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."

Comments

Re:Poor, Poor SCO

[dmartin]

This is something that has confused me before, so I will ask it again in this context. The seventh amendment states

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. I am also aware that corporations are treated much like persons, and the amount in question certainly comes to more than $20, so why are they not guaranteed the right to trial by jury if they request it?

The answers I got when I asked about this last time (it was about people) was that someone could request a jury trial for civil matters, but they would have to pay huge court expenses. One argument may by that a corporation does not have the same rights as a person. After all, the USSC has ruled that "free speechquot; and commerical speech are quite different, and commercial speech is the only type of speech a corporation is likely to be involved in. Or is it that the costs to SCO would be too high? Or is it a technical definition of the words common law that I am missing?

Any insight would be appreciated!