The European Commission Wednesday announced it has “stopped the clock” on its anti-trust investigation into digital rights management software maker ContentGuard, a joint venture between Microsoft and Time Warner, pending further information on the deal.
The European Commission Wednesday announced it has “stopped the clock” on its anti-trust investigation into digital rights management software maker ContentGuard, a joint venture between Microsoft and Time Warner, pending further information on the deal.
A spokesman for competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said that the investigation into the joint venture had been frozen because a request for information to the two companies had not received an adequate answer. The Commission is the European Union’s executive branch.
The move was not linked to last week’s announcement that French electronics maker Thompson was becoming the third major investor in the project, the spokesman said. “Thompson is not the subject of our demand for information,” he said.
The participation of Thompson in the deal is widely seen as a strategy by Microsoft and Time Warner to head off the Commission’s concerns that ContentGuard might stifle the DRM market by blocking competitors’ access to its technologies.
According to people familiar with the case, the Commission told the two original investors that they must provide access to ContentGuard’s technology through a “free and open” licensing agreement.
The Commission spokesman commented: “We can’t say anything about the impact of (the) Thompson (deal) on ContentGuard because we haven’t had the details on the affairs concerned.”
