SCO Amends Novell Complaint 286
rm69990 writes "According to Groklaw, SCO now seeks to amend their complaint against Novell. SCO says it 'seeks leave to file a Second Amended Complaint in significant part in consideration of the counterclaims that Novell asserted in its Answer and Counterclaims.' SCO now accuses Novell of infringing SCO's copyrights by distributing SUSE Linux, of breaching a non-compete clause between the two companies, and SCO is also asking for specific performance forcing Novell to turn over the Unix copyrights to SCO. So SCO is essentially admitting that Novell owns the copyrights at this point, but is saying that Novell breached the contract (that specifically excluded copyrights) by failing to transfer them to Santa Cruz."
How can they keep doing this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell me this -> How are they making a profit today?
No. I really want to know.
Didn't SCO have a ceiling agreement (Score:3, Interesting)
Namely that there was a maximum price they would have to pay for legal support, above that amount of money the costs were for the legal company.
Couldn't find a link to it on Google though.
Re:From The Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much everything that makes SuSE remotely like UNIX, basically. This seems to be derived from SCO's amusing claim that all our UNIX are belong to them; they must have sat down, asked themselves 'what makes a UNIX system so UNIXey?', written out a list and handed it to the lawyers...
Luser Pays. Support your original claim. Re:Wha?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
In essence if you are in a lawsuit and the court rules against you then the other goy can ask the court to make you pay his lawyer. The courts usually accept those requests.
In the case of the fiasco sco has been carrying on, those rules would immediately double the cost to them. It also reduces the likelihood of someone settling a frivolous lawsuit.
SCO has also filed suite in contries that require you to support your original claim. Those casses are over. In Ostralia they are under warning to not try it again. (Public mischife is a crime)
Well, another $10,000,000 helps. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about delay, and msft scare tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
At this point, the entire point of the scam is keep delaying. Msft's army of shills are screaming the message: "People are being sued for using Linux - don't use Linux." Of course the msft influenced tech-pop-media is leaving out the details, but most of the public isn't interested in the details.
There is also a very powerful object lesson being sent to other companies: "if you contribute to Linux, you better be ready to spend $100MM to fight a msft backed nuisance lawsuit. And you better be squeaky clean, because the discovery will never stop." How many companies want to bother with that? "Screw it. I was going to donate this code to Linux, but it just isn't worth the trouble."
McBride rakes in an easy $1MM a year. Scox market cap goes from $6MM to $70MM. Life is good for the scox scammers. Scox execs can lie, cheat, and steal, all they want. The USA bogo-justice system isn't going to do anything about it.
Re:Luser Pays. Support your original claim. Re:Wha (Score:4, Interesting)
It would sorta act as a resource balance in proceedings. If "big company" is sued by "Joe Schmoe" working with a single lawyer, they have every right to use a team of 30 lawyers, but should only expect to be reimbursed for the first one.
- Tony
"who else is going to pay?" (Score:5, Interesting)
The US should just admit that the "law" is supposed to be for the people and be reasonable and just and understandable for the most part for anyone with any sort of normal English language comprehension. This "law" situation has gotten to be too complex and ill suited for "the people" because they are essentially locked out of the system and must needs hire (most of the time) an EXTREMELY expensive translator. That's all lawyers are, glorified translators who turn human speak into confusing and overly verbose law speak, then enjoy a "vendor lockin". Even "your" lawyer has a clear cut case of belonging to this conflict of interest scenario of maintaining the translator monopoly, along with the judge and the rest of the "legal system". Then you notice that there is no incentive whatsoever for them to make laws simpler or fairer or easier, or just "less" of them,nope, the opposite is true, and they rule in congress.
We have no over all "law" that would limit the growth industry of "more laws" and more complex laws on the books. We are already at the "millions of laws" state now, with no end in sight. This is obviously insane to anyone who isn't a lawyer, but they hold the cards now.
It's just a carved in stone racket now. Would we put up with plumbers who consciously and universally always add an extra quarter mile of plumbing to a house just because they could?
Would we put up with carpenters who used tens times the amount of wood needed for a project all the time, just so they could always charge more? Would we put up with auto mechanics who insisted on replacing your engine and transmission every time you needed an oil change? No we wouldn't, but we as a society put up with that crap from the politician/lawyers/lobbyist/judges law racket cartel.
Oh ya, they have an added bonus! They have armed mercenaries who do whatever they are told, usually involving you when you run afoul of one of their bosses rackets. Too bad the plumbers and carpenters and mechanics can't enjoy this level of the threat of violence to increase their profits and social standings in the "equal" society we are supposed to have.
Re:How can they keep doing this? (Score:4, Interesting)
More MSFT funding? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first I thought that ESR was a conspiracy nut. Then you realize that, no, Microsoft actually *is* as nasty as he claims.
Re:IBM or Novell will *NOT* just buy SCO out (Score:4, Interesting)
That was the theory three years ago, when IBM could have bought scox for $20MM. IBM wanted no part of it then, and after three years, and about $100MM spent by IBM, you can be absolutely certain that IBM wants no part of that scam company now.
When you buy scox, you buy lawsuits, lots of lawsuits. Scox has violated many companies, and many laws. Do you think IBM wants that? Do you think IBM wants all the ill will that comes with buying scox?
IBM's linux business is in the billions, the msft/scox nuisance lawsuit is hardly worth jeopordizing that.
Re:Luser Pays. Support your original claim. Re:Wha (Score:4, Interesting)
As taxpayers, we're paying for their damn circus and I think they owe us for all the public money they've wasted on their stupid pump and dump scheme.
Re:Luser Pays. Support your original claim. Re:Wha (Score:2, Interesting)
There are problems with all the things mentioned - perhaps it should be a rule about if it is a person getting sued by a company and they win they are completely entitled to reclaim ANY expenditure (well within reason) from that company. That should stop companies suing all these people because they can. Perhaps if the court case is frivolous, and happens more then once the person / company sueing can be taken to court to reclaim the Police and Court times. I'm not sure how to solve if one person sues another... most of it depends on the circumstances. I think almost all laws should be flexible as almost every law I could think of a reason to break it. Speeding? Well your honour I was being chased down by this guy and was afraid for my life so tried to speed away. Murder? Well this guy came into my house, I caught him with a knife walking towards my son's room so I shot him. Of course there are times they are obviously guilty and should get the full extent of the law!
I had a friend who used to work in Halfords in the UK (they sell bikes and accessories basically), and he was the store manager. A guy tried to shoplift so my mate grabbed the guy and held him down until police arrived. The guy then sued my mate for assault (I think the exact wording in UK law is 'unwanted touches' are assault). In court the Magistrate (think that is a Justice of the Peace in the US) asked the shoplifter why he was sueing for assault, and the guy replied 'he shouldn't have fucking touched me'. The magistrate then replied 'No, you should have fucking stole from his shop' and did the guy for wasting court time, police time as well as anything else he could think of!
Re:IBM or Novell should just buy SCO out (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM's not going to buy SCO out, or settle on any terms SCO would agree to. And nobody else is crazy enough to buy SCO out and take on the legal problems. The big problem is that SCO didn't just sue IBM, they publicly claimed IBM stole from SCO and ignored contract terms. Those are deadly serious claims to make considering the amount of business IBM does with governments, militaries and financial institutions (domestic and foreign) who have less than no tolerance for shenanigans and who won't do business with a company they don't trust completely. To make it worse, some of what SCO claimed IBM stole from them isn't just Unix stuff, it's things like JFS and RCU that're at the heart of IBM's mainframe systems. You know mainframes, the big boxes that're at the heart of IBM's business, the ones that run the boring accounting and payroll systems without which the corporate world wouldn't exist. IBM can't tolerate that sort of cloud hanging over it. Right now IBM's got two goals:
Some Clarifications (Score:2, Interesting)
Argument over an exception. (Score:3, Interesting)
The part of the agreement that said Novell kept the copyrights and other IP said something to the effect that the IP rights were not transferred EXCEPT as necessary for SCO/Caldera/whatever to enforce their rights under the contract. (The actual text was posted on (or linked from) groklaw a while back but I can't find it just now. If anybody knows a URL for it, or has the paragraph in question, please followup with it.)
As I read it, SCO counted on that exception to give them the Unix copyrights, or enough of them to back their anti-linux suits. Novell thought they still owned the copyrights, and said so. So now SCO is suing Novell for failing to perform on their contract by transfering enough copyrights to support their suits.
It's easy to see how the SCO execs could think they're in the right - especially back when they started. Now they have a tiger by the tail. At this point they HAVE to continue trying to enforce their interpretation, because the company (and their careers) will collapse if they give up. They'll be better off even if they lose.
Re:Argument over an exception. (Score:1, Interesting)
#include <IANAL.h>
There are (at least) two problems with SCO's reasoning.
1) The APA (Asset Perchase Agreement) was between Novell and Santa Cruz Operations. Caldera/The SCO Group bought whatever assets Santa Cruz Operations owned at the time of sale. Did Caldera/The SCO Group buy the APA also? Can they go back and enforce a contact that was between Novell and the original Santa Cruz Operations?
2) The APA was written to transfer only the UNIX licensing management to Santa Cruz Operations. Even if The SCO Group can enforce the original APA, can they expand the terms of the APA from mere license management to include their UNIX IP extortion, ahem, SCOSource scheme, thereby invoking the copyright transfer clause of the APA?
Law == Programming (Score:4, Interesting)
Law is like programming. It requires nailing down all sorts of intricate little details, getting the syntax just right, and tweaking the niggly bits until everyone is satisfied.
As long as anything has two interpretations, you can bet that two sides on a dispute will argue about which interpretation is correct.
The main difference between programming and law is that programmers argue with a machine that can't change it's mind about the rules. There is no such predictable arbitrator for law.
Programmers remove bad code -- the law just keeps adding to the mudball without ever actually deleting the cruft. Imagine "debugging" a system when someone can bring up a (fixed) bug (case) from 10-15 years ago and actually have the courts/system accept the old bug as relevent to the current implementation...