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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?"
he never claimed they were or weren't guilty, just that from the evidence it probably should have gone to trial.
And that is just a flat-out stupid thing for him to say. There was no evidence! SCO invented this absurd "methods and concepts" legal theory out of whole cloth, but that's not evidence.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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.
Well, TFA is a troll who doesn't know what he's talking about. Copyright law is very, very, VERY clear on this -- there is no such thing as a transfer of copyright unless there is a written, explicit transfer of copyright. And even then, there are situations where explicit transfers can be made null and void, and situations where transfers can be undone years after the fact.
Basically the writer is claiming that the judge is somehow obligated to entertain a novel new legal theory with no basis in law, and that it is "unfair" for the judge to rule on the law as it is clearly written.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Let's be blunt here. Wall Street was a big part of this scam, as they usually are with most stock scams. Part of it, I suspect, is because most "experts" are just dumb-ass crap journalists who know nothing about the companies they give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to. They just talk out of their ass, either out of greed (they own the stock and are using their pulpit to pump their investments) or because they are just morons.
I'll be charitable with this guy and say he's a moron, a scammed idiot.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unless you can show judge Kimball was intimidated by the number of people on Slashdot who hate SCO, it's irrelevant that they do. It's a free country and you can hate anybody you want.
TFA does raise a rather more interesting point: did the judge have legal authority to dismiss the case as he did in the ruling.
Novell asked Kimball to grant a summary judgment. A summary judgment is a ruling by the judge on the elements of the case where there is no legally relevant factual dispute. If I sue you for promising to fly me to the moon for $100, and you admit that you did, there is no factual dispute, only a legal one of whether such a promise is binding. However, if you deny making that promise, we have two different versions of the facts. The judge can't grant me victory because he finds you less credible than me; unless we both agree to let him do that, it's up to a jury. On the other hand, if there was something about the promise that made it non-binding in that (e.g., it was "opposite day") the judge could summarily rule for you, because none of the facts in dispute are relevant.
So the question is whether the judge simply ruled the factual disputes were not relevant to the claims, or whether he improperly took the role of jury and decided to favor one set of evidence as more credible than another. Or maybe he did a little of both, which would be par for this case.
Ultimately, SCO is going to lose because it won't have the money to appeal this decision. If the decision was a proper one that's all to the good. If it were an improper one, then that is a situation any of us might find ourselves in some day, fighting a richer opponent and at the mercy of a judge that favors that opponent.
It's good news when the bad guys get defeated fair and square. It's not entirely good news if they are defeated by biases in a system we depend upon to be fair.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are bad lawyers, bad doctors, and bad engineers. Trouble is, bad lawyers can keep practicing law long after their reputation or sanity would have permitted *cough*thompson*cough*. Just because they do it for a living doesn't make them good at it. That assumption really doesn't hold water.
While I agree there are passionate interests on both sides, the fact remains that SCO threatened legal action to practically everyone and his sister in the PR press. If they wanted to wage a smear campaign against linux... they lost... and it cost them. Regardless of the "dispassionate" facts of the dispute in question (which brought into the mix copyrights, breach of contract, etc etc... and never once did we see any proof of infringement, as I recall.. for whatever reason... my guess is, dispassionately, that they didn't have jack squat.)
How can you compete with free, they asked? Litigate them back to the stone age... SCO lost, they're appealing, the other matter's going through, we're all going to die.. the earth is round... (I could go on...)
SCO picked a fight and lost, not because they attacked IBM, but because they didn't have any solid anything with which to battle... and their wildly fantastic claims and conspiracies they spread in the press merely fueled the hatred of them.... and the questions about their very sanity.
For the SCO folks (and apologists).. Life's hard. Buy a helmet. This wasn't mob justice. This was one company trying to build a house of cards against another company. That's all. The blogs, the press, the linux/sco war of words outside of the courtroom is just entertainment.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Two things:
Computer science and engineering establish exceptionless mathematical and mechanical relations between the text of a program and the behavior of an abstract or physical machine; the regularities that links the two things are mathematical and physical. A legal system establishes a set of social practices for deciding how texts (statutes, case law) are applied to disputes; the regularities that link the two things are social practices. Computers programs rely on mathematical rules whose application can be determined in every case beforehand; legal systems exist because the application of law to every possible case can never be determined beforehand. (This is all basic Wittgenstein, BTW.)
I'm sorry, but you've failed to make your case that I've overblown anything. And what's the point of your little lecture that judges in common law jurisdictions are called to decide cases according to precedent? My original post explicitly mentions the doctrine of stare decisis.
Are you adequate?