Groklaw Turns One

JuliusRV writes "Today is Groklaw's one-year anniversary! As PJ writes, 'What a difference a year makes. When we started, all the headlines were saying that SCO was going to destroy Linux or at least make it cry. Now, looking around today, I see almost everyone predicting SCO's imminent doom instead. I think the truth, as usual, isn't in the headlines, and that it's somewhere in between those two extremes.' Thanks, PJ and all other Groklawyers, keep up the good work!"

Not to nitpick....

[redwoodtree]

....as I know lawyers love to do, but PJ is a grokParaLegal I believe and not a grokLawyer. Regardless, great work and great site.

It must feel really nice to know you are largely responsible for the ongoing education of millions of readers.

The Year of the SCO Group FUD and Outright Lies

[NZheretic]

June 2003 : What evidence of origin,ownership,copyright + GPL [slashdot.org].

December 2003 : The SCO Group cannot expect [slashdot.org] to win any case based upon application interfaces which it's AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors relased in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability

March 2004 : How the lawsuit is going to go in court [slashdot.org]

Re:Remember...

[eric76]

There's also the T. Cullen Davis case.

Some people said that he was the first murder defendant in Texas that was richer than the state.

Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom

[Animats]

SCO doesn't automatically go away if their stock drops to penny levels.

True. But SCOX went from nowhere to 22, and then back down to nowhere, all on hype. That's a classic speculative bubble. Live by the momentum, die by the momentum. It's not like their revenue numbers are any good, except for that cash infusion from Microsoft.

Re:not accessible from China?

[DMUTPeregrine]

atomintersoft.com and choose a proxy. Or get a friend using circumventor from peacefire.org

Re:Remember...

[jesterzog]

I for one do not have much faith in our legal system. forget OJ, look at Microsoft. half a decade in the courts has not forced a change in Microsoft's business practices.

I'm not sure if I agree entirely. I have a friend working at Microsoft, on the Windows team, who I had the opportunity to meet again recently.

She gave us an informal seminar about working in Microsoft, where she pointed out that any meetings that they have with any clients, including the MS Office team, have to be planned very carefully in advance. One of the rules that they're required to be very careful about is that they don't give any internal information to anyone that doesn't go to everyone.

On the higher corporate level, Microsoft hasn't really changed a lot. It manipulates the law and competitors, abuses its position, and I fully agree that that's a bad thing and the legal enforcement hasn't had the effect that it should. But it's not entirely correct to say that the lawsuits haven't had at least some effect on many of the procedures followed within Microsoft. Teams that might often have intermingled frequently are no longer allowed to talk with each other in detail about what they're doing.

Re:Remember...

[cft_128]

There have been quite a few slashdot [slashdot.org] articles [slashdot.org] on the subject of anti-trust lawsuits and Microsoft. What it boils down too is that Microsoft makes enough money breaking the law that we (not just the US but the EU too) cannot fine them enough to make it fiscally unsound for them to obey the law. They view it as a 'cost of doing business'.

Even if we raise the fines the legal systems move too slowly to make a difference. On one hand a slow legal system can be good - better to have the time make sure that a innocent person/party doesn't get convicted, on the other hand man does it burn. We do need better penalties to make this work better. One would be to amend the 14th amendment to allow us to punish those at the helms of corporations rather than the corporation itself, or better yet re-evaluate parts of the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court case which (without any explanations) decided that corporations are people. According to the official records Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite stated right before the arguments started:

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

Before that ruling corporations were quite a bit more limited - they could not contribute any money to any political candidates or attempt to influence an elections, the 5th amendment double jeopardy clause didn't apply to them and in some states they couldn't even own other corporations.

I don't think that all of those things are inherently bad (I work for corporations and do think that many of them are good) but I think we should take a nice long hard look at corporations and what rights we (real humans) think they should have. As Thomas Jefferson said: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Re:GrokDoc??

[4lex]

I regularly search on google [google.com] for it, but no big news for the moment :-/ This [groklaw.net] seems to be the latest update (Grokdoc - A Status Report Sunday, April 18 2004). Basically says the reaction was very good and there are a lot of hands willing to help... but no beta-testing URL nor anything like that. I really would like to redirect some happy new-converts there...

Re:Remember...

[Aim Here]

Well both sides in an American jury have the same rights to alternate jurors so it's hardly unfair. If the defence swaps a juror, the prosecution can swap another one and vice versa, up to a limit - it's the same for both sides and the effect is hopefully to get a jury that both prosecution and defence agree on..