California businesses stand to collect handsomely from Microsoft's $1.1 billion class action antitrust settlement, if they can document ownership of eligible products. The settlement, which received preliminary court approval last week, followed a class action suit alleging that Microsoft overcharged California customers. The case was settled without admission of liability.
The plaintiffs' attorneys are finalizing claim forms that will make it possible for individual and enterprise volume license holders to collect. Eugene Crew, whose law firm, Townsend and Townsend and Crew in San Francisco, is the lead counsel in the case, expects 80 percent of the eligible funds to go to businesses, with some collecting many thousands of dollars.
But the issue for IT managers is whether the potential benefit is worth the expense of digging out old records of, say, Windows 3.1 usage.
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