Court Adds Copyright Infringement to SCO's Suit Against IBM

Court finds "good cause"

[cyril kearney]

On Feb 25, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells ruled:
"The Court, therefore, finding good cause shown hereby grants SCO Group's motion for leave to file amended pleadings"

The amendmeent was the addition of copyright infringement claims against IBM by SCO. The claims for damages is now 5 Billion dollars. The court gave no indications of the merits of any of the claims.

This case does not look like it will go away soon.

[bird]

I'm glad it's not my money they feed to the lawyers.

[martin]

Of course it will not go away soon, SCO will do their best to squeeze money from Linux users. Rackshack were the first to purchase a license today.

PS. Didn't SCO withdraw all of their initial claims last month, looks like they're just trying to find anything to convince the court to judge for them.

[cyril kearney]

martin:

[internetnews.com...]

says their were four complaints in the original claim and now there are nine. Not enough information is available for me to comments on the merits of any of these claims.

LinuxToday says that EV1Servers has begun to buy licenses from SCO. It also predicts that SCO will file suit against a large well known company today (Tuesday March 2, 2004).

[martin]

Found something interesting, I guess ODP has made an interesting new category:

[directory.google.com...]

I'm not sure if this was the right article but it also mentions SCO withdrawing claims in the court:
[theregister.co.uk...]

[cyril kearney]

martin;
I'm not clear on all the lawyering going on. I think SCO has dropped some of its claims and replaced them with the copyright claims that are easier to prove.

AutoZone has been sued by SCO claiming Linux copyright infringement.

[biz.yahoo.com...]

I continue to think that the Linux trade press is doing a disservice to the Linux community by their lack of non-judgmental independent reporting. The business press and the judge seem to think that the issues are real in this case but it is difficult to tell because the trade press can't report on this story impartially.

Linux is not the only free Unix variant. Before long companies may be facing a transition to FreeBSD or budgeting licensing fees. A responsible trade press should be preparing and educating the user community.

[martin]

An interesting finding by Netcraft - Court that will hear SCO v AutoZone lawsuit itself runs Linux [news.netcraft.com].

I'm not sure how SCO picked up AutoZone but their choice does sound weird to me, autos is not the closest industry to Linux.

[brakthepoet]

Check out bcolflesh's post on the leaked SCO/MS email:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[digitalghost]

SCO was going to sue BOA first:

[zdnet.com.com...]

Gotta love the MS invisible ink...

[cyril kearney]

The last two posts go right to the heart of the coverage of the SCO v IBN suit. One is a conspiracy theory and the other uncovers that Bank of America was being considered as the second user sued by SCO.

Both are marginally interesting. But the big news of the day is that the Judge ordered IBM to turn over to SCO the source code of 232 different software releases of AIX and Dynix. SCO was ordered to detail the claims it has against this code.

The Judge is clearly moving the case along. If SCO can make an arguement for more code the Judge will entertain granting more discovery information but no fishing expedition is allowed.

[martin]

It looks like ev1 received a very big discount on their license purchase from SCO:

[news.netcraft.com...]

[martin]

And a little bit of BOFH... [theregister.co.uk...]