An internal investigation this week confirmed that court employees posted the Microsoft rulings to a location on the court's Web site they believed was inaccessible to the public, said Scheldon Snook, the administrative assistant to Thomas Hogan, the chief U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia.
But anyone with a Web browser could read the documents without a password. Technicians could have made that location effectively invisible to visitors with a simple change to their computer software.
"In the future, we're probably going to keep any opinions like this secure until the time they're released," Snook said. "We looked into it, and we determined that the opinion wasn't leaked by staff. Our secure systems weren't compromised by a hacker."
The court's mistake last week coincided with a flurry of late-day trading of Microsoft's stock. Its price, which had been falling most of Friday, immediately ticked upward within moments after employees placed the decision -- which handed Microsoft a huge victory -- on the court's Web site.
Late-day trading peaked just five minutes before markets closed, when $90 million worth of Microsoft shares exchanged hands.
Snook said Thursday that the court's technical experts still were reviewing electronic logs, which would show details about the Internet users who initially found the decisions.
Securities experts said, because the documents were available publicly, that there was no risk U.S. regulators would consider the decisions mistakenly posted by the court to be insider information.
"Something taken off the court's Web site would be difficult to characterize as nonpublic," said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor. "There's no question. They could certainly argue that they believed it was available to anyone."
Judges are not obligated to wait until the closing bell before they disclose rulings that might affect the price of publicly traded companies, although the previous Microsoft trial judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, favored rulings after 4 p.m. on Fridays.
"They're not guided in any way," said Karen Redmond, a spokeswoman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "This is all new territory."
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had intended to provide individual, printed copies of her decisions to Microsoft and government lawyers at 4 p.m., and then make her decisions available publicly on the court's official Web page a half-hour later.
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