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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 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."
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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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.
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).
"Will someone please squash this bug please."
Better yet, warm up your arm and be the first one to throw your best shot! Mulligans are allowed. My favorite McBride quote from a CRN Interview:
"
CRN: This lawsuit is very unpopular among many in the open-source community.
McBride: We're either right or we're not. If we're wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us..."
Does this count as the record for "longest continuous fail"? Or was that the Bush administration?
(Best Montgomery Burns voice) "Excellent." Pardon me while I go warm up.
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.
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.