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SCO Asks Court To Reconsider IBM's Dismissal
VE3OGG writes "The SCO Group — the litigation firm currently in dispute with, among many, IBM, over supposed copyright infringing code in Unix — has quietly asked the courts to reconsider IBM's request to toss the case out. SCO argued that the court's November decision was procedurally and substantially flawed and they say 'the rules of procedure do not support such a result under the circumstances of this case.' If allowed to reopen the case, the SCO Group argues, that new evidence would present itself through the deposition of several IBM programmers who had previously been interviewed."
When I was in high school, a rat got into the house. My cousin, a neighbor and I had it pinned behind a piece of furniture. I was beating it from above with a broom handle, my neighbor was wacking it from underneath with a shovel and my cousin was hitting it from the side with something else. I thought the damn thing would never die. SCO reminds me of that rat.
SCO is also asking Santa for a big red wagon and a puppy dog.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
as news for nerds that is one week old is still news...
Kimball Quoted as saying "You'll shoot your case out kid!"
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
According to both the article and Groklaw, it's not so much that Judge Kimball threw out SCO's case as it is that he affirmed Magistrate Judge Wells' order that threw out the claims that SCO couldn't or wouldn't substantiate. That does indeed include most of SCO's claims, but it's not true that the whole case was dismissed. SCO does have a few claims remaining, and IBM has multiple counterclaims. Nevertheless, SCO's goose is completely cooked, and we're now just waiting for IBM to finish them off.
Groklaw now has up a redacted version of IBM's reply memo to SCO's motion, which lays out numerous reasons why SCO is yet again full of what my grandfather called "condensed canal water".
If they had some evidence they probably should have used it the first time. What were they waiting for? Christmas?
Wait, didn't the court just tell them that no, you can not introduce new evidence into a case years after discovery is over? And then tossed their case out saying they have no leg to stand on? And now they say "if only we were allowed to add this new evidence, there would be a case" ???
Are they trying to pull a Microsoft here - annoying the judge until he says something stupid and they can get him replaced? Or are they simply dumb and hard of hearing?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Although week-old as mentioned, moves like this make it clear who is behind the curtain. Despite the astroturfer team here on Slashdot trying to claim otherwise, when a company's lawyers swallow their their pride, dignity AND reputation in front of everyone plus the audience, it is obvious that gulp was lubricated with so big wad of cash they can retire after the case is over.
Except that they're not the defendants in this case. Which is too bad since their twisted and distorted delusional logic would certainly support such an argument.
They presented these items as evidence, but when the items were rightly challenged (basically, SCOG didn't supply file, version and line information that the judge ordered of code/methods they accused IBM of misusing), they changed their story (as they are accustomed to) and told the judge the items were claims.
If you take a good look at SCOG's filings, you can see that they cherry-pick those parts of the evidence and declarations that seem to support their claim, often quoting incomplete paragraphs of contracts and correspondence, and using parts of declarations out of context.
It's just plain lies, dressed up to enable SCOG to present them without sanction.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
According to both the article and Groklaw, it's not so much that Judge Kimball threw out SCO's case as it is that he affirmed Magistrate Judge Wells' order that threw out the claims that SCO couldn't or wouldn't substantiate.
There is a still a problem with the terminology in the above. Judge Wells did not throw out claims (a legal term). She did not throw out evidence. She threw out allegations of IBM wrongdoing that were inadequately substantiated. Judge Kimball affirmed the ruling.
Contrary to SCO's latest filings and attempts to obfuscate the issue, all of the claims (Causes of action) are intact. They still have about a hundred allegations in play. Most of these allegations are still redacted from the general public but indications are that they are quite weak.
Dear Santa, As the beautiful Christmas season is upon us again I want you to know that if you fail to meet my demands I won't eat my vegetables all year long which will cause me to die of malnutrition. Here are my demands so you won't murder me: BLAH BLAH BALH
This is an example of the Casablanca Dilemma, which works like this.
You're in Casablanca. If you are not out of Casablanca on tommorow's flight, you're a dead man. You have your tickets, but you need Captain Renault to provide you with papers. Louis charges a thousand francs for this "service",and you can only raise five hundred.
The only way to double your money overnight is to win big a Rick's roullette tables, which would be very unlikely at an honest table -- which Rick's decidedly are not. Sometimes Rick has been known to take pity on a hard luck case, but there's no special reason for him to help you out of all the other desperate folks. You beg Rick for help, but it's no use. He's already helped one hard luck case tonight, and for some reason he is too distracted to pay attention to anything you have to say.
So you put down your bet at Rick's crooked table, knowing that you are almost certainly a walking dead man. But it's better to keep playing than to stop, and remove all doubt.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> ...the litigation firm currently in dispute with, among many, IBM, over
> supposed copyright infringing code in Unix...
Incorrect. It's a contract case. The only copyright infringement claim The SCO Group is making has to do with IBM continuing to distribute AIX after TSG supposedly terminated IBM's irrevocable, perpetual, fully paid up SysV license.
> -- has quietly asked the courts to reconsider IBM's request to toss the case
> out.
Incorrect again. They have asked the court to reconsider its decision to toss most of TSG's evidence.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Most of these allegations are still redacted from the general public
Why are parts of these proceedings redacted?
that SCO _ever_ thought they had a chance of winning this case; that their intention from the very beginning was just to draw it out as long as possible.
As long as they do, the 800-pound puppetmaster behind the curtain can continue to get mileage out of charges that Linux is tainted by IP infringement and that Linux users may be liable for stiff damages.
If a person keeps filing lawsuits demanding that the CIA and the Pope turn off the mind control beams focused on his apartment, a judge will eventually tell him "Go away and NEVER COME BACK with this nonsense".
If corporations are "legal persons", why aren't they bound by the same standard?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
after he's spent all this money and lost it all at the justice crap table, rather than going out with the same amount of money, like a normal U.S. entrepeneur and...
CREATE SOMETHING PEOPLE WILL KNOCK YOUR DOOR DOW TO GET AT.
This reads like SCO want the court to throw the case out, or that the court has thrown the case out, and SCO wants the court to reconsider. When, in fact, all that has happened is a sizeable portion of their case has been thrown out, not the case in it's entirety.
When the potential proceeds from this lawsuit are really the only asset SCO has left? They have a duty to their shareholders to protect the companies assets until the bankruptcy court auctions off all the office equipment and padlocks the doors.
Have gnu, will travel.
Or is it another paralegal, only now with Boies, Schiller & Flexner / Flower?
Boo.
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
This is still misleading. NONE of Scalderas claims have been dismissed yet. NONE.
The magistrate judge threw out a number of their *evidentiary* entries, for failure to be specific. That was appealed, reviewed, and affirmed.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Any documents in a court case can be sealed from the general public on request of the parties, to avoid revealing trade secrets, embarrasing stuff, and so on. Then a redacted form of the document is normally made available, minus whatever they don't want you to see.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The article you linked to is a text version of IBM's reply to a previous SCO motion for partial summary judgment.
SCO's memorandum in support, which this belated Slashdot article is about, was filed on Dec 14th so we shouldn't expect IBM's reply to it until sometime next week.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
"..But your honor, this decision will hurt the vast majority of computer users"
..your not George Bush)
(Second council whispers in ear: psst.. that wont work for us, we are not Microsoft.)
"...I mean, with the security of our country at ris.."
(psst
"..err.. actually, its for the safety of the children."
(psst.. rfid?)
"umm.. ??? please?"
(there ya go)
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Let it DIE Let it DIE!!! SCO DIE!
The worst kind of Vampire.. Those Blood Suck'n Lawyers will not give up until every drop of blood is sucked from it's corpse then that isn't enough they molest the corpse. They have a name for those kinds of blood sucken lawyers "Necrophilafags".
May they rot with the corpse..
Merry Christmas SCO
IBM has pointed out that if SCO's theory were correct then SCO would have control over almost the entire software industry. IBM has depositions from all of the people from both sides involved in the System V contracts. None of those people agree with SCO's crazy theory that all of the software industry are belong to SCO.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Neither judge has thrown out anyone's claims. The ruling was only on evidence TSCOG submitted in support of some of their claims against IBM. In fact, IBM pointed out in their own briefings and motions supporting their (eventually granted) request for exclusion of the evidence that TSCOG was playing word games in trying to interchange claims and evidence. Obviously, the judges are smarter than TSCOG thinks.
Saying that claims have been thrown out is the lie that TSCOG has repeated enough times in their arguments that even the press and now Slashdot is treating it as fact. You don't have read some semi-obscure ten second summary to know what really happened (November 14th - weeks ago). Go to Groklaw and read that actual court papers yourself if you really care.
For example, Eli Lilly company has been trying to suppress documents related to their marketing of Zyprexa. But recently this message has been posted to various news and activism sites all over the world:
t ar.gz.html
Eli Lilly's motion to suppress the evidence has been denied by an inter-galactic court of appeals. Justice will be served over HTTP.
As we speak, the slick marketing plans drawn up by the smartest boys in the drug dealing business are propagating across the Internet. Bittorrents have been internationally seeded; p2p networks like morpheus, kaaza, gnutella, and limewire are already trading vigorously; photos laced with the data have been posted to public photo sharing sites like flickr; movies containing slideshows are circulating on video sharing sites like YouTube; Usenet isn't obsolete yet, and yes, backups have been uploaded to freenet (freenetproject.org), the virtual data haven;
Information wants to be free. Look for a file named ZyprexaKills, or any of its l33t variants.
For those of you without easy access to these services we have temporarily posted these files in this convenient location:
http://files-upload.com/files/34036/ZyprexaKills.
Please be careful when obtaining them - we are up against some of the most greedy and powerful elites in the world.You may want to consider using the tor program (tor.eff.org) to preserve your anonymity. If its difficult for you to install this program, try www.torify.com, a web based surfing solution.
Send this message to as many friends and mailing lists that you can think of, especially the technically saavy and the media connected.
Please tag all netroots activity and distributed research relating to this campaign with the tag 'zyprexakills'.
This message is also available at: zyprexakills.wordpress.org zyprexakills.pbwiki.com
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Agent Fred
Once something is out there, all over the place, what can any company do about it?
And frankly, aren't all corporations in the US accountable to We The People.
There is such a thing as taking the concept of "trade secrets" way too far.
Blaming the victim for crimes that the perpretrator knows were committed, letting slip out a little about the commission, because s/he committed them.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Hey, SCO! You're supposed to submit your evidence during discovery, not several years into the case! Stop wasting our time and give up already.
www.isoHunt.com
is that it has been allowed to continue for this long despite SCO inability support their claims.
The only evidence they provide was at their conference in 2003, and that turn out to be code from BSD they (SC) had illegally removed the copyright notice from.
At least Darl McBride has shutup, and apparently he has let himself go since this start. He use to be in pretty good shape now he's a fatty.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=SCO
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=IBM&hl=en
is it just me, or could IBM easily afford to simply buy SCO group? seams like if they just bought the company, they would have nothing to worry about, and the issue would end.
-EL
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
That's why IBM never settles - never.
They had over 3 years to present their evidence. In that time they presented nothing.
It's the corporate death penalty! but the problem is that corporations are allowed to loot the corpse of other dying corporations without picking up the liabilities. it's something dead people can't do, we have lots of laws specifically so that debtors get fair estate rights if individuals, but not nearly so for corporations. Much of SCO's "property" is IP.. technically NOT property.. but instead of dying with the owner like yours or mine would for anybody to find our old diary and use, corporate IP persists ad infinitum... Something like System V for all the battles fought over it should just have the IP killed outright. It's 40 years old at this point.. kill it, PD it, be done.
How far does their stock have to be buried before IBM just acquires them, and just releases all their (SCO's) IP under the GPL (or BSD, or whatever)? Acquisition was obviously the original plan, but when will it happen in reality? IBM obviously has the cash, but how far does SCO have to sink until they do something about it? One would think they'd do it sooner just to stop Darl's salary.
Sun had bought total rights to Unix from ATT back in the 80's. There was nothing that SCO could have come after Sun for except a pure harassment suit, which would then make this extortion money( If true, then the all the officers would do prison time if McNeally will testify against them and I bet that he will not do that). So what exactly was McNealy afraid of? I would guess that McNealy coached it that way to the employees rather than admit what he was doing. As it was, he took the stock and then sold it once uncovered.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But he does tell Sam to "Play it".
"If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"
I don't recall that. But thanks, I've got the movie on tape so you've given me a reason to watch it today.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Not true. That's just your blind unreasoning hatred speaking.
The LDS Church does not support any companies, in Utah or elswhere. They expect to get money from investments, not lose it. That's what money managers do, in any organization.
Get real.