MS accused of 'global legal assault'

SEATTLE: Lindows Inc., the software maker embroiled in a trademark dispute with Microsoft Corp., filed a motion to stop what it called a "global legal assault," it said.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, "has used their monopoly profits to fund a global legal assault on our small company to halt the adoption of Linux," Michael Robertson, chief executive of San Diego-based Lindows.com, said in a statement.

Microsoft's trademark infringement lawsuit against Lindows.com, which distributes a variant of the Linux operating system that can be copied and modified freely, charges that the company chose its name in order to gain publicity from being associated with Microsoft's Windows operating system software, which runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.

The motion was filed to U.S. District Court of Western Washington Judge John Coughenour on Monday.

Lindows, which has halted operations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg after Microsoft obtained an injunction from a Dutch court that forbade it from using the Lindows name, said that it had to completely withdraw operations after receiving legal papers demanding that it pay a fine of up to 100,000 euros a day for failing to comply with an earlier court order.

"Lindows is infringing Microsoft's trademark in a number of countries around the world and Microsoft has a responsibility to take measures to protect its trademark internationally, just as we are doing in the U.S.," said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake, adding that Microsoft was "not asking any court, in the U.S. or internationally, to regulate this matter outside of their respective countries or jurisdictions such as the Benelux Court."

© Reuters