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Judge Petitioned To Unseal SCO-IBM Court Records
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw is reporting that Maureen O'Gara has applied to the judge to open all and any filings or transcipts that till now have been sealed by the Utah district court hearing the SCO Group's $5 billion suit against IBM. Groklaw's Pamela Jones notes that 'O'Gara believes the public can't understand the case, because of the sealing' and some of the Groklaw.net members seem to agree that, that since in the U.S. any citizen has a right to review court records in order to monitor the performance of a judge, that O'Gara's 'motion to intervene' will most likely succeed." An anonymous reader writes that Jones last night said of the request "that she is 'of two minds' about the filing: 'I'm crazy wild to read everything. But on the other hand, the court and the parties wouldn't seal things without a reason that seems good to them. I believe in privacy, personally, and I don't think the public has a "right" to know everything.' The legal filing to unseal everything has not yet become available via Pacer."
Just because someone sues you....that doesn't mean that all of your private information and trade secrets should become public information.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
We still know nothing about what SCO allegeds was stolen. If we knew, the Open Scource community could remove and rewrite offending parts in a few months. (I guess, IANA programmer) Why are people proud that FUD is the only thing they can produce?
I believe a portion of the public (many of whom are here) understand that SCO's case is ridiculous. Really it's just the extent of the ridiculousness that's being sealed off right now.
The part of the public that doesn't understand the case is not going to read these documents anyway. This would however allow experts to analyze the case more effectively, which will in turn benefit the general public's understanding of the case. All in all though, you've got to be in favor of these documents being opened up.
Your tax dollars are also hard at work doing things like fighting terrorism and hunting down child rapists. Perhaps we should publicly publish all of this info as soon as it is available as well?
Have you ever thought that perhaps they have a reason for this? And that maybe even that reason is favoring your hero in this battle? Probably not, but just bringing up the idea.
This may shock you, but it's not all about you. While I'm unable to comment about the particulars of THIS case, there's lots of information that comes up in court that's none of anyone's damn business but the parties involved.
Never confuse volume with power.
If I wanted to make your confidential material public, all I'd need to do is launch a spurious lawsuit and then have a journalist ask for it. Then it's all public knowledge. Courts seal stuff for a reason, and part of the stuff at issue in this case is IBM's proprietary software.
Do your "tax dollars" entitle you to peruse IBM's source code? And do IBM's tax dollars entitle them to peruse yours?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The point is that your tax dollars don't entitle you to IBM's trade secrets, or SCO's for that matter.
Just because they have to reveal these things to the judge in order to resolve their dispute doesn't mean that you automatically are entitled to the product of their work.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
But various new sources have mentioned that Ms. Jones resigned from OSRM because SCO had systematically smeared her participation in that organization. No hard feelings between her and SCO could have crept into any of her announcements about that fine purveyor of THE Unix OS.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Some records should be sealed. For instance, if evidence is brought up in a trial that represents a trade secret (the formula for some bizarre compound, for instance) no one needs to be looking at it outside the trial.
The records sealed in the SCO case, of course, probably have nothing to do with anything important and will simply be used to try and smear IBM. I kind of want to see them, but I also realize there's not going to be anything there.
Bother. I am so sick of this case and all the empty threats.
M
I worked at a law firm 4 years ago (in their IT department) and the whole legal system wrt this filing has confused me a lot. I always thought that trials were supposed to be public, but that certainly doesn't seem the case anymore. As of 2000, you had to have some sort of ID or know someone with an ID to get into a courthouse (and if you were coming as a guest of someone with an ID, you had to go through a security check, where as they could just walk in). It seems like most cases you hear about are closed to the public, and occationally the judge will allow some sort of video feed out to the press. It doesn't really bother me all that much because I don't have a huge interest in going and watching a bunch of trials, but I don't ever want to be put in a position where I'm tried for something and nobody is allowed to know anything about the case (as has happened to certain 'enemy combantants' in the last couple of years).
Whatever. It seems like judges are allowed to do whatever they want in their courtroooms, and no other branch of government gets to keep it in check (after all, an appeal judge will support his buddy judge in an appeal of a judicial decision).
In this case, I feel like the information should be made public, mostly because I think it would be great for the public to see that SCO's case is baseless and help clear the name of Linux before decision-makers decide to choose something other than Linux. I also don't see the point of making this case so private, there doesn't seem to be any sort of really good reason to make a case private (strong mafia/mob witness protection type issues, etc.). So, let's hope this filing succeeds.
Many comments here seem to ignore the fact that this is a civil, not criminal, suit. SCO is suing IBM; the only part the government plays is in providing the judge and courtroom. Why should information be released, just because it is involved in a court case? If you could force someone's private information to be leaked to the public merely by suing them for something, the right to privacy would be severely threatened. Is this what we really want?
Your tax dollars became their tax dollars when you paid them. We don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic.
Those dollars pay for a practical version of justice -- through the courts -- not for the right to see whatever you want. Your tax dollars pay for medicare hospital visits across the country, but nobody thinks you're allowed to storm into the hospital and demand medical records for everyone that paid anything but cash.
I'm not dumb enough to think that funding the battling of two hulking companies are the same as somebody's medical records, but in this case, they probably reached an agreement in order to protect trade secrets, privileged communications, and so on.
Recently, courts have taken to imposing publication bans (Read: You've got a right to know, but to exercise it, you'll have to line up for a seat in person, not send your representative, the press), or to sealing documents at the request of either counsel.
I'm of the opinion that, in all but the rarest of cases, the public's right to know what sort of justice is being done in their name trumps parties' desire for secrecy.
I'd like to see the details of all settlements made public, none of this crap about parties using our courts to compel counterparties to agree to secret settlements.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
would you be so good as to post your last seven tax returns, your drivers liscense, and the titles to any cars and property you own? I know that my tax dollars were used to process those documents, and I have a right to know.
PJ 'blogs' the facts, albeit sometimes with a fierce preserve for open source, but nevertheless, the FACTS.
The other news sites 'report' what they decide is 'news', and that 'news' can be swayed by whatever/whoever is paying them to say it.
I have been a posting member of Groklaw for ages now, and I damn well trust an ex-paralegal to investigate and 'blog' the truth, rather than any news reporter ANYTIME.
PJ has done the world of 'IANAL' geeks proud - and I would even say without a doubt without PJ and her blog, the SCO FUD would have worked and we would all be in the shit.
Get the Windows source code entered as evidence, then get it unsealed, same as this case.
Sometimes confidentiality is necessary.
Sometimes confidentiality is timely
Perhaps what we're really missing is a review process to determine what needs no sealing, what can be unsealed post-trial, what remains sealed through the appeals process, and what should remain trade secret.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Its really funny that you people should mention rape victims considering the sort of public humiliation they tend to go through should they successfully press charges.
That's my point. Sometimes privacy is a good thing in regards to court cases.
I don't respond to AC's.
Second: PJ states that she is torn on this current issue. She would love to be able to read all the documents (including the ~35 that are sealed out of 2-300 that have been filed), but she also sees that merely having someone file a malicious court case shouldn't automatically remove all your right to privacy.
Third: Groklaw isn't just about the facts, and nothing but the facts; it's also about analysis of the facts. But the cool thing about Groklaw is that the facts are there to support the analysis, and if you can make a case that the same facts support a different interpretation, they will listen. They may not agree, but they will listen.
Fourth: Your particular quote has a context, which you didn't provide. The context is that O'Gara stated, "SCO's suit claims IBM improperly incorporated aspects of SCO's Unix operating system in Linux. If proved, it could derail the Linux market and take the open source movement down with it." Well, that statement is in a PR release about filing a motion, not in the motion itself. It also has the problem of not stating how, exactly, even if the Linux kernel goes down in the SCO lawsuits, it will take the whole open source movement with it. OS is much more than the Linux kernel; it's also Apache and gcc and BSD and...
But the point of PJ's comment is that the SCO lawsuits seem almost designed to damage the open source movement, by spreading as much FUD as possible for as long as possible. Note the absense of any concrete claims that can be verified, the presense of lots of widely publicised vague claims that can't really be nailed down, and the constant manipulation of the courts to prevent any concrete judgments from being handed down.
PJ's point, then, is that O'Gara's comment shows what the real game is. (Given her other comments, I don't think PJ is very worried about the judge not getting it, however.)
This is just FUD, served up as a news story by a person with a very public agenda. I am sure that Maureen does not expect to see the evidence. She just wants to make a lot of noise about it.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?