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Microsoft Legal Documents To Be Destroyed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-probably-just-some-unimportant-stuff dept.

el-schwa writes "The Salt Lake Tribune has a story that talks about the old Micrsoft vs. Caldera anti-trust lawsuit. During the trial Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to get 937 boxes of controversial documents kept private. Now it appears that Caldera is no longer interested in paying for storage on the boxes, and they are scheduled to be destroyed."

11 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. why not make them electronic documents? by Numeric · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't believe a "tech" company would not convert these documents into some electronic form.

    Scan -> Save -> ? -> Profit

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    -- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
  2. Ill chip in 20 bucks for a good cause. by Unknown+Poltroon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    SOmeone feed em through a sheet feed scanner.

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    All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
  3. Obligatory 1984 comparison by infornogr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building."

    1. Re:Obligatory 1984 comparison by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 5, Informative

      Dude, you just violated copyright!

      Christ. Just because there's so much misinformation out there, and just in case some ignorant and innocent soul takes you seriously, let me clear this up.

      Title 17 of the United States code defines fair use rights in chapter 1, section 107. It says, in part and in summary, that you can make fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and comment as long as you use only a small fraction of the work. Infornogr's quoting of 1984 was not a violation of copyright under United States law, or the law of any other country signatory to the Berne Convention.

      And clonebarkins, you're not funny.

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      I write in my journal
  4. Hilarious by 4of12 · · Score: 3

    how quickly Microsoft and its antagonists can get worked up by someone lazily and recklessly waving about the possibility that some old dirty laundry is about to disappear...

    IIRC, there have been some funny stories about shredders running long into the night at various places and times (Arthur Anderson's Enron task force, the McDougal's savings and loan, Iran Contra, etc.) Probably a lot more that I'm missing.

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    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  5. Garage@Home by skookum · · Score: 4, Funny

    Time for a new distributed computing project, Attic@Home, where you donate a bit of spare storage area to put some boxes...

  6. just imagine how much they'd get for them... by The_Guv'na · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...on Ebay!

    Just auctioning them page by page would generate megabucks. Just think about it... Some loons will pay a premium for every page from a file just to make sure it was complete, or just for a single page on the off chance it contained some real gem of info that really gets up Microsoft's arse :)

    1. Obtain, modify, and release a free OS.
    2. Flog legal docs on Ebay.
    3. Profit!

    Ali

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    Ph33r m3!!!
  7. You want 'em? Take 'em! by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't get on Caldera's ass because they don't want to pay to have the stuff stored. They're willing to turn them over. Bug the EFF or someone to go pick 'em up. I'm sure they'll turn out to be very interesting.

  8. 'nuff said by tchdab1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Caldera claimed the helter-skelter of "confidential" stamps on hundreds of documents appeared to have been "done by monkeys." That explains the code too.

  9. Heh, 900+ boxes...??? by pdboddy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That would take a bit of time to scan, since I didn't see mention of how big the boxes are. There could be hundreds of thousands of pages... I know I wouldn't want to do that amount of scanning, even for the overtime. =P And it definitely wouldn't be a small amount of space electronically either...

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    Julie Moult is an idiot.
  10. scanning that much stuff by phr2 · · Score: 4, Informative
    I have some experience with scanning piles of paper. For about $5K you can get a production scanner that does 100 pages/minute or so. That means these 3 million pages would take 30,000 minutes or 500 hours to scan, about 12 weeks full time, assuming you could keep the scanner running flat out, which in my experience is not easy. The work is not very demanding but it's tedious. Despite the automated equipment you're constantly shuffling paper around and there tends to be a lot of pauses in scanning.

    At $10/hour (salary+overhead for some clerical type in a low-wage state) that's about $5K in labor, plus the hardware. Plus there's the matter of 900 boxes of paper--a full trailer load, so another several K$ to get it delivered to where it's being scanned, plus then you have to store it. Overall, you're looking at $15-20K minimum to scan this stuff. It's sort of possible some organization is interested enough to throw that much cash around. I can't see many individuals willing to do it.