Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I wasn't aware of the fact that assault was legal in the US.
SCNR
... that they're also looking for an elusive character to subpoena, his name is "Honest Truth".
FLR
I'd have thought SCO would be bust by now, given the amount of money they must be spending on lawyers, and on how fast their customers must be running from them. Does anyone how they are still able to make money?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Nah, I'll just call my Cousin Vinnie.
Baseball bat and umm...
You named SCO? I heard you're giving a friend of mine, PJ, some problems. Let's talk.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
They may have killed themselves, we really don't know. But, in a country where people are killed over parking spaces, I would be careful about seperating delusional paranoria from legitimate concern for one's safty.
At least I've paid her a couple of times and I suspect others have done the same. There are some very convenient donation links on Groklaw and for every donation I have sent so far I have received a friendly "thankyou" email. But even if she *did* work for IBM, that wouldn't change the facts of the case and I would still enjoy reading the legal analysis, which is pretty sound once you take out the sometimes over the top OSS "fangirlism" that I occasionally find a bit annyoing.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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"?
Now PJ can file a civil claim and try to get what little is left of SCO. Better yet use discovery to find the individuals who have done this and file against them personally. Slander is possible. They have made a concerted effort to discredit her in the press and since their claims are all false it will be easy to prove. Don't sue a worthless shell, get the jerks and lighten their wallets, that will end this farce the quickest.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Clearly Groklaw is the biggest of the many sites that go over the minutae of the various SCO lawsuits, so they are probably quite correct in their assertion that it's materially impacting their business - and proves that you do indeed reap what you sow. So, SCO drags PJ into the lawsuit, probably knowing full well that it's almost certainly not going to get them anywhere legally, but that it will buy them yet more delays, something they really seem to like. IANAL, but from what I understand of US law free speech does not extend to those involved in a legal case being able to comment on that case, and that surely has to be the real goal here. By getting PJ involved in the case and getting really, *really* lucky, they might be able to effectively gag Groklaw, or at least limit what they can and cannot post.
Personally, I think getting someone with a detailed knowledge of the case, a legal background, additional protections through being a journalist and despises you and your company onto the witness stand is not a smart move, but then I think SCO & BSF have already proven beyond reasonable doubt that they are not smart. Desperate maybe, but not smart.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Micro$oft has both purchased a very large license for undisclosed Unix IP (can't they get anything that they need from BSD?) and has been implicated at least a little bit in under-the-table assurances to places like Baystar that their "investment" in SCO will be covered when it is lost.
It has probably been worth a great deal to spread IP FUD about Linux until Vista gets up and going. Do you think that they have gotten their money's worth in funding TSCOG's long slow suicide?
It's funded by Microsoft. Your Windows dollars at work.
... then SCO should be tagged "funny." If you take a look at their stock (SCOX) since 2000, you will notice that they have gone from $94 to a mere $0.89.
I may have been the last serious Linux/GCC/Python user that has not visited Groklaw, but what the hey; it is 0625, I am still at work, and needed to "escape" to something unique on-line.
The lady noted "Forsooth, methinks SCO folk need to get better aligned with truth, justice, and the American way, as the saying goes. But that's the judges' job, so I'll end my comments about this here."
Was this hyperbole, or does she really have significant faith in the American justice system ? And this is not a rhetorical question. Others that read her often may want to answer.
As for me, I have not been certain about the meaning of the "American way" for several years. As a former U.S. marine and Libertarian, I had a tendency to believe that the U.S. Constitution represented the most realistic opportunity for "justice".
It now seems that the implementation does not meet the requirements of the abstraction.
According to everything I've read, SCO wants to depose PJ for the Novell case not the IBM case. But they also want to include the deposition in the IBM once it is done. All depositions in the IBM case should have been done by now. They are trying to do an end-around the rules.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Given the fact that Maureen O'Gara, a reporter(and I use that loosely)tried to find out where PJ lived, and then published photos of her alleged house, brother and mother without ever verifing if it really was the right Pamela Jones I too would be a bit paranoid. If I published photo's of Darl Mcbride's house you can believe he wold have the police after me even if it was the wrong house.
Given the facts in this case, and what Darl has said ad done, I too would be scared of what Darl would try to do.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Just to correct the article, the 20 documents refered to as listed on Groklaw were submitted
by SCO as evidence that PJ/Groklaw have interferred with their Busines and to justify
deposing her.
Most of them seem to be net gossip/comment.
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.
Email SCO with your message " I AM P.J!"
For authenticity you should be wearing your Spartacus gladiator arm shield or Roman slave tunic while typing.
P226
SCO's CEO has made a point of telling the press that he carries a gun. So he's got lawyers and guns, but he's running out of money.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Many of the commercial Unices have some AT&T code in their kernels and utilities. Most of the original AT&T code has been bug-fixed out and there is serious dispute whether copyright applies on the remaining fragments. Other Unix variants are based on BSD code and lack any code where (AT&T/Novell/SCO) may claim copyright upon. Sun is a special case, as they contributed to SystemV and have more rights than mere SystemV licensees.
Are you still with me or did you lose the plot somewhere?
Sorry, you can not sue a document. There has to be a lawsuit regarding a real conflict between two legal entities.
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
They have had 2 odd deaths, both ruled suicide, associated with them. One had turned against SCO and the other was convincing her father that SCO was a mess (who then disassociated himself from SCO and the parent). And you think that she is sounding shrill?
Me, If I was SCO's number one enemy, I would not want to be known to them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"I would argue that as an officer of the court, and one who (I hope) believes in the system, she should in this case seek service."
She's not a lawyer, right? What makes her an "officer of the court"?
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.
Why don't we just send Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner after him?
(and to the mod trolls, no it's not off-topic, reread the parent).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You are absolutely correct -- that was a bit of a jab on my part. I'm not a huge fan of Groklaw, or the way it is run. PJ's opinions are taken as fact or as prevailing legal opinion in their entirity by many, and that is annoying to me. She advocates a position, which is of course a lawyerly thing to do, while leaving out other arguments (see, e.g., the groklaw wikipedia page).
She may or may not work for IBM -- it doesn't really matter to me, and I honestly don't think it matters legally. At the same time, if she really values the law instead of a pulpit for her personal ideology, she should seek being served. She can blog about her personal experiences -- about a blogger becoming involved in her topic.
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?
Test your net with Netalyzr
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
Personally, I'm hoping for a new verb, like "SCOpuku" (from 'seppuku') or at least "SCOicide". To wit:
SCOpuku: Destroying one's company by launching frivolous legal action against Open Source developers and/or companies. See SCO.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
So Microsoft is funding the Baystar investment in SCO that's behind all of this. Microsoft drops chump change and casts a 5-year cloud over IP FUD over Linux at the same time that Microsoft is ramping up their licensing fees, releasing a new DRM-crippled version of Windows called 'vista', and generally consolidating their worldwide windows franchise. In a normal marketplace, doing all of those customer-unfriendly things at once would cost you your customers. But with the SCO cloud hanging over Linux, it's value as a serious alternative to Windows for corporate and government customers has been severely compromised. Imagine for a moment that there had never been a SCO lawsuit. Maybe then HP, Dell, and Lenovo would be successfully hawking Linux desktops and laptops to rapidly growing corporate, government, and personal markets and Linux would be on magazine covers everywhere instead of...vista. So...you can call the SCO lawsuit a lot of things but you what you can NOT call it is a stupid move on Microsoft's part.
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.