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SCO Amends Suit, Clarifies "Violations", Triples Damages
Bootsy Collins writes "This evening on C|Net contains three new items. First, they've upped the damages they're seeking to $3 billion. Second, they claim that by making SMP technology generally available through Linux, IBM violated federal export controls and thus breached their contract with SCO through committing an illegal act. Finally, they elaborate on one specific technology they claim rights to which IBM inserted into the 2.5 kernel series -- the
read-copy update memory management features which went in at 2.5.43.
Unclear is why SCO thinks they have the rights to RCU, since the technology was originally developed by Sequent in the early 1990s."
fp eat that, suckaz w00t w00t
first post
Damn, my ascii pen1s b1rd is missing...
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 16, 2003, 9:20 PM PT
SCO Group has upped the ante in an amendment to its suit against IBM, seeking more than $3 billion in damages for alleged copying of proprietary Unix intellectual property into Linux.
In March, SCO Group surprised the world with a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion against IBM in the case. An amended complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Utah added more claims against IBM, tripled damages to at least $3 billion, sought an injunction prohibiting IBM from selling Unix and detailed some accusations of technology moved to Linux.
SCO seeks at least $1 billion in damages from IBM's alleged breach of its contract with SCO; another $1 billion for breach of the Unix contract signed by Sequent, which IBM acquired in 1999; and another $1 billion for unfair competition. SCO also seeks more for misappropriation of trade secrets and punitive damages.
The amended suit also asserts that SCO holds copyrights to Unix, a point that could be key in future Linux and Unix litigation. Novell, which owned Unix intellectual property before selling it to SCO's predecessor, initially disputed SCO's ownership, but later relented.
However, the suit still makes no claims of copyright violation, which several independent attorneys believe could lead to stronger claims than that of trade secret infringement. After the Novell spat, SCO said it had not registered those trademarks. Independent attorneys say SCO must register the trademarks before basing legal action on them.
SCO has made no secret in recent months that it hired high-profile attorney David Boies to spearhead its case against IBM, but the company's legal representation in Utah courts is also noteworthy. The company retained Brent O. Hatch and Mark F. James of the law firm Hatch, James & Dodge. Hatch is the son of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a representative for SCO confirmed Monday.
The suit specifically blames Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds for allowing proprietary Unix code into Linux.
"As IBM executives know, a significant flaw of Linux is the inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code that comes in from those many different software developers. If source code is code copied from protected Unix code, there is no way for Linus Torvalds to identify that fact," the suit said. "As a result, a very significant amount of Unix protected code is currently found in Linux 2.4.x and Linux 2.5.x releases in violation of SCO's contractual rights and copyrights."
Torvalds said in an e-mail interview that the Linux developer community's process is transparent and called on SCO to reveal what its specific complaints are.
"It's not our side that isn't identifying the code. We'll work damn hard to identify everything they care to name," Torvalds said. "In fact, the source control system is out there in the public, and it identifies the source and the reason for patches," mentioning the BitKeeper repository he's used for the past two years to keep track of code in the heart, or kernel, of Linux.
Torvalds sided with IBM over what rights Big Blue has over its code. "IBM, as the original sole author to a particular piece of code, has full copyright rights, and they (not SCO) can use the code they wrote themselves in any way they see fit," Torvalds said.
In its amendment, the Lindon, Utah-based company toned down some of the language questioning the abilities
I already own
a b d e f g h i j k l m n p q r t u v w x y and z.
Know dat.
The parent was written by someone of such complete idiocy and impossibly bad grammar, that I will now wrap my head in a towel and yell war cries at Ted Kennedy.
Linux Kernel = Oil Wells
IP = WMD
The parent deserved a repost. Please mod the parent up. Not me. The parent was funny and very true. If they didn't post AC, they'd be on my friend's list now.
Un-news
Wow. You are an idiot. George Bush is EXACTLY like SCO. And like the original post said, George is an alcoholic who spouts off nonsense (like WMD) as well. It's a VERY apt analogy. Unless of course you've given into the Bush administration's brainwashing.
Un-news
You spell so badly you must be doing it on purpose.
Fucking asshole.
"They provide a pretty useful service to the public: demonstrating that the concept of intellectual property leads to poor results if applied in the manner shown by SCO. Intellectual property is a nice idea if used e.g. by an artist to protect her works from unauthorized altering, or if it helps an inventor to make a living. It is not if separated from the actual, individual creators of something; it is not if used to revoke transactions after the fact; it is not if applied to prevent people from tinkering with things they did buy. Now we have a showcase. Thank you, SCO! "
Translation: I like Linux. Therefore SCO must be wrong in accusing Linux of stealing their IP. If SCO were suing MS, you'd be applauding them. How this factually-void crap gets modded up, I'll never know.
Vote for Pedro
Why is it insane for SCO to protect their copyrighted work, but reasonable for GPLed code to enforce copyleft? I don't understand your logic. If I said I made some changes to linux and was selling it without releasing the source, people here would be up in arms. If SCO claims they were wronged in a similar manner, the lawsuit is frivolous. Slashdot logic makes no sense to me.
Vote for Pedro
Obviously Solaris v10 will be actually be Sun rebadged version of Linux! At which point IBM will probably sue Sun as it is has parts of IBM code in and as SCO can retroactively decide to that the code that they shipped under GPL is no really under the GPL. At some point, it will be shown that DEC misused trade secrets at some point and code which was misappropriated then made it's way into VMS which then somehow made it into NT and the only operating system that we can actually use is DOS.