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SCO Fires back, Subpoenas Stallman, Torvalds et al
SirFozzie writes "SCO has just, within the past hour, announced that they have fired back against IBM's legal broadside, with one of their own, filing subpoenas against several of the biggest names in Linux. SCO filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta."
Don't worry, European courts have produced plenty of whoppers of their own -- German lawyers going on trademark jihads concerning trademarks they don't even own (Mobilix); British courts making it illegal to tell anyone that some servant saw Prince Charles and another man doing the nasty (whoops, now Slashdot will have to be banned in the UK!); French courts ruling that Google can't let a competitor use the AdWords feature to attach an ad to a search that mentions a competitor's name -- I could go on and on.
Stallman's precision is less than that of most members of the law profession. The legal system is quite used to Stallman's habit of precise definition and preambles of defining semantics before answering. That's how law works, and to a certain extent, is what constitutes law. The phrase "Intellectual Property" pisses Stallman off because it has no meaning, whereas "Patents, Copyright and Trademark", are three seperate concepts. In law, that's so true there are seperate law offices that work for each of the three... and using the phrase "intellectual property" without referring to one of those three in precision will get you laughed out of court.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Alan Cox will not travel to the US after Dmitry Sklyarov got arrested.
Just in case anyone is getting wrongheaded expectations of RMS and/or Linus appearing in a courtroom anytime soon, these subpoenas most likely are asking for either: a) depositions relative to discovery or b) specific documents, answers or background information relative to one of the issues being considered at trial. Nothing terribly exciting here, although it does make for a catchy headline.
I mention this because a number of posts speculate on "the GPL finally going to trial" or some such as a consequence of this. That may very well happen, but not as an immediate result of this. So those of you awaiting the "GPL Final Combat" should probably sheathe the swords for a little while longer...