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SCO Files Response To Demand For Evidence
The Welcome Rain writes "SCO has posted its notice of compliance with the court order of December 12, which required them to produce evidence. The document itself is brief, but refers to a sixty-page supplement which lists the offending lines, and asserts that it can find more when IBM produces some of the evidence demanded of them by SCO. Millions of lines on sixty pages? How silly."
It says the supplement exceeds 60 pages. So we don't know the actual size.
On a side note, any legal reason why they would say "exceed 60 pages". Why not 50 pages, or 70 pages, or whatever?
There's a protective order on the case. I'm pretty sure that it applies to those 60 pages.
Check this out.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
It means that a party's attorney is not licensed to practice law in the state in which the suit is filed, but is so licensed in another state, and the party would like this attorney to help represent them. I believe at least one attorney for each party must be licensed in that state, but others need not be.
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
The judge was very specific in December. She demanded forthright and overwhelming examples of the offending code. She said she would not allow the case to move forward unless it was submitted. She further stated she would not compel IBM the task of providing all development and and beta data unless it was required to answer SCO's disclosure. 60 pages is not a sufficient brief to even outline the supposed infractions SCO is throwing about, let alone actual instances of IP theft! A divorce case can easily have a 200 page evidentiary outline! Unless there is more we aren't hearing about, there is a good chance this will not meet the court's demands and the case will be dismissed.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
INTERROGATORY NO. 1: seeks specific identification of all alleged trade secrets and confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges IBM misappropriated or misused. This information is requested by product, file and line of code.
INTERROGATORY NO. 2: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 2 seeks further identification of: (a) all persons who have or had rights to the same; (b) the nature and sources of SCO's rights in the same; and (c) efforts to maintain secrecy or confidentiality of the same.
INTERROGATORY NO. 3: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 3 seeks the identity of all persons to whom the same was disclosed and the details of such disclosure. In particular, this interrogatory seeks: (a) the date of disclosure; (b) the terms of disclosure; (c) the documents relating to disclosure; (d) all places where the trade secret and/or confidential or proprietary information may be found or accessed.
INTERROGATORY NO. 4: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 4 seeks information regarding each instance in which plaintiff alleges that IBM misappropriated or misused the same. In particular, this interrogatory seeks (a) the date of the alleged misuse or misappropriation; (b) the persons involved; c) the manner of misuse or misappropriation; and (d) the location of any method or code in any IBM product, Linux, open source or the public domain.
INTERROGATORY NO. 5: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 5 seeks identification of (a) all agreements relating thereto, and (b) all copyrights and patents relating thereto, including but not limited to the owners, licensors, licensees, assignors or assignees thereof.
INTERROGATORY NO. 6: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 6 seeks (a) the origin of the code or method, including where, when and by whom created; (b) all products in which the code or method is included or upon which it is based (in whole or in part).
INTERROGATORY NO. 7: seeks a description of each instance in which IBM allegedly engaged in unfair competition, including but not limited to: (a) the dates of such conduct, (b) the persons involved, and (c) the specific manner of unfair competition.
INTERROGATORY NO. 8: seeks the identification of all agreements with which IBM allegedly interfered, including but not limited to: (a) the date of interference, (b) the persons involved in the interference, (c) the manner of interference, (d) the actions (if any) IBM encouraged licensees to take, (e) the actions, if any, such licensees took as a result of IBM's inducement/encouragement, (f) the trade secret or proprietary information (if any) involved in the alleged interference.
INTERROGATORY NO. 9: seeks identification of all agreements that IBM has allegedly breached, including but not limited to: (a) the date of breach, (b) the persons involved, and (c) the specific manner of breach.
INTERROGATORY NO. 10: Separately, for each of plaintiff's claims for relief, please identify all persons (including but not limited to present or former employees of plaintiff or plaintiff's predecessors in interest) with knowledge relating to plaintiff's claims and contentions and the general nature of, or the categories of, facts known by each person.
INTERROGATORY No.11: Please identify all products ever marketed, sold or distributed by plaintiff or plaintiff's pred
ThisIsAnExampleAccountGL@yahoo.com
As the article said, SCO is waiting for IBM to supply the evidence. They like to do things back-to-front and inside-out at SCO.
I'm sure Darl and company also kick up a stink at the hardware store when the checkout boys won't assemble Darl's DIY storage rack.
from google The legal definition of pro hac vice is "for the particular occasion..."
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Sadly, that was filed privately. We may not get to see it until the upcoming hearing.
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
"for this occasion", in Latin (lawyer's 31334 $p3ak)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
IBM does have a countersuit and so does Red Hat
The sixty pages referred to in the original story are pages that SCO has promised to deliver to IBM when they get around to it.
Now, of course, the small font claim is something we shouldn't dismiss too lightly. SCO did originally try to meet its discovery obligations by providing IBM with something like 100 million lines of code printed out on paper.
As an engineer, I need to look at the edge conditions. Consider the case where the recipient already has a copy of the source code. The compression / decompression algorithm could be smart enough to say "Yup, that's it" and have the entire payload be "1" or "Nope, here's a gzipped version" and have the payload be a "0" followed by a general purpose compression payload. There are points in between that make this compression be specifically tuned but slightly more useful, for example, each paragraph gets its own fingerprint to follow a "1" and non-SCO paragraphs get bzipped, or whatever. In any event, it is not impossible to compress millions of lines of text onto 60 pages for any reasonably arbitrary font size when the programmer has adequate knowledge of the application.
Not that SCO will let any trained programmers worth their weight in carbon dioxide to look at the application conditions, but it was fun to think about.
Sadly!? JOY!!! There's still time for me to sell short!
You'd better be quick then. It looks like the downward spiral has already started.
While SCO undoubtedly should lose, it's also possible (however unlikely) that they will win. It all depends on how they present their case and what kind of understanding the judge has of the concepts involved. Just look at the cases Nintendo has brought against people who sell developement equiptment. (I realize this isn't exactly the same , but it's a similar idea). Nintendo claimed that 3rd party development tools violated copy protection on their GBA carts, of which there is none, except for the Nintendo logo which is required for a game to run. Now, according to the widely known Sega vs. Accolade case, that logo is fair game for anyone who wants to release an unliscenced game. The judge in that case obviously didn't understand the meaning of copyright protection, or was just having a bad day or something; but either way, Nintendo won, and Lik-Sang is no longer selling devcarts. There are many possibilities on what might happen, and SCO could (even though it's obvious to most of us that they won't) win. Just a thought...
You are obviously not a lawyer and/or you have no idea how the law works in practice. Discovery deadlines were meant to be broken. You can accuse someone of wrongdoing if you have adequate deposition testimony, which in this case appears to be present (RTFDocument). If you couldn't file a lawsuit until you had an airtight case against the defendant, not many lawsuits would be filed.
Monday's response included no examples of copyright violations, Stowell said. "We've not introduced copyright infringement as part of our case with IBM. We've tried to make it clear that it's a contract issue." From http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/01/13/HNscosho wscode_1.html
It's not a big problem, since in most OSS projects, the individual programmer usually retains copyright on the parts he wrote.
So, if he/she submits code that he/she does not have rights to, it is they who are liable, not the entire project.
This could be contrasted against a newspaper or magazine, where the contributing writers do not retain their copyright. That's why the newspaper is liable if a story turns out to be plagiarized.
(Note that in both cases, end users/subscribers are not liable, unlike what SCO seems to think)
Some OSS projects, like GNU and Apache, require you to sign over copyrights, like with newspapers, this makes them liable.
But at the same time, copyright releases usually entail that you agree that your work is original, thus giving them the ability to seek damages against you if you weren't truthful.
But in this particular case the 'discovery' is not really discovery as such but the defendant forcing the plaintif to actually reveal their true statement of claim in a form that makes it possible to actually mount a defense.
Courts tend to consider that type of issue rather more skeptically. You can dick arround making the other side perform makework for only so long before the court tells you to stop with the games and to start behaving in a manner that will allow the case to be set down for trial.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Well, at least the first hour covers the applicationm fee.
From http://www.azbar.org/AttorneyResources/pro_hac.cfm :
Applicants must pay a fee of $369.75 to apply for pro hac vice admission during the 2004 calendar year. Because the fee is computed at 85% of the fee assessed members of the State Bar of Arizona, the fee will increase as fees increase for members of the State Bar.
Yes, but SCO was ordered to do more than specify lines of code. They were ordered to provide a huge pile of information for each and every alleged infraction. We may not have access to SCO's response, but we do have access to the questions that they were supposed to answer. Take a look at interrogatories 12 and 13, for example:
That is a lot of information to provide for "each line of code." I would bet that in many cases 60 pages wouldn't even be enough to correctly document one infraction. And there are 11 other interrogatories that deal with entirely different aspects of the case. Each of these interrogatories likewise required huge amounts of information to correctly answer their demands. Handing over 60 pages is like submitting a Hello World program written in bash when asked to code an ERP program. It's so ridiculous that you almost have to invent a new word to correctly describe it.
The funniest part of the whole thing is that SCO apparently has paid their lawyers millions of dollars for their supposed "legal advice."
The problem is that we all have copies of this code already. The IP is question is already in the wild. PS SCOX stock price looks like it's taking a dive...
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
JFS2 wa first written for OS/2, and then was ported to AIX and Linux using the OS/2 code as reference.
So that makes SCO's argument that it is a UNIX derivived code pretty much moot.
And I think IBM followed a similar path woth RCU...
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Insightful? Whathehell? Another case of clueless moderation.
The order was to provide:
1) all alleged trade secrets and confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges IBM misappropriated or misused by product, file and line of code.
2) For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in 1: (a) all persons who have or had rights to the same; (b) the nature and sources of SCO's rights in the same; and (c) efforts to maintain secrecy or confidentiality of the same.
3) the identity of all persons to whom the [Confidential Information] was disclosed and the details of such disclosure. In particular: (a) the date of disclosure; (b) the terms of disclosure; (c) the documents relating to disclosure; (d) all places where the trade secret and/or confidential or proprietary information may be found or accessed.
4) [I]nformation regarding each instance in which plaintiff alleges that IBM misappropriated or misused the [Confidential Information]. In particular: (a) the date of the alleged misuse or misappropriation; (b) the persons involved; c) the manner of misuse or misappropriation; and (d) the location of any method or code in any IBM product, Linux, open source or the public domain. (emphasis added)
5) identification of (a) all agreements relating to [IBMs alleged infringement], and (b) all copyrights and patents relating thereto, including but not limited to the owners, licensors, licensees, assignors or assignees thereof.
6) [For each item SCO alledges was misappropriated]:(a) the origin of the code or method, including where, when and by whom created; (b) all products in which the code or method is included or upon which it is based (in whole or in part).
7) [A] description of each instance in which IBM allegedly engaged in unfair competition, including but not limited to: (a) the dates of such conduct, (b) the persons involved, and (c) the specific manner of unfair competition.
8) [I]dentification of all agreements with which IBM allegedly interfered, including but not limited to: (a) the date of interference, (b) the persons involved in the interference, (c) the manner of interference, (d) the actions (if any) IBM encouraged licensees to take, (e) the actions, if any, such licensees took as a result of IBM's inducement/encouragement, (f) the trade secret or proprietary information (if any) involved in the alleged interference.
9) [I]dentification of all agreements that IBM has allegedly breached, including but not limited to: (a) the date of breach, (b) the persons involved, and (c) the specific manner of breach.
12) [I]dentify, with specificity (by file and line of code), (a) all source code and other material in Linux (including but not limited to the Linux kernel, any Linux operating sytem and any Linux distribution) to which plaintiff has rights; and (b) the nature of plaintiff's rights, including but not limited to whether and how the code or other material derives from UNIX. (emphasis added)
13) For each line of code and other materials identified in response to 12, please state whether (a) IBM has infringed plaintiff's rights, and for any rights IBM is alleged to have infringed, describe in detail how IBM is alleged to have infringed plaintiff's rights; and (b) whether plaintiff has ever distributed code or other material or otherwise made it available to the public, as part of a Linux distribution or otherwise, and, if so, the circumstances under which it was distributed or otherwise made available, including but not limited to the product(s) in which it was distributed or made available, and the terms under which is was distributed or made available (such as under the GPL or any other license).
A response to any one of these requests should take more than 60 pages - 60 pages for ALL responses is totally out of touch with reality.
I agree that we have to wait until the judge and IBM have read the submission to know how *they* react, but it should be pla
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
You've taken two lines from different places in the song and stuck 'em together wrong. They don't even rhyme that way.
"So listen up bitch 'cause there may be a test, my style is smooth but it's hard to digest."
Ah yes, Grocklaw has it and some explanations of how it might be fought. But until it is broken it is unlikely that we will get access to the actual evidence.
I was under the impression, thanks to a Groklaw article, that you can't claim both copyright/patent AND trade secret. You use copyrights and patents to guarantee that nobody is allowed to duplicate your work because you are distributing said work in a very non-discriminating manner. (Giving it to anyone who will pay, basically) Filing a patent on something puts documentation on how it works in the public domain. For trade secret protection, you can't disitribute it unless you are discriminating about who you distribute it to. You also don't get the guarantee that nobody can duplicate your work. For example, the recipe for Coke is a trade secret, and anyone is allowed to buy a can reverse engineer it, and mass-produce the same thing for profit. The Coca-cola company doesn't distribute the recipe to anyone.
The Groklaw piece I read talked about the USL v BSD trial, and how USL tried to claim trade secret at one point, but were unable to prove they had distributed the code in a discriminating fashion. It also came out that since the code had been disitributed so long ago, it wasn't even copyrightable, which is a large reason why USL and BSD settled the case.