Did SCO Get Linux-mob Justice?

An anonymous reader writes "According to Fortune's legal blogger Roger Parloff, "once in awhile a judicial ruling comes down that's so wrong at such a basic level that you're just left scratching your head". He claims that Judge Kimball's "102-page ruling (about SCO) was greeted with widespread rejoicing and I-told-you-so's", but "the problem is not that Judge Kimball's view of the facts is wrong". Was the ruling unfair?"

Comments

No.

[Scareduck]

His hyperventilation amounts to ignoring SCO's inflated claims of ownership to everything, failure to prove they owned what they claimed -- which, by the way, they were never able to show in court what it was that they claimed they owned! This is legal wankery at its lowest, folks. Nothing to see here. Move on.

Re:No.

[N1ck0]

Looking at other IP court cases can lead one to believe that SCO was treated differently from other companies. If SCO sued Average Little Company Technologies Inc they may have been able to put on a good show and have a decent chance of winning. But SCO didn't sue a small company, they sued IBM, RedHat, Novell, etc and when you take a large corporation to court and provide no evidence, and use extortion style tactics on those corporation's customers, the corporation is going to fight back.

Did SCO get a black eye from the fight? Yes
Might SCO have got away clean if it was a smaller company? Yes
Is it right that this same dance in a courtroom could have defeated a smaller company? No
Should you expect to get hurt when you wage war with large amounts of people and companies? Yes

Was SCO Treated unfairly? No! If you present no evidence, and base most of your case on false assumptions the law is quite clear that you should loose. And when you base all your financials on something you should loose, you go bust.

No A$$hole Rule

[vinn]

Anyone ever hear of the book "No Asshole Rule"? It applies to hiring and firing staff (and if you're a manager you should probably browse through it.) On a real gut level I think corporations should abide by the ideas in that book. If you can't play nice in the playground with the other kids, you deserve to get your face punched in. Similarly, if you build your business on open source software, you play nice by going to the software developers and saying, "We think you're infringing this IP.. can you work with us to fix that?" If you wanna be the asshole that goes around suing everyone, blatantly lying to the press, and tell Wall Street another set of lies then you deserve to file bankruptcy.

Yodeling

[Roadmaster]

It looks as if this guy believes the judge plainly shouldn't have ruled on the issues he did. I think he should put his money where his mouth is and, pro-bono, file an appeal on SCO's behalf reverting Kimball's decision and repeating the entire 5-year process. My guess is he won't; a good way to generate buzz about your writings is to be on the opposing side of a losing argument, and doing your best to confound things and give reasonings as to why everybody else (against SCO) is wrong. I believe this behavior is known in certain circles as "trolling". That, folks, is why everybody hates lawyers; they just complicate things and can make a problem many times worse, all while taking 5 years to do it.

Article date: September 10, 2007, 6:14 am

[Anonymous Coward]

• That blog article is almost three months old: September 2007.
• That blog article has a provocative title but little substance.
• That blog article is horribly biased.
• That blog article claims that Judge Kimball did not know what he was talking about (especially regarding the APA), while he was praised by others (who are not part of the "Linux-mob") for this deep analysis of the facts.

That blog article is just old FUD.

"Mob justice" Good grief!

[dogsbreath]

SCO has had several years in court and nothing that they have come up with in terms of a legal theory to support their position has had any lift to it. This is hardly "mob justice". If anything, there should be complaints that Judge K give them too much slack.

It is about time that the slow turning wheels of justice move to end the long suffering of IBM, Novell, the linux community, and open source in general.

Re:Since when?...

[trolltalk.com]

I'm just amazed at how many supposedly-knowledgeable people continue to fall for what is utter BS. Anyone reading the comments posted to the article within hours of its' first appearance would have seen the whole thing torn apart - in particular, the legal requirement for a transfer of copywrite to include a written transfer, and that, withut that, judge Kimball could NOT rule in favour of SCO even if he wanted to.

This is the same level of "journalism" as pretendrle and mogtroll. Uninformed. Ditto with all those "analysts" who also came out with buy recommendations, talking through their goatse.cx orifices.

The one thing this experience has taught is that many and "analyst", "journalist", "expert" or "lawyer" is just another opinionated asshole, too lazy to do any fact-checking.

1. Boies could have checked the facts and told SCO "you have no case."
2. All the analysts could have checked the facts and told the world "SCO has no case."

While the average slashdotter may not be a lawyer, we seem to have a better grasp of legal fundamentals than many of the "experts". Why? Because we write code, and we know the consequences of overlooking a missed semicolon, a typo, or starting from wrong assumptions. Lawyers, on the other hand, don't have a financial incentive to give good advice or dig too deeply when it means generating less revenue.

Shakespeare had it right. "First, we kill all the lawyers."

Rubbish.

[Jaywalk]

Starting from the deliberately inflammatory headline -- note that he never tries to explain how a ruling by a District Court judge after three years of trial amounts to "mob justice" -- Parloff is scrounging for a pro-SCO angle here. He finally settles on this:

And as any second-semester law student knows, a judge can grant such a motion only when, as innumerable courts in every state and federal jurisdiction have repeatedly written, "the evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the party opposing the motion [i.e., SCO, in this situation], shows there are no genuine issues of material fact."

That's right, as far as it goes. Kimball actually said that SCO didn't have any genuine issues of material fact on their side. Parloff then goes on to pull up some stuff he thinks qualifies as "issues of material fact":

The then-CEOs of both Santa Cruz and Novell (yes, of Novell too) each supported SCO's position in their testimony -- i.e., the position Judge Kimball rejected without even letting a jury hear it.

True enough. The trouble is that the CEOs weren't involved in writing that contract. All the lawyers who were actually involved (on both sides) agreed with Novell. As did all the contemporaneous documents.

But the key issue is that none of that matters. The contract has specific language, called an "integration clause" saying that only what's in the contract matters. Anything outside the contract, like who remembers what, is irrelevant. The contract cannot possibly be read to say that SCO owns the copyrights because the contract explicitly says that copyrights are not to be transferred. Parloff actually touches on this near the bottom of his article, but then dismisses it based on SCO's argument that -- elsewhere in the contract -- it says "all rights and ownership". Now he's just being coy because the actual wording is something more like "all rights and ownership, except those included in section X". And copyright law is very explicit about the kind of language you have to use to transfer copyrights.

It's not always possible to tell a shill from an honest journalist, but SCO and their obvious shills (like Maureen O'Gara) started making claims that Kimball was legally incompetent and often overturned on appeal (not true) at about the same time Parloff came up with this bit of legal opinion. None of the regular press came to the same conclusion. Since he's playing the same riff, I'm guessing he's with the band.

Re:hmm

[gnasher719]

I suspect very few of the "call the Waaaambulance" type people here have actually read the article. There's actually quite compelling evidence of shady or unfair goings on in that trial. Completely striking the testimony of one of the main negotiators because of a family member with vested interests (having a wife work at one company is worse than you working for another company?) does seem extremely odd. It's not even slight testimony, it essentially was confirmation that SCO were told and led to believe they had ownership of Unix rights. Although this testimony could've had holes picked in, to completely discount something so incredibly important to the case is odd. You haven't followed this case, have you?

There is an absolutely, one hundred percent clear contract between Novell and SCO: The contract says "Novell sells the business to SCO, excluding any copyrights". That's what the contract says. Sure, Novell _intended_ to sell the copyrights as well, but SCO didn't have the money for that. SCO's witnesses were excluded for a very good reason: The contract is absolutely clear. It means what it says. Any witness that says otherwise can and must be ignored. That's what the law actually says: Any witness contradicting the meaning of a written contract must be ignored.

SCO was never "told and led to believe they had ownership of Unix rights". They tried to buy these rights. Novell wanted to sell them. SCO didn't have the money.

Just yesterday I went to a shop selling 50 inch LCD TVs. I wanted to buy one. I said "would you sell that TV to me"? They said "Of course, absolutely yes". I said "How much is it?" They said "$3,000". I said "Umph. I've only got $200". I left the shop with a tiny 15" TV. But I have a dozen witnesses that I wanted to buy the 50" one, and they can all confirm that the shop wanted to sell me one. Even the shop assistant and his manager witnessed under oath that they wanted to sell me a 50" TV. So surely I have the right to get that TV for my $200?

Re:Why Are People Angry At The Author?

[NMerriam]

He actually makes a good point. From a legal standpoint, the judge (most likely) should not have granted Novell's motion for a summary judgment. The judge (probably) should have let the matter go to trial. From a "rules of the bench/bar" standpoint, the author is probably correct.

No, he doesn't make a good point. Judges are under no obligation to entertain novel new legal theories for years on end in their courtroom. The case was based on copyright, which requires explicit written transfer. There was no explicit written transfer of copyright, therefore there was no reason for the trial to go forward.

Re:Since when?...

[Frosty Piss]

The one thing this experience has taught is that many and "analyst", "journalist", "expert" or "lawyer" is just another opinionated asshole, too lazy to do any fact-checking.

1. Boies could have checked the facts and told SCO "you have no case."

2. All the analysts could have checked the facts and told the world "SCO has no case."

You seem to make the assumption that Boies and the analysts didn't know, where ignorant of the fact that SCO "had no case". Sometimes it may seem like these people are idiots, but the thing to remember is that they all have vested interests.

Take Boies: He's a lawyer, and lawyers represent guilty people all the time. Most lawyers are essentially mercenaries. The same thing can be said for so-called "analysts", most of whom are fare from "independent". The same goes for "journalists", who, contrary to what they would like you to think, are far from analytically unbiased.

My point is that you suggest all these talking heads are "too lazy to do any fact-checking" and in general ignorant of the facts. I think you are wrong, I think the facts are obvious, and we must look to other, self-serving reasons for their various proclamations.