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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."
How is it that you managed to be the first post AFTER browsing the linked site, supposedly noticing a slowdown, browsing to slashdot "coincidentally" seeing this link....
Hmmm....
Is this like how old people can feel the rain in their bones? Can you feel a slashdotting?
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?
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.
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. =====
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?
unix is made out of PEOPLE... PEOPLE!!
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.
Groklaw accused Maureen O'Gara of lying about the court proceedings a while back, so I guess now we'll find out what really happened.
More specifically, Pam Jones on Groklaw pointed out that what Maureen O'Gara said happened either (a) did not happen, or (b) happened behind a screen so that no one in the audience could see it, and that (c) the transcript was sealed, so that O'Gara could not have found out what was said from the transcript. Finally, (d) what O'Gara says happened contradicts other things that the audience did see.
This does not mean that O'Gara was necessarily wrong, but it does mean that either the other people in the audience weren't paying atention, or O'Gara was provided with information that she shouldn't have been provided with, or O'Gara simply made it up.
Your second paragraph is taken completely out of context. Jones is, and says so, happy about seeing more documents become unsealed:
What Pam was laughing at was the "extra" information in the request that the judge is likely not to take very well. Such as telling the judge, in the request, what the significance of the case is.
Jerry
Groklaw appears to be slow, so here's relevant portions of the article you linked to:
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A Bit of the Blarney -- or Worse? -- About "Lost" Code
Saturday, October 23 2004 @ 03:38 PM EDT
It used to be funny pointing out mistakes in reporters' stories.
But when a reporter prints something that isn't just misinformed but hurtfully inaccurate, I think it's more serious. As you likely know, Maureen O'Gara printed a story about what allegedly was said in the last court hearing between IBM and SCO. That, in and of itself, is ethically problematic, to me, since the court ordered the transcript sealed. The source of her "information" would be whom, would you guess?
It wouldn't surprise me if IBM follows up on that aspect of the matter. I would.
Groklaw had eyewitnesses at the hearing. None of them reports seeing Ms. O'Gara there. Furthermore, none of them heard what she "reports" about IBM supposedly claiming not to be able to find code it was supposed to turn over. Let me repeat that. IBM never said anything like that, according to our eyewitnesses. I absolutely can tell you that the O'Gara story does not match what they heard. They also told me that the screen was placed in such a way that no one in the audience could see it. How then does Ms. O'Gara know what was shown on the screen?
Nor does it make any sense. For starters, IBM said at the hearing that they have produced all the code they have been ordered to produce to date. They have produced all released versions of AIX which they were told to turn over. That isn't even in dispute. The hearing was about whether IBM should now be required to produce more code, now that SCO couldn't find any infringing code in the millions of lines it already received. The judge hasn't decided that issue. Second, SCO's Third Amended Complaint has not yet, to my knowledge, been accepted by the court. Even if we posit that it will be, IBM has not yet even answered it, let alone been found in violation of anything having to do with it or even been accused of such.
I therefore conclude that Ms. O'Gara has been provided with some misinformation, or she has decided to spread a bit of the Blarney sua sponte.
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