Gates’ Antitrust Trial Video
It's not "Girls Gone Wild" or even a compilation of "Cops," but the 11-DVD collection of Bill Gates' 1998 antitrust trial deposition…
It's not "Girls Gone Wild" or even a compilation of "Cops," but the 11-DVD collection of Bill Gates' 1998 antitrust trial deposition now for sale on eBay may be just the thing for the geek who has everything. Little Rock, Ark. resident Dave Mitchell is selling the DVDs, which contain 17-plus hours of videotaped testimony of the then-president of Microsoft prior to the opening of the U.S. Department of Justice's case, U.S. v. Microsoft. The deposition, which Mitchell touts on his eBay listing as "an un-rehearsed and un-censored Bill Gates answering hundreds of probing questions," was used during the trial by the government, which played selected clips from it at several points. Media reports written during the trial commented on Gates' ability to draw out the questioning by challenging the meaning of such words as "concerned" and his repeated inability to remember events. "I think its evident to every spectator that, for whatever reasons, in many respects Mr. Gates has not been particularly responsive to his deposition interrogation," said the presiding judge, Thomas Jackson, during the trial. Much of Gates' deposition was devoted to going over e-mails and conversations with other Microsoft executives about potential plans to block Sun (for its Java) and Netscape (for its Navigator browser, then the leading browser). At one point, Gates claimed that in 1995, he had "no sense of what Netscape was doing." (A text transcript of the deposition can be found on the Department of Justice's Web site.)