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Judge Calls SCO On Lack of Evidence
Rob writes to mention a CBR article on Judge Wells' assessment that SCO just hasn't made its case against IBM in the well-known and long-lasting legal battle. The magistrate called the lack of evidence inexcusable. She further likened their claims to a shoplifter being handed a catalog for a store after being stopped, and being told 'what you took is in there somewhere, figure it out.' From the article: "In the view of the court it is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all the evidence... on the table' ... given SCO's own public statements... it would appear that SCO had more than enough evidence to comply with the court's orders." Groklaw has coverage of the decision, and the complete text from the judge. Update: 06/30 15:14 GMT by Z : This story bears more than a passing resemblance to this one from Wednesday. Sorry about that.
This case was lost in the public court of opinion long ago, I'm kind of surprised it's even still going on. Apparently the judge is of the same mind.
Too bad Darl and friends have already made their millions from SCO's little stock kiting scheme, but it'll at least be a small comfort to see SCO finally begin to implode. I think I'll be checking the Salt Lake Tribune (I live here) for the eventual bankruptcy sale... maybe buy one of their logoed signs and mount it on a trophy plaque. (well, a man can dream, can't he?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You can see lots of insightful comments in the other story about this.
This case was a complete waste of time and effort. Hopefully they will disappear into the woodwork never to be seen or heard from again. Quite pathetic that it went on this long.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I thought that US law requires the defendant to provide reasonable amount of evidence in order to get a court case started in the first place.
This case is still going on?
I thought SCO lost a long time ago.
Technoli
SCO _have_ made their case. Specifically, they've effectively gone "our case is extremely weak and you should throw it out."
They can do this because their aim was to encourage investment in SCO (both via share buying and directly from coMpanieS willing to support anything that might weaken IBM), not to win a case.
If only all litigants were so forthright. Three cheers for these latter-day Washingtons!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
No, it's more like a store manager stopping someone who owns a competing business leaving the store, accusing them of shoplifting with no proof of anything being stolen, and then giving them the catalog to sort it out simply to harass them and take up their time.
Seeing SCO capsize, dozens (hundreds?) of competent if obsolete UNIX hackers thrown out of work, with yummy parachutes for all the top-level blokes who dreamed up the Awesome strategy of trying to sue Linux out of existence, or at least make it look like a platform with hairy legal issues attaching to it. I hyperbolize only a little bit when I say this is almost an Enron-type scam.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
What you may have missed is that SCO's parent company released a lot of source code under the GPL- and once released they can't 'unrelease it' later. As a result it was perfectly legal to use a lot of those files in Linux. Besides, don't you think that SCO would have shown this source code to the Judge if they had a case at all?
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
And I agree it's sad that a co. can game the system this much for this long, without providing detail about the alleged wrongdoing. It's basically a Gitmo approach to suing.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Fuck off, troll.
Since nobody outside SCO except perhaps the MoGTroll, Didiot, and a few people who were paid to look at it, have seen it, I call bullshit - or should I say backinfullforce-shit.
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Both SCO and Linux can legally take anything they want from the BSD code base - so they would have the exact same comments, etc.
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The LKP module that SCO had to yank is a good indication that copying went from Linux to SCO Unix, and not vice versa;
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Header files? Sure, for things like POSIX, they WOULD be the exact same. No copyright infringement.
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Those "millions of lines of code" in Blepp's suitcase seem to have disappeared.
Stock scam. That's all it ever was, after the extortion attempt failed.128 foot notes? Curious.
Coincidence? I think not...
aj.
Anybody here think that this resembles some guy dealing with his girlfriend/wife who is mad at him..
Him: What did I do?
Her: You know what you did, and if you don't know, I'm not telling you.
So if even the court believes that SCO has abused the legal system for unfair gains - will there be any punishment for that? Can the judge declare such punishment or does it have to go through a seperate case? Does the court system even have a way to send the message that it doesn't like being abused?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In quick summary, SCO did not provide line number, VERSION and FILE information for many of it's claims. Some of their claims they did not even find source code for (roughly 2/3rds of claims). IBM warned them very early on that if they didn't receive these specifics, they would seek court intervention.
SCO also claimed that "methods and concepts" do not need source code to back them up. However, the Judge decided that this was incorrect and that methods and concepts could, in the most basic of terms, be boiled down to source code. Even the SCO technical witnesses attested to this, and furthermore SCO repeatedly requested the SAME LEVEL of specificity from IBM when requestiong source codef regarding AIX, LINUX and other products throughout the trial.
Basically the Judge finds it unacceptable that even though SCO has had since 2003 to substantiate it's claim with LINE, FILE and VERSION numbers for each claim, it has failed to do so.
I would now like to see the SEC and/or the major SCO stockholders (non-MS obviously) hold the executive team accountable for this major company loss of money, business, and most of all CREDIBILITY in the technology market. Those Linux-using companies that SCO intimidated into buying indemnity licenses should further pursue legal action to get their costs back, with punitive damages to boot.
In my mind, this strategy of theirs fits right in line with the same kind of covert accounting strategies that Enron/Worldcom/etc were investigated for, where the EXECUTIVES themselves were held accountable to the tune of big $$$ and jail time.
Let me introduce you to my very own DMCA-protected encryption key: BC 1B 64 4A 8D DE 49 E8 C3 7D CC EE 1A AD EE
Don't go away mad. Just go away.
Do the math:
SCO = (SUCK)!
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
Only Microsoft's contribution had positive impact on 95% of the world's PC users ....
My Starcraft 2 Blog
The shoplifting analogy isn't quite there.
Actually, it's as if you walked out of Neiman Marcus, a security guard accused you of shoplifting, and then refused to tell you what you shoplifted.
Then, the guard pulls over his buddy, respected Yankee Group Laura Didio. She looks in your bag, then looks at the Neiman Marcus catalog, and announces on national media that you have stolen something from Neimann Marcus but she won't say what it is.
Three years later, during trial, the guard is still unable to explain what you stole from the store.
The real tragedy here is that a gang of crooks are able to game the legal system and drag on a bogus lawsuit for years and years. How many small business owners or private individuals could afford to defend against a legal claim - any legal claim - where the opponene, even though his case had no basis in fact, was ready to litigate for YEARS.
So I applaud the Judge in this case (I think) and IBM for having the backbone to stand up to the SCO thugs. But we're all losers here.
SCO executives and possibly even the goddamned shareholders should do jail time for fraudulent use of the courts.
Laura is such a two-faced windbag! She spends months berating Linux and IBM -- hell, she's seen the supposed evidence, and now she's doing an about-face so she can proclaim that as an industry analyst, her forcasts are "spot on".
The Yankee Group (and especially Laura) wouldn't know their own asses from a hole in the ground.
That's already happened.IBM counter-sued them to get them to say that IBM doesn't infringe. Red Hat sued to get them to say that Red Hat's customers don't have to pay SCO's licensing fees. And Novell sued them for 95% of their revenue. Amongst other things.
It lied. It got some fools to pay for their Linux licenses, which might be fraudulent.
It tried. SCO refused to sell the licenses once people stepped forward to buy one. Well, except for Microsoft and Sun, but SCO won't show the contracts that went with those sales.
SCO needs to be buried for all this sometime soon.
It'll happen. The Novell lawsuit is going to gut SCO. The IBM countersuit is going to render the fat into soap. And then the Red Hat lawsuit is going to clean up the blood stains.
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
They may have. There were many items in the "Final Disclosure" that IBM did not challenge as being insufficiently described. Meaning they probably did have line numbers, file and version listed. Since the actual list is under seal, none of us know for sure. This was just the first stroke of the axe, cutting out all alleged instances of misuse that have not been sufficiently specified.
In the next stage, the summary judgement phase, IBM may ask the judge to toss out more. However the bar for summary judgment is pretty high (the "facts" are not in dispute), but that doesn't mean we can't expect more of the instances of alleged misuse to be axed at this step too.
Anything remaining would then be left for a jury to decide.
At least that's how I understand the process.
Now who the fuck modded me Funny ?!
My Starcraft 2 Blog
About the only thing it gets right are the things quoted from teh ruling. So, read the Groklaw article.
The judge did not throw out any evidence. The judge threw out a bunch of SCO's claims against IBM because SCO did not provide IBM with what specifically IBM did that caused SCO to bring those claims agains IBM. IBM asked what version, file, and line of code SCO was claiming IBM used improperly, and SCO did not tell them. So, the judge said you cannot litigate those claims against IBM because IBM cannot defend themselves without knowing exactly what you are claiming they did.
There is another set of motion practice going on to get some parts of SCO's expert reports stricken due to them bringing up supposed misconduct that was not part of what SCO has in their pleadings or that SCO mentioned during discovery. This could result in much of those expert reports being stricken which could properly be called throwing out evidence vs throwing out claims.
Which is kind of ironic, given that Darl McBride accused Linux exactly the same thing