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Judge Rejects SCO's Motion For a New Trial
An anonymous reader writes "A judge has rejected SCO's motion for a new trial in the company's dispute over UNIX intellectual property ownership. The ruling validates a verdict that was issued in April by a jury who determined that Novell, and not SCO, is the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. This means SCO cannot continue to pursue its litigation against IBM and other Linux users. 'There was substantial evidence that Novell made an intentional decision to retain ownership of the copyrights,' the judge wrote in his decision. 'The Court finds that the verdict is not clearly, decidedly, or overwhelmingly against the weight of the evidence. Therefore, SCO is not entitled to a new trial.'"
Come on guys. Groklaw has been covering this thing since the very beginning. The least you could do is link to the article there. Give a little respect to Pam Jones for following this long slog like a trouper.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I really hope this is the last I ever have to hear about SCO.
"I'm not dead yet!"
I would think about changing my line of work if I was assigned SCO versus the World.
Is that where they came up with the title of that movie? Seriously SCO GIVE IT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.
I hate it when my favorite show doesn't get renewed for another season.
San Jose, CALIFORNIA. In response to a judge's dismissal of it's demands for a new trial today, SCO filed 10,000 new lawsuits against various entities including IBM, Oracle, and G-d. "One of these must stick," said SCO's Chief Extortion Officer. "It's not about principle. It's about being money-grubbing assholes."
It would have been more believable if you'd mentioned that SCO had hired *IAA's legal team to sue the first 10,000 Linux users in its efforts to stop the piracy of the Unix source code it doesn't rightfully own.
The head of Daryl McBride is seen in court appealing the latest decision against SCO which declared Daryl McBride not eligible for compensation for inclusion into Futurama episodes on the grounds that he is "just wasting space now that other more important heads need shelf space for. Like Tiger Woods 9th wife" said Leyla. Bender, while trying to get McBride to bite his shiny metal ass, broke the head jar and dropped the head of McBride accidentally into a metal stamping machine. The head of Pam Jones laughed her jar fluid into a total froth while Fry looked on confused.
That got cleared up so quickly and easily, I'm impressed!
THe Sco Group is now a smoking crater rundown of the different cases
NOVELL V TSCOG: Goes to Novell (this is the basis for the rest of the Litigation Lotto)
TSCOG V IBM : the case that started it all
WAIVED BY ORDER OF NOVELL (IBM does get the counter claims)
SUSE V TSCOG (arbitration): Rendered Moot (lack of grounds)
The Sco Group bankruptcy Chapter 11: to be converted to Chapter 7 (a chunk of the money is now owed to NOVELL)
(the various smaller bit cases are now also Mooted)
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open source CDE already
1. Remember that cutting off the legal arms does no good.
2. Remember that zombie companies can continue to be threatening even if they have no leg to stand on.
3. Exposing and severing the connection between the brain and the rest of the corporate body may help, but the remaining parts can still remain dangerous, and typically twitch for some time.
4. Corporate zombies are often controlled by evil overlords. Real victory occurs only after the evil overlord is slain.
5. Remember that anything that was once good and lovable about the company that has been zombified is long gone and completely unrecoverable.
6. Zombie companies are frequently covered in parasites (lawyers).
I am officially gone from
The article seem to suggest that the SCO v IBM is over. That's not quite correct. SCO's claims against IBM most likely will be voided. IBM however has counterclaims. At this point, IBM can't get much money but knowing IBM, they want to make an example of SCO so that no other company will do this to them again.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Will someone please squash this bug please. It's still kicking and squirming about.
It would have been more believable if you'd mentioned that SCO had hired *IAA's legal team to sue the first 10,000 Linux users in its efforts to stop the piracy of the Unix source code it doesn't rightfully own.
That was LAST WEEK, right?
USER a term of abuse in the U.K.?
Isn't SCO going to buy Novell?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Get an axe...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I have never heard of it.
I'm sure I'm not the first to say "about fucking time!", but I had to say it anyway.
All it requires is for someone with stacks of time and money to take a look at the SCO corporate profile and sue them on the basis that just about everything written on that page is a lie.
I mean, does anyone really think that SCO is a "leading provider of software technology", or that their "highly innovative and reliable solutions help millions of customers grow their businesses everyday". As we have just seen, "SCO owns all rights and ownership of the core UNIX operating system source code" is about as untrue as it is possible to get. As a bonus, such a legal action would certainly conclude faster than the 7 years this has been going on.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
Or, "we'll have to nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure"
Seriously, how is this thing still alive? Who or what keeps funding them? How the hell can they still be paying the layers after what is it now, 8 some odd years of loss after loss after loss. Do they have a single paying customer left??
So, how they hell is it still alive?
I can't wait for IBM to sue for all the time and money spent just to gather the source code:
Complying with the Court's Order involved more than 4,700 hours of work from more than 400 IBM employees. This does not include the time spent by IBM's counsel and consultants on this project, which was likewise considerable. IBM produced a total of more than 80 GB of source code and other electronic data to SCO, and more than 900,000 pages of paper (which were scanned and produced in electronic form on CDs).
Does this count as the record for "longest continuous fail"? Or was that the Bush administration?
"Shut the fuck up already."
And in other news, Hitler admits he probably lost the war.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
groklaw is to sco as theoildrum is to bp :)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Def. the Bush Admin. Bush tried hard to torpedo the Constitution.
SCO was damn expensive, but the outcome was only delayed, not in doubt.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They do exist!
and im sure they can come up with the tools needed
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In those moments where you're not quite sure if the undead are really dead, dead, don't get all stingy with your bullets. I mean, one more clean shot to the head, and this lady could have avoided becoming a human Happy Meal. Woulda... coulda... shoulda.
Don't make a deal with Novell unless you read the fine print carefully.
It's Alive, It's Alive
The End.
I would think about changing my line of work if I was assigned SCO versus the World.
Nah. What you've got there are lawyers who are getting paid. Doesn't matter if what they are doing is wrong and hopeless. Look at a lawyer's paycheck. For that, Sisyphus would probably wake up cheerful and show up for a day's work with a smile.
This is just lawyers being lawyers for the most part. Sure you get some good ones every so often, like Ray Beckerman. People who actually get into the field because they wish to be superheroes. But 99.9% of the world - regardless of their job - just want to get paid.
And you and I are probably no different. I've worked on software projects that were doomed. How about you? I worked on a project once for 3 years that I knew 6 months in was going to wind up in a box on a shelf. Did I care? Hell no. I was making a paycheck during the dot bomb. Plenty of my coder friends weren't.
Once SCO finally runs out of cash these guys will move on. Some of them will wind up working for Save the Puppies, some for the RIAA. Both will sleep well that night. It's just a job.
Oh, one more thing. The SCO lawyers didn't lose. They did what Microsoft (via BayStar) paid them to do. Defame Linux. I'm sure the instructions went like this. "Make it drag out as long as you can. Sew fear and doubt. Never surrender!" Fifty million bucks buys a lot of moral flexibility. And these are lawyers, which is a profession that isn't overly burdened with saints.
And on their resume for their next job they can say that they spearheaded an impossible effort. They moved market share towards their customer and away from an open source project that has a nebulous cloud of people working on it. They attacked a ghost, did it for a decade, and did that with a tenacity that would make a pit bull proud.
There are many places where someone with that kind of determination and moral flexibility would be most welcome. I expect a lot of these resumes to wind up on the desks of BP's HR department sometime in the near future.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Red Hats case is not mooted. Since SCO does not have the copyrights they sued Redhat for violating, Red Hat's defamation case is a slam-dunk.
I know, it'll settle quietly.
Seriously there's a hole in the ground where the horse was and you keep hearing thuds every now and then.
I mean it. I wish this miserable excuse for a company would just shrivel up and disappear. They're like a little yapping dog that just keeps yap, yap, yapping away incessantly until you want to swat it with a baseball bat.
It took time to add links to the footnotes of the text of the decision. Over time, in the way Groklaw works, the footnote text will become links to text versions of the associated documents, which link to the official court PDFs, and a link to the blog post will appear in the summary page here, or a child page. That's how Groklaw does things. The members contribute to fund the purchase of the documents from the court. Groklaw was a tiny bit slower than Ars Technica this time but in the fullness of time GrokLaw makes a better record that the Library of Congress has deemed worthy to record. This is certainly the best recorded copyright infringement case ever, and that's solely because of GrokLaw. Not only that, but the thorough documentation makes it a case study in all forms of intellectual property litigation and even all forms of extended litigation practice. Pamela isn't the fastest always, though she usually is because this case is a specialty - but her site is the definitive record of this series of court cases. Groklaw doesn't have the attention deficit disorder that /. suffers from, nor does it tolerate certain types of troll, nor obscenity. Pamela might have chosen the slashdot moderation system instead of the one she did given an adequate education and foresight in blogging and technology - but she didn't. She's not a geek like us, she's a paralegal and the decision point was more than seven years ago. It's a paralegal's blog and given the persistence and popularity of her site she chose well. Groklaw might have obsessive compulsive disorder in that it follows religiously minutia on a court case most people don't care about, but that's a different issue. Groklaw is thorough. It's a worthy reference for this specific topic, and the only one worth mentioning.
The site is also producing text-based documentation of the Comes V. Microsoft collection of documents. In Comes, the plaintiff forced production of a vast collection of documents that offer an interesting view into the internal operation of the Microsoft monopoly, and published them on their website which closed when Microsoft settled. Most of these documents were captured, and are being indexed by the Groklaw team. This is a worthy endeavor that could use help if you're interested.
Groklaw has no advertising - it's fully funded by its interested members (in this group I am proud to stand) and supported with servers and bandwidth by ibiblio because it's a noteworthy and popular endeavor that promotes openness. Ars Technica reports on major events in the case, and references their other articles on the case. Ars does this to attract page hits that drive their advertising funding. It's in no way similar to the way Groklaw works.
Groklaw is notable not just for this case but in providing an exemplary example to follow for documenting a notable legal case. This has never been done before in this way and Pamela Jones deserves considerable respect for inventing this method of preventing a miscarriage of justice. What these cases need more than anything else to secure justice is the full light of public knowledge of what's happening. Had that public awareness and thorough documentation provided by GrokLaw not been the case, an unpleasantly different outcome was almost certain.
For me GrokLaw is not just about this case though that is a prime focus now. It's about how we, the common geeks through our collective memory and obsessive attention to detail can derail the attempts to halt progress by seasoned lawyers who are ignorant of how things actually work, and inattentive to when they were inven
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...and any applicable Deity, burn it, bury it, drop kick it down the nearest negative stellar mass, stab it, poison it, nuke the bloody thing, just make it STAY dead this time!
Let. It. DIE!
And if, for some inexplicable reason, this abomination that is SCO even SUGGESTS a hint of resurrection, then it'll be truly time to go freaking medieval on this damnable thing.
Does anyone actually still use SCO? Why? Their last real release was over a decade ago.
Hmmm... My /. userid has 2 fewer digits than yours, yet I can post as an AC.
Now kindly get off my lawn (and your high horse).
...SCO won a moral victoryeven as they lost on the detailed legal technicalties of the case.
Not unlike the manner in which Hitler won a moral victory at Stalingrad?
(Hey, it's not /. if somebody doesn't Godwin the thread, right?)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I feel old just seeing this shit again, and it's STILL going on? Our legal system is a complete joke if it allows this nonsense to continue on forever and ever.
PJ tried to publish an article on /. she got modded to oblivion and started GROKLAW radioland , then it evolved into Groklaw as it is today
PJ has however, dirtied the linnen. When Apple abuses copyright and DMCA, PJ's all A-OK with it. When SCO does it, oooh, that's bad.
This hypocrisy has damaged her credibility.
And no trillion-dollar-war either. Obama has a long LONG way to go to beat Bush. 8 years may not be enough...
And now I'm awaiting what all the SCO pundits have to say. O'Gara, Lyons, Enderle, and Paul Murphy. Come on fuckers, we want to hear you explain your idiocy. Or are you going to flee with your tails between your legs?
-- Linux user #369862
http://www.zombielandrules.com/zombieland-rule-2-double-tap/
SCO started out the day trading @ .12 and ended the day @ .03.... they need to just close shop and be done....
Wake up, your Honor -- just say:
"You're dead, so you cannot bring this or any further actions in any court at all.
The plaintiff should go away and lie down."
So, we've been waiting a little over seven years to skewer those who we knew were on the wrong side of the SCO vs. IBM issue, both here and on the broader Internet.
Now that it's decided, it's time to see who was right. Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, seems like a good place to start. "Crunchy linux users" indeed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Braaaaaaaaains!
Free Martian Whores!
Novell Wipes the Floor with SCO
"it (SCO) should have gotten them (copyrights) under the intent of the original deal."
http://linux.sys-con.com/node/1428534/print
Clearly Novell (and IBM) have all their legal ducks in a row, and, as you would expect, the judge clearly saw that. So the result shoupd be neither surprising nor unexpected.
Of course, it's almost universally agreed, both by people inside the computer/software industry and people outside, that SCO won a moral victoryeven as they lost on the detailed legal technicalties of the case.
Dude, can I try some of your stuff?
If they must persist in pissing off everyone on the fuggin' globe, let them look out for themselves.
If you want justice:
1) SCO will no longer be able to argue to the Bankruptcy court that it still has a reasonable chance of success with their litigation, so they will be forced to focus their resources. They can no longer rely on plausibility of winning their IBM case, because they essentially have no case now. Not to mention, there's now a good whack of counterclaims that IBM will be drawing out of them, and they're basically entirely crippled now. The Judge gave them the option to waive their IBM suit, and if they don't take that opportunity then they risk getting sued by Novell as well, meaning they're going to be in mad mad debt even longer.
2) SCO shares are worth a nickel. That's right, 5 cents. You could probably buy a whole big-ass chunk of the company right now if you really wanted to, but who would? You have a literally bankrupt company with tons in debts, looking to accumulate a whole bunch more debts through litigation, that is currently being administered by a court-appointed trustee. So all you'd be getting is debt and zero power to fix it.
3) If SCO does decide to appeal this, then at this point it's going to start costing Boies-Schiller, the law office that accepted this bullshit case in the first place. So now THEY get a financial lesson out of all of this too - don't take pump-and-dump schemes, and don't enter into law cases without first KNOWING that your client has evidence. Personally I'd actually LIKE to see this appeal happen just so Boies-Schiller can suffer as well.
The reason this case has drawn out as long as it has is because the legal system DOES work. They gave SCO enough rope to hang themselves with, and SCO took every last inch. Rather than cut their losses when any of the billions of evident signs that they were going down - when they were ruled by a judge to not own the copyright, when they were ruled by a JURY they didn't own the copyright, when they declared bankruptcy, etc. etc. etc. All this has added up to their current state: A dead company, and all of its owners in a SERIOUS amount of debt. If they cut their losses and settled then a lot of where they are now could have been avoided. But they refused to swallow their pride. And now they have a worthless company that nobody will buy, and a product that has no resources to keep it going, and no feasible plan to crawl out. Justice has been served. So if it ties up the courts for a little bit longer, all it's going to do is drive them deeper and deeper, as well as all the people that surround it. All of the chief executives' reputations have been tarnished. It'll be a long time before anybody does business again with Darl McBride before thinking twice, thrice, or sixteen times about it.
They've lost. They're over. They have no recovery. They're dead already. This is just the final crushing fatality blow. Don't think Justice hasn't been served, it has.
The only people hurt by another appeal are the lawyers at this point, so yeah, let them. I want to see these fuckers. rot.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Zimbabwe dollars. (Essentially impossible. :-)
McBride ties to Mugabe aren't in question but it will be revealed that they have a mutual admiration society going.
If only Derle had an army ... and his word was law ... and it didn't matter that the country was now worthless.
If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no trade for tinkers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.