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SCO Legally Assaults PJ of Groklaw
Litigious Bastards writes "SCO has just filed court papers saying that they were unable to subpoena PJ of Groklaw. While they apparently sent their crack team of process servers out looking for random people named Pamela Jones, it would appear that they were unable to locate the bright yellow envelope labeled 'Email PJ' on the Groklaw website to ask for directions to serve her in person. They're once again accusing her of working for IBM or Novell, and Groklaw is now hosting over 20 documents PJ claims were planted in the media in an effort to discredit her. As she says, 'And so the stupidest lawsuit in the history of the world just got stupider. And a whole lot meaner.'"
1. Are you legally obliged to make it easy for someone to subpoena you? eg. by replying to an email asking for that information.
2. Is it a particularly good idea to email an address on a website which may or may not go to the correct person asking "Hey, where do you live, we want to serve legal documents on you"?
Yeah, there are a lot of idiot lawsuits out there. But how many have gone on for four years, cost this kind of money and involved this many people? SCO sent threatening letters went to 1500 companies, sued two of their own clients and three of their former business partners. And, as is becoming increasingly clear, they really didn't have any real evidence to start with.
Maybe you could find a suit based on a stupider premise, but I don't think anyone can beat SCO for the sheer scale of their stupidity.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense".
True, but until they actually reach her with a subpoena, she's not under any legal requirement to do so. Hearing about a subpoena in the news (or via a motion she's retrieved from the internet) isn't nearly the same thing as actually being served. And if she's not actively dodging it (for example, if she's honestly taking a long-planned vacation somewhere and prefers to keep the destination private), then that's just SCO's tough luck.
I mean, really, why make it easy for SCO?
On a slightly different point, was it just me, or did this motion sound really whiny, even considering the history of this case?
SCO has been making accusations against PJ for a long time. They have previously tried to find her and on one occasion they 'outed' her, identifying her as a sixty year old Mormon with a son in New York city. If they can find her and serve her then she will have to pay big lawyer bills with no hope of recovering them because SCO is going bankrupt anyway.
These people have demonstrated time and time again how nasty they are. They have zero respect for the truth and there is an excellent chance that some of them are going to jail when this is over.
PJ has nothing to do with the case other than hosting the website that destroyed the FUD value of SCO's criminally frivolous lawsuits. Any evidence she gives will have no bearing on the outcome of the cases. They are just after her to harass her. She's not being shrill and paranoid, she's being realistic.
As far as "free speech", while there are technicalities all over the place and it does get complicated with judges also claiming that you don't "lose your rights" when stuff happens like this, I would have to agree with you on a practical level. Once you have a lawsuit filed, you pretty much have to shut up.
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Of course there is explicit legislation that is designed to stop this sort of behavior by "activist groups" and others who are clearly on a political campaign and have previously been exercising their 1st amendment rights prior to a lawsuit that attempts to shut them up: http://www.thefirstamendment.org/antislappresourc
While SCO here is screwed financially as it is, normally this is something that is dangerous as the group (like PJ from Groklaw) which is sued, as long as they are on the safe side of libel laws, can counter sue for incredible amounts of money. In the arena of public opinion, it is also a P.R. nightmare to lose a SLAPP suit, not to mention it may have serious negative consequences if you are involved with other legal matters.
Perhaps you don't live it the real world where very bad things can happen to very good people. There is lots of money involved here and maybe even some jail time for some corporate bigshots. So who knows what someone might do, or be paid to do, to shut up a never-ending source of bother for their get-rich plans.
For example, in the company I work for, in the same period, our stock has gone from approximately 1000 (split-adjusted) to 19 right now -- and we're even making a profit now, and weren't back then. Irrational exuberance indeed!
It's called the dot-com bubble, and lots of stocks did that.
Hyperbole, yes. But she's making an important point.
Lawyers and cops play special roles in our society. Those roles require they have powers which, if abused, could make our lives living hells. And bad as a rogue cop can be, short of killing you there's nothing he can do to you that's worse than what a rogue lawyer can do. Maybe they don't put a bullet in your head, but they can take the roof from over your head, the food off of your table, and medicine out of your medicine cabinet. For some people, people who have a responsibility to provide for others, a bullet in the head would be preferable.
So we rightly expect that cops and lawyers display a high degree of responsibility when it comes to the integrity of the system. To be a decent cop, I suppose you just need common sense, but a lawyer's ethics are much trickier because he's supposed to be a vigorous advocate for his client. The problem with abusive SLAPP lawsuits and even the use of empty legal threats is that they divide society into two classes: people with the resources to defend themselves and people who do not.
Does anybody have a duty to respect and cooperate with a system which unjustly oppresses them? Should we give power to people who will use it to wrong us for their clients' benefits? If we do, we'll end up with a two track system of justice in which one class of people can use the legal system to compel any behavior they wish from the other.
SLAPP suits and baseless legal extortion undermine the legitimacy of the system. The system should come down hard on lawyers who practice this kind of law. Not only should they be disbarred, they should be sent to jail to do hard time. We'd strip a cop of his badge and send him to jail if he was shaking down shopkeepers. I'd rather pay protection money to a cop than let a bad lawyer get his hooks into me.
Let me be clear that I don't hate lawyers. I admire the profession, and technical skills of it practitioners. But they have a higher duty of public ethics than a day laborer or cab driver, and when they breech that duty the damage they cause is unthinkable.
This by the way is why we should be concerned about the dismissal of David Iglesias. It is true that Mr. Iglesias served at the pleasure of the President; but the President has no more right to single out his political enemies for prosecution than he has to single out his friends to receive federal contracts. Mr. Iglesias, and indeed the President, have a duty to support and defend the Constitution, and the integrity of the legal system. As bad as the potential for abuse is for an ordinary lawyer, a prosecutor has the power to drop an unbearable burden of suspicion on anybody he choses. That power should only be exercised in the public interest.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
PJ has been flawlessly consistent in her trust in the U.S. legal system. She says that it can produce imperfect results, as can any human-created system, but it has a strong tendency to work in the right direction.
In the SCO case, PJ has in her own inimitable way, contributed to this case going the right way: She brings the actinic glare of illumination onto a process that SCO, and others, have tried to accomplish.
PJ started her blog several months before the SCO case became public knowledge, in order to connect geeks with legal concepts. She believed then and still believes that we (the technologists) should be aware of the rules of the game in order avoid being steamrolled by it.
I've been reading the blog since early 2003, and PJ sounds like a gentle spoken (she insists on decorum) but very very intelligent paralegal. The truth justice and the American way language is backed up by consistent and finely honed research and argument. Plus one additional ingredient, a very angry hornet's nest: 10,000+ pissed off developers, some of whom have been around from the inception of UNIX and derived technologies. PJ, more than anything else, has brought us together to face the threat from SCO and folks like them, and for that alone her contribution is inestimable.
Unless IBM specifically instructs OSDL to forward the donation to Groklaw, they are not 'clearly' donating money through a third party. OSDL independently chooses to use the money in that way, OSDL makes that choice. Big difference.
SCO has a long and (well documented by PJ) history of abusive, ridiculous, legal theories and a long trend of gross attacks and dissemination in the press and in legal filings.
So why should she help them at all in their quest to slime her?
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It was probably a side effect of the new moderation system. You used to click a "moderate to this" dropdown box and then click "submit" to moderate. With the new comment system it's javascript based so as soon as you select a moderation it is applied. I'm sure I'm not the only person to accidentally moderate a post to the wrong thing.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
Eloquently put.
Let me put the first reason this way. There is no law that says it is your responsibility to seek such service
I agree, and I stated as much in my post.
The second reason is the Constitutional right to privacy
The US Supreme Court has recognized something of a "right to privacy" in several cases, but of course the Constitution doesn't grant a general "right to privacy" in as explicit terms as I would like. That "right" protects you from unreasonable search and seizure in their "in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" (4th Amendment). It originally applied only to the federal government. By the 14th amendment it's been interpreted to extend to the state governments as well. In the instant case, no government is seeking PJ. At present, it's a private (i.e. non-governmental) entity, and no [federal] Constitutional right exists to privacy from a private entity.
Agreed. Surely she could get in touch with them, right? Presumably she has nothing to hide, and could easily let SCO know "here I am, stop this nonsense". Groklaw shouldn't be about its creator.
Aww, that's cute! Completely naive, but darling.
Seriously, have you ever been sued? Even when you are 100% sure that you are in the right, you still have to pay $250 an hour to your lawyer to fend off all the bullshit they care to throw. With SCO, that may be a near-infinite supply. And if you miss something in preparation or they find something that they can distort into an apparent problem? Then you could be well and truly fucked. Even if it all turns out perfectly, it's months or years of stress, just because there's so much on the line and so much out of your control.
Make no mistake: if somebody suggests you have "nothing to hide", that's the time to clam up completely.
And of course, the fact that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Which effectively says that the feds don't have the power to rescind the right to privacy. The states have that power, if the people give it to them.
While that is a tool that is sometimes used to avoid delisting, reverse splits are traditionally punished quite heavily by investors. It's also not a certainty that it would help them, as NASDAQ has rules about doing that to pump up your stock price. There are market capitalization requirements as well as absolute share price requirements. If they reverse split, they will almost certainly lose their already dwindling market cap, if they don't they face delisting from share value.
They have publicly said they have enough cash to last them until this fall. Not exactly a forecast that inspires confidence. Combine that with a reverse split and watch any remaining tatters of credibility they have in any form swirl down the crapper. If even one of those pending summary judgement motions goes against them, that will probably be all it takes to cause what few investors are left to cut and run.
No, I stand by my evaluation. I don't expect them to last more than three months in their current form.