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Report Claims SCO Intends to Charge IBM with Fraud
An anonymous reader writes "Now it gets interesting. According to this report, it looks as if SCO is preparing to accuse IBM of fraud, and has even opened up a web site to counter the runaway success of Groklaw. SCO's expensive attorneys Boies and Silver are apparently going to file a motion asking the court to unseal most of the documents that are currently under seal, in the hope that certain of IBM's e-mails will be seen by the outside world to tell a story about AIX, Dynix, and Project Monterey that implicates IBM in, well to be blunt, fraud. Groklaw is certain to have its own distinct view about this latest development of course."
Just a minor correction. Their website, actually very well done for a law firm, can be found at www.boies-schiller.com.
As a side note, I'm a law student and Boies Schiller is an interesting firm. They are one of the three highest paying firms in the country, with a first year starting salary of 140,000 per year as opposed to 125,000 for the majority of large law firms. They are headquartered in Armonk, NY as opposed to New York, NY.
David Boies is the premier partner. He left another high powered firm, Cravath, to start his own firm (Cravath is strangely enough representing IBM in this case). Since then, some say that Boies Schiller has become the cult of David Boies (hyperbole). I think that both his sister and brother have high management positions in the firm.
Regardless, from what I hear, Boies is one of the best litigators in the country. Cravath has good litigators too. This case will be well argued - and that is a good thing.
The summary links to the main page, whose "Read story" link doesn't work. Here's the link to the printer-friendly page that *does* work:
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46384_p.htm
Dismissal is when the suit is structurally flawed to begin with (e.g.: SCOX sued Novell for "Slander of Title" but didn't even allege one of the requisite elements for SoT.)
What you're talking about would be summary judgment: there's not even enough evidence that a jury would be needed to weigh it. Since it can take a while to develop evidence through discovery, motions for summary judgment generally wait until the case is well-developed.
IBM now is proceeding to file motions for summary judgment, based in large part on the fact that SCOX hasn't even tried to identify specific facts that would support a charge of either copyright infringement or contract violation.
Slow, frustrating, but like Juggernaught's Carriage it gets there eventually and regardless.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The OSI position paper has a good summary of the various meanings of "Unix" and why when people say that Linux comes from Unix they don't mean it in the legal, code-copying sense.
You can read the latest over at Groklaw. IBM's MIT computer scientist actually exists as opposed to $CO's mystery team.
Thats about the funniest thing I've read in a while. I had a heated discussion about this exactly a month ago. SCO spews drivel about copyrights to any news media that will listen to them anymore, then they have the gall to get up there in court and claim this has nothing to do with copyrights. Mcbride, the death bell tolls for thee.
You are implying that Linux was somehow built on the Unix source code, back in the really old days. This was simply not the case, and even SCO seems to stay away from saying otherwise. Linux has always been an independent development, merely inspired by Unix/POSIX. SCO has been saying that Unix sourcecode was introduced into the Linux kernel between version 2.4 and 2.6 (to improve multiprocessor scalability). This is very recent history and has nothing at all to do with the origins of Linux, more than 10 years ago.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This case will be well argued - and that is a good thing.
Not so far -- it's turning into a textbook case in "1001 ways to ruin a case." BSF has contradicted itself not only in its filings in different courts, but even in its filings before the Utah court. It's misrepresented the orders and findings of the Magistrate Judge to the District Judge, with the Magistrate's assistants present.
When Judge Kimball asked Mr. Frei (SCOX Counsel) to explain the contradictions between their filings in Delaware and their filings in Utah, he tried to change the subject. The Judge then pointedly demanded a responsive reply, whereupon Mr. Frei deferred to Mr. Silver as the expert on the Delaware case.
At this point Mr. Silver woke up, tried to change the subject, and finally simply declared that there was no contradiction -- not, as you may imagine, a response calculated to reassure a United States District Judge who'd already commented on those very contradictions himself.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Not quite. Last quarter SCO had $678,000 in SCOSource revenue ($709,000 YTD), finally putting on the books the EV1 deal as well as several others. Legal costs last quarter alone was $7.3m.
Much of the money paid so far came from cash reserves as well as the Baystar/RBC dealings.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
That's pretty clear. Judge Kimball is clearly telling SCO's attorneys that they need to present unambiguous evidence of copying, and soon. He's hinting to SCO that unless they come up with something good, he's going to grant IBM's summary judgement motions. He's giving them one last chance to do so.
This is a U.S. District Court judge. He has many other cases, most of them criminal. Here's his court schedule for the week. Sentencing hearings, plea bargains, and a few civil cases. He's not there to listen to SCO's lawyers stall forever. Federal civil procedure doesn't allow that.
I believe that here in Canada, there's a lot fewer frivolous lawsuits, since it's far easier to get losing sides to pay defendant's costs.
"The most common scale of costs is called partial indemnity, which means the successful party will receive approximately 40-50% of its legal costs from the unsuccessful party. Where one party's behaviour has been particularly egregious, the court may award a higher scale of costs, called substantial indemnity, which is in the range of approximately 70-80% of the actual costs incurred."
The courts also have the discretion to NOT award costs, particularly if they feel that the losing claim was legitimate but failed on technicalities, or if there is substantial economic disparity. In the case of SCO, I'm fairly sure that IBM would ask for substantial indemnity.
For more details, check this.