by those enterprising programmers, DivX squishes movies down to fewer than 700 megabytes, small enough to fit on a CD. To watch a movie in DivX format, all you need is the DivX codec program, which tells your computer how to decompress the file...
...husband Marc started with $2 million. And she knows half a dozen other current and former Microsofties who have started foundations. "The status symbol of the '80s was a BMW. The status symbol of this decade is having your own foundation named after you," says a Microsoft retiree, who naturally has her own. The move certainly makes financial sense for folks like Kanter. After typical start-up costs of about $20,000, assets of more than $300,000 can be parked so that the donor gets tax benefits as well as the satisfaction of controlling her charitable giving...
Those results include Paulo Liwanag, 20, for whom Kanter's foundation paid $3,500 in tuition for a technology course that qualified him as a Microsoft Certified Professional, a valuable accreditation in his field. Liwanag, whom Kanter met while working at Microsoft, could not have afforded the tuition on his own. It prepared him for a more promising career--and a $45,000 salary. "This will really help," he says. "I see myself working for a really big company in the computer field." Kanter, who has paid tuition for 14 other young people, says, "This is the most fulfilling thing...