Gates Video To Be Made Public

A federal appeals court agreed Friday to make public the full three days of videotaped interviews of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates being questioned by government lawyers in the company's antitrust case.

During more than 13 weeks of trial, government lawyers have shown roughly eight hours of the interviews. The ruling means the rest of the video - about 12 hours' worth - will be made public.

The ruling also makes public dozens of depositions with other Microsoft (MSFT) executives and with leaders of other high-tech companies. There was no indication when any of the interviews will be made public. Some of the depositions include testimony about trade secrets that must be shielded from the public, so the interviews will likely be released in an abridged form following a review by their lawyers.

The ruling has no effect on the legal case against Microsoft.

The order requires that reporters and the public be allowed to attend any future depositions, said Jay Brown, a lawyer whose firm argued the case on behalf of several media organizations.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed an earlier decision by the trial judge, who reluctantly agreed last August that the deposition of Gates was open to the public under an obscure 1913 law.

Microsoft had quickly asked the appeals court to prevent reporters and the public from actually attending the three days of interviews with Gates at the company's headquarters.

The interviews proved highly embarrassing to Microsoft because Gates often professed to forget key events and appeared to evade questions he believed overly broad.

Earlier in the trial, when Microsoft complained about showing the video in the courtroom, the trial judge admonished the company's lawyer that, "If anything, I think the problem is with your witness, not with the way in which his testimony is being presented."

"I think it's evident to every spectator that, for whatever reasons, in many respects Mr. Gates has not been particularly responsive," U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said.

Gates himself bristled at use of the videotape in a telephone interview in November with The Associated Press.

"I answered every question, completely, truthfully through many, many, many long days," Gates said. "The fact that they're taking snippets out of that and holding them up without having me there because they chose not to call me as a witness, I think, is quite novel."

Microsoft had argued that opening the deposition to the public would lead to a "carnival atmosphere" and a "media circus."

The judge said he was bound by an 85-year-old federal law that covers depositions in antitrust lawsuits. The rarely used law says such depositions "shall be open to the public as freely as are trials in open court."