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SCO Asks Judge To Give Them the Unix Copyright

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the we-promise-to-walk-it-every-day dept.

Raul654 writes "In March, the jury in the Novell/SCO case found that Novell owns the copyright to Unix. Now, SCO's lawyers have asked judge Ted Stewart to order Novell to turn over the Unix copyright to them. 'SCO contends the jury did not answer the specific issue before Stewart that involves a legal principle called "specific performance," under which a party can ask a court to order another party to fulfill an aspect of an agreement.'" Over at Groklaw, PJ is deep into a community project to annotate SCO's filing. It's for the benefit of future historians, but it makes amusing reading now.

7 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. sco still alive? by nonewmsgs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    isn't sco dead yet?

    1. Re:sco still alive? by StuartHankins · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I suggest further reading, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft . Sun's payments are irrelevant.

      If you truly don't understand the issues with a convicted monopolist (such as Microsoft) paying a 3rd party to attack their competition, then no amount of rational discourse will help you understand why that's wrong.

  2. nah, SCO is dead.. by miataninja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but the lawyers are still alive (and feeding on the corpse)

  3. Make. It. Stop. by whisper_jeff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously, at what point does the legal system decide it's fed up with their bullshit and put a stop to it. Everyone deserves their day in court but I think SCO has gotten more than their due...

    1. Re:Make. It. Stop. by RichMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When SCO decides to stop spending money on lawyers. The problem is SCO managed to sucker the lawyers in at the beginning into an up front fee and the lawyers are committed to see it through "all appeals". So while SCO is now bankrupt and running on a loan in bankruptcy over its non-existant IP the lawyers are still "happily paid" and running this thing.

      So the lawyers are committed. I sort of hope this is the lawyers doing an exit strategy of over committing on a stupid claim that will get denied so they can then make a short appeal which will also get denied then exit. Then they can point at this filing and say "see we did our best".

  4. Re:And if SCO _did_ get it... what? by JiffyPop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There has been no examples exposed by SCO or anyone else that would indicated that Linux has anything to fear from the holder of UNIX copyrights, whoever that may be. If there were any code that infringes on a copyright then that functionality can be re-coded from the specifications, eliminating any infringement.

  5. Re:And if SCO _did_ get it... what? by Xtifr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it'd mean that SCO's case against IBM would have _some_ (and i say _some_) merit.

    Getting the copyrights now shouldn't help them. All the code in Linux has been already distributed by the current Unix copyright holders under the terms of the GPL. Even if SCO gets the copyrights, they can't revoke the perfectly valid license that has already been granted to any Unix code that might happen to be in Linux.

    Oh, and it was SCO (Caldera) that put Ancient Unix in the public domain. Ironically, they probably did so illegally, since Novell owned the copyrights, not that Novell is likely to complain at this late date.