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Judge Kimball Strikes SCO's Jury Trial Demand
watchingeyes writes "In a ruling on various pre-trial motions in limine and other, similar motions in the SCO vs Novell case, Judge Kimball today issued a ruling striking SCO's demand for a jury trial, ruling that Novell's claims seek equitable, and not legal relief. In addition, he denied SCO's request for entry of judgment that would allow them to appeal his ruling on the UNIX copyrights and Novell's waiver rights, ruling that if SCO wants to appeal any of his rulings, it can do them all at once after trial. He also granted Novell's request to voluntarily dismiss its own breach of contract claim, denied SCO's motion to exclude press coverage and evidence from the IBM case, granted Novell's motion in limine preventing SCO from contesting his summary judgment ruling at trial, granted Novell's second motion in limine preventing SCO from arguing that SCOsource licenses that license SVRx only incidentally aren't SVRx licenses, denied another SCO motion in limine which improperly asked the Judge to issue rulings on contractual issues and denied Novell's final motion in limine which sought to prevent SCO from contesting Novell's apportionment of royalties analysis. Looks like SCO will be facing a trial in-front of a judge which has already ruled against them numerous times."
Interpretation: SCO screwed themselves. If one has been following the case all along, this should be no surprise.
C|N>K
since english is not my primary language, can someone help me with all the legalese ?
is this another nail on SCO's coffin, or several of them at the same time ?
What ? Me, worry ?
One question that will be settled at trial is apportionment. That is, how much of the money paid by Microsoft and Sun belongs to Novell. The judge has clearly said that some of the money belongs to Novell. The best SCO can do is argue that it is a very small amount.
SCO's problem is that they basically told the SEC that all the money belongs to Novell. SCO tried to have that evidence excluded but failed.
It is likely that Novell will get more than 50% of the money. The judge will grant a constructive trust. SCO will be immediately bankrupt. The trustee will march in and kick the current SCO management out. The trustee will agree to anything the creditors (IBM, Novell mainly) tell him. The cases will end immediately.
AllParadox, a retired lawyer who has been following the case closely, predicts that Judge K. will issue an order sanctioning SCO's lawyers. Some of them could end up being disbarred. It will serve them right. This case has been an incredible misuse of the courts.
Sure they do. They just need a case first.
I have my own personal feelings here - not only should the lawyers be kicked out but their masters should be personally punished. If your dog bites somebody on your command then you'd better believe that you'll face the music. If you are a corporate exec who issues the sic 'em command to your lawyer then you had better be ready to face the music. Personally.
But my personal thoughts are irrelevant, and these lawyers are likely to get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. In fact, in Michigan (and probably many other states) a lawyer is held responsible if he doesn't pursue a case to the utmost, and bringing about frivolous charges are just part of the game. How many cases are filed alleging racial discrimination where there is clearly zero evidence, let alone plausibility that it ever happened? Those lawyers are never punished for making false allegations, if the charges don't stick then all of the lawyers and judges say "oh well, no harm in trying".
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Darl just can't keep from flapping his festering pie-hole. Up until now SCO attorneys have been fairly good at keeping him quiet and from making public statements. However it looks as though he couldn't resist doing a computerworld interview. I'm not sure what he thinks he has to gain by attempting to try his case in the courts of public opinion:
We absolutely and fundamentally believe we are right in this case, and we believe in the justice system. But we also know that things don't always happen the way they're supposed to, and we're realistic about that point.
And this gem is fascinating as well:
Let's call a spade a spade: We just took a literal pounding. We got knocked down -- there is no doubt about it. This is not a good ruling for us. But it's not the end of the line of the legal battle. In fact, there's some very encouraging things that came out of even this ruling. And we will continue to fight on those fronts.
Original article here
I can only guess that the "encouraging thing" he is speaking about has to be that Kimball ruled that they own their own derivitive works of UnixWare. However these are facts were never in question. At this point we can expect SCO to argue that the M$ and Sun licenses were SCOsource licenses and not SVR4 UNIX. Good luck with that since I believe they have made conflicting public statements about that in the past as well.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I doubt it. He's probably been hearing that joke all his life. Bringin it up again is not going to get you on his good side.
Scox was as good as dead before the scam. In fact, scox still has a higher market cap now than before the scam. Scox had never been profitable before the scam, they were losing money every quarter. Scox had no hope of turning that around. Since the scam, scox execs and lawyers have made a ton of money.
Msft's objective was to put a legal cloud over linux, and that was probably accomplished as well. Msft's other objective was to send this message to any company that might be thinking about contributing to Linux: "anybody who contributes to linux will be punished with a $100 million lawsuit, and five years in court."
Scox got away with outright lying to the SEC *many* times. Numerous public lies, extortion, mail fraud, barratry, vexatious abuse of the legal system, securities fraud, and more. Scam planned to go bankrupt all along, it's the only way the scam would make sense. As always, msft got away with the scam as well.
All this "lawsuit" amounts to nothing more than a msft PR stunt. This lawsuit is about 1% of msft's on-going fud campaign. Msft paid some scammer hillbillies from Utah to file bogus claims against ibm (not even a linux distributor) just to slime linux.
All of this "scox screwed themselves" cheerleading is laughable.
Sorry.