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.'"

Comments

Not over yet

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Not over yet

[Todd Knarr]

Actually IIRC IBM took code from AIX on Power and put it into Project Monterrey. SCO's claim was that IBM then took that code and contributed it to Linux, essentially claiming that they had control over anything that'd even touched Monterrey regardless of origin. The claim was even more ridiculous because the code they claimed IBM had contributed (JFS) wasn't the code contributed to Monterrey. IBM had originally written JFS for AIX on Power. Their Linux team had to create a completely new implementation of JFS from scratch, because the AIX driver couldn't be ported over to x86. And in fact the Linux team came up with such a superior implementation that IBM removed the original JFS driver (the one that got contributed to Monterrey) from AIX and ported the Linux JFS driver over to AIX on Power. So had SCO gotten past the twin hurdles of claiming control over IBM's independently-developed code just because it was contributed to Monterrey and the code they were suing over never having been contributed to Monterrey, they would've faced the hurdle of the code having come from Linux to Monterrey and not the other way around.

Of course, that's par for the course for SCO. Remember that their first allegedly infringing piece of code turned out not to even be theirs. The malloc() code they claimed was copied from SCO Unix into Linux turned out to be a piece of earlier code (released both under the BSD license multiple times and into the public domain by it's original author) that both SCO Unix and Linux had gone and used (well, SCO Unix used it, Linux had dropped it in favor of more modern code and when it was found the reaction was "What's that still doing there? Get rid of it, it's not being used and it's just cluttering things up.").

Re:Groklaw link

[yorugua]

Or lets quote her:

Stewart Rules: Novell Wins! CASE CLOSED! Thursday, June 10 2010 @ 04:14 PM EDT

Here you go, munchkins. Judge Ted Stewart has ruled for Novell and against SCO. Novell's claim for declaratory judgment is granted; SCO's claims for specific performance and breach of the implied covenant of good fair and fair dealings are denied. Also SCO's motion for judgment as a matter of law or for a new trial: denied. Novell is entitled to waive, at its sole discretion, claims against IBM, Sequent and other SVRX licensees.

CASE CLOSED!

Maybe I should say cases closed. The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine. The judge writes in the Memorandum Decision and Order about SCOsource, "Finally, while SCO's witnesses testified that the copyrights were 'required' for SCO to run its SCOsource licensing program, this was not something that SCO ever acquired from Novell." He totally got it. He noticed Darl McBride admitted that SCO didn't need the copyrights for anything but SCOsource. It couldn't be any better if I'd written it myself.

Was the jury misled or confused? Not at all, the judge writes: "The jury could have rejected the testimony of SCO's witnesses for a number of reasons, including their lack of involvement in drafting the APA, the fact that there was little testimony on any actual discussions concerning the transfer of copyrights, or that many of the witnesses had a financial interest in the litigation."

"The Clerk of the Court is directed to close this case forthwith," Stewart writes in the final judgment. I believe that means SCO v. IBM is essentially over now, unless IBM wishes to pursue its counterclaims.

And now it is -- finally -- time, once again, for my red dress! And a huge thank you to Michael Jacobs and the team at Morrison & Foerster, who never gave up but, more importantly, showed that you can fight hard and win with ethics and dignity, and to Sterling Brennan of Workman|Nydegger, who was frankly absolutely wonderful at trial. And thank you to you, Groklaw volunteers, because we made a difference in this world.

Re:Groklaw link

[daniel23]

Thanks for citing her! However, the link to the red dress got lost and needs adding.