Slashdot Mirror
SCO Adds Copyright Claim to IBM Suit
An anonymous reader writes "News.com.com reports that the SCO Group has significantly widened its Unix and Linux lawsuit against IBM,
adding a copyright infringement claim to the already complicated case." There's also another story discussing the copyright claims.
SCO's lawyers are practicing the tried & true method of Throw Enough Shit Against the Wall and Some of It Will Stick.
They know it's a poor case they have so they keep adding more and more claims to their position along with the necessary bravado stupid investors have come to love.
Trolling is a art,
If we apply that standard to /., wouldn't 99.9% of the stories go away? How many of them start with "NYTimes is reporting... According to CNN.com..."
The problem is that if someone were to actually buy SCO, it would set a dangerous precedent and other failing compaines would be sure to follow.
No the only way to put an end to this is to make sure that SCO goes down in a ball of fire that can be seen around the world.
So now they want to claim extra damages for an infringement of "registered" copyright when the registration was filed after the lawsuit? IANAL but this really seems like grasping at straws, otherwise this would always happen in a copyright dispute to get the extra damages.
Plus, doesn't this now potentially get them in trouble with Novell who claims that the copyrights are still theirs? Criminal plagiarism, anybody?
This just seems like another tactic to stall their case. Personally, I believe that there is something more sinister than just a dying company in its death throws here. The longer this goes on, the more damage being done to Linux and open source in general. Obviously, when they finally have to account for any of their claims they will quickly lose, but the longer they can take to prevent that the better (if you support my hypothesis).
My guess is they'll go to court and say "Your honour, you asked us to provide these documents to IBM before the case could continue, however since that ruling we've ammended our suite and would ask that we can push back that date as a result."
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Suppose some terrorists took innocent hostages in order to exchance them for known terrorists in prison, and demanded an exchance. If we actually went though with the exchance, it would be a short term good at a severe long term cost when more groups of innocent people are taken hostage by other groups.
Buying out the SCO would encourage more bad behaviour. Better to stick this through, no matter what the cost. It may be messy in the short term, but in the long term it will dissuade this sor tof behaviour.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.
It's obvious that SCO is not only wanting to raise its stock price, but it's hoping to be bought out by some of the bigger fish out there to possibly placate them.
Let's hope Microsoft doesn't clue into this. Their best strategy right now might be to buy out SCO (along with their IP claims) and just throw an insane amuont of money and lawyers into these lawsuits. If a tiny flea like SCO can create this much FUD, imagine what MS could do.
Awww c'mon now, /. is not really a news site in the same way that CNN is a news site- it's an aggregation of news stories FROM places like CNN and NYT. The reason it exists to funnel stories that are interesting to the geek community, and give them a forum to discuss them. And the occasional editorial/review/whatever.
The object of /. really isn't to scoop real news sites, so quit whining about it!
teeker
Actually, for this to be a proper example, there also needs to be an attachment of Darl's private fortunes. If the CEO can get away with his pockets full, then it isn't much of an example. If a company is dying, the CEO doesn't care about the company, he cares about himself. So unless you ensure that HE has to pay, you haven't discouraged copycats very effectively.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
MS won't buy. If they did, they'd purchase the legal liabilities as well as the benefits. And then IBM would dig in for damages. And lots of contingency lawyers would start courting everyone who ever contributed anything to the kernel. And every company that did consulting in Linux.
No. There was a good reason that MS wanted this kept at arms length. If they wanted closer ties, they could have had them cheaply a year ago. (All they needed to do is offer to guarantee 4 profitable quarters and Darl would have done nearly anything.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
SCO's case is completely falling appart.
Apparently, the new copyright claim is that IBM continued to distribute AIX even after SCO "terminated" their license.
In other words, the copyright claim doesn't have anything to do with the alleged copying of code from SysV to Linux.
Additionally, SCO responded to IBMs interrogatory (asking which Linux files SCO claims any rights to) by listing only 17 files (and not identifying specific lines in those files) and indicating that none of these 17 files contain code from SysV.
I really expected them to do much better. I don't see how IBM can be ordered to proceed with discovery given existing case law. (Although it seems like IBM might voluntarily produce information so they can limit SCOs avenues of appeal.
I like this quote from Groklaw:
One of the SCO lawyers "...went on to claim that they have identified 400 million lines of Unix code and 300 million lines of Linux code affected, but also admitted that SCO has not submitted everything required by the court order."
Where did they find 300 million lines of Linux code to begin with, much less 300 million infringing lines?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
They might run out of money first... then they have to start selling the Linux and Unix again.
Who'd buy it from them?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Report on SCO's Compliance With the Court's order sums up the whole fiasco pretty well I think. It's a line from Paragraph 5:
Duh! And Darl wants $5 Billion for this?!?! For what exactly? I can't wait for the stomping to commence.
I think you are correct that everyone is missing the trick, but you are wrong if you think SCO is holding out to pull some magic trump card for a climactic finish.
I think what everyone is missing is that SCO is trying to say that SCO owns UNIX, UNIX=AIX, AIX=LINUX, therefore UNIX=LINUX and SCO owns LINUX.
And the way they are trying to state this is by saying that IBM signed a contract with SCO that says "we will let you look at our SCO code and in return any code you develop from then on belongs to us as a derivitive work".
They have stated this over and over in many different ways, however, I suspect that they haven't come right out and stated it in a simple way because anyone who saw the simple truth of their arguement would be astonished at the absurdity.
So you see, the reason SCO wants all the AIX code is not because there is SCO code in linux but because they believe that IBM copied IBM AIX code into linux. That is the copyright violation. And SCO is hopeful that everyone will ignore the fact that its IBM code developed and paid for by IBM and somehow fall for their asinine logic of "all your code belong to us".
Anyhow, its sure fun to watch IBM trash SCO's lawyers in court and show no sign of giving quarter.
burnin
Maybe if the media (cough cough) stops reporting (ad nauseum) every little brain fart out of Lindon, Utah, it will foil SCO's pump and dump strategy and they'll go away. The S/N on Slashdot has been steadily going downhill over the last couple of years, but the daily regurgitation of SCO FUD has been making it worse. Can you report on something else for a change? Pretty please with sugar on top?
Eclipse, Jikes, i8n support libraries used in Xerces among others, and a LONG list of other projects, a ton of Linux contributions (JFS, for instance).... Just to mention a few. IBM have released more code as open source than most software companies produce during their entire existence.
'Cuz you sure aren't talking about the IBM I know. IBM giving an asset away isn't poetic. I'd call it heart-stoppingly unimaginable.
;-)
Start imagining. IBM wouldn't be in this mess if it hadn't started giving away (well, GPLing at least) some of it's assets.
Some of the entries on those lists are a lot more advanced than SCO's code (compare IBM's NUMA contributions to the malloc version SCO was whining about under NDA, for example), too. At least a few prominent divisions of IBM see that open source isn't necessarily "IBM giving away an asset", but can often be "IBM adding value to their services and hardware". In the case of giving away Unix, it would be "IBM removing a perceived risk of their services and hardware".
You're right that this isn't the way IBM used to behave, and it's probably not the way every IBM executive would like to behave now. But is a way that they've started to behave, and it isn't implausible to hope that they'll continue. If you want implausible, you could consider that IBM's changes today give us hope for a changed Microsoft sometime in the future.