The Microsoft OOXML Modus Operandi: Throw 1,000 Pages of Other People's Work for a Judge to Read Ahead of a One-Hour Meeting
No time to discuss this - that's the point
Yesterday I said that the SLAPPs from Microsofters had suffered another big blow this past Wednesday. How much money will they throw at lawyers in a failed bid to silence me? The EPO attempted this several times and it always backfired. Eventually they came to the conclusion they were just hurting themselves. So they stopped.
There's something else to be said about what happened before the Hearing. They kept flinging an extraordinary number of pages at me (and later at the Judge). There's no time to read all this - let alone discuss this - and that's the point. It's intentional. That was their strategy, or so it would seem. In my assessment, they were trying to compensate for the fact their side was without merit and their client was utterly despicable (he still is). They assumed I'd have no time to talk if they "clogged up" the Hearing, or that my submissions would get lost in the "pile". The analogy very often used for this type of scenario is, throw lots of [something] at the wall, then hope [something] will stick.
Also see: When They Have Nothing Left to Help Advance Abusive Litigation for Microsoft People... Other Than Throwing ~500 Pages of Someone Else's Work Into a PDF | Who Imitates Who? Plagiarist as Client (From Microsoft), 'Plagiarism' at the Law Firm?
All they had to offer was volume, not signal. Days earlier it seemed like they 'blew a fuse' and ended up trying to recover from an error that may put them out of business (I may cover this next year; now isn't the best time).
They (some of them) ended up staying in the office until 6PM on a Friday, having hauled an astounding amount of pages that are, as usual - just mountains of other people's cases - maybe in an effort to drown out the signal and make it hard to focus on what's actually relevant and recent. They ended up throwing about 800-1000 pages at the Judge for a 60-minute hearing. Not kidding. Almost 1,000 pages. Seems like the strategy of gish gallop.
Thankfully, what matters at the end is what judges decide, not public opinion, just like voting is determined by ballot boxes, not how many "likes" one gets in social control media.
The Master (Judge) in this case mostly sided with me and let me explain the case in very simple terms, whereas the other side was deliberately over-complicating everything, obscuring the key issue that an ordinary person (outsider) can follow and understand. Most people don't familiarise themselves with the past decade's court decisions and don't memorise many laws in a specialised domain. It's like a "secret language". They wanted to speak in terms I could not follow, based on references I never heard of (past cases).
I should also note that this seems consistent with their tactics of clogging up dockets and sending piles of papers (mostly with work that's not theirs) to scare or drown out the signal - a form of misinformation tactic. And throwing lots of papers at key people to cloud their judgement is what slop does - it uses volumes to overcome what's true, then it's hard to get back to simple facts.
People who resort to this may strut around like they've hit a homerun when in fact they just used a PDF merger to put together many pages or works of people other than themselves (sort of like LLMs that scrape works without authorisation and no proper attribution, disregard for licensing etc.) - that analogy goes a long way.
OOXML was about 6,000 pages - of course nobody read the whole thing! How were delegates meant to vote on something they never even read? Microsoft added bribes to that, which meant the voting got tarnished with white-dollar crime under ISO's watch.
People in their entire legal careers are not likely to have seen a ratio of about one page per 3 seconds of a hearing, which means that for a day-long (8 hours) hearing there would be close to 8,000 pages to go through.
I don't want to share screenshots of entire E-mails today, but it's quite revealing that not only did the Microsofters' lawyers stay late on Friday at the office (or WFH, i.e. home). Again after 8PM they sent out E-mails, so one might assume they worked until it almost got dark. It's like 10 of their people against me. 10 against one. They have law degrees. I don't.
See time below. Past 8PM UK time.
They didn't send all my messages to the Judge. Why would they play fair?
"Please include this correspondence as well," I told the Clerk, "as they omitted it."
At the end he could see what was really going on. I am pleased with the decision.
To scare me ahead of the Hearing the Microsofters' lawyers sent me by post not skeleton arguments (which would actually be useful) but instead a massive bill that they wrongly assumed I'd be made to pay. They had this fantasy. Now they have a write-off.
Microsoft has many internal issues, including a massive class-action lawsuit connected to the above.
7 hours ago a Microsoft leaker said about the upcoming wave of Microsoft layoffs: "This is MCAPS focused. They are making significant changes to the roles and alignments and flattening many management levels. Many will experience 10-15% reductions…some complete teams eliminated as Microsoft pushes focus to partners."
That they chose to pick on a man and his humble wife in Manchester (in a rather malicious way, too) for talking about Microsoft issues is revealing. Maybe focus on paying salaries to your staff, not feeding litigation against critics (a friend who saw this claimed it was classic "lawfare"). █