Judge Kimball Strikes SCO's Jury Trial Demand 149
watchingeyes writes "In a ruling on various pre-trial motions in limine and other, similar motions in the SCO vs Novell case, Judge Kimball today issued a ruling striking SCO's demand for a jury trial, ruling that Novell's claims seek equitable, and not legal relief. In addition, he denied SCO's request for entry of judgment that would allow them to appeal his ruling on the UNIX copyrights and Novell's waiver rights, ruling that if SCO wants to appeal any of his rulings, it can do them all at once after trial. He also granted Novell's request to voluntarily dismiss its own breach of contract claim, denied SCO's motion to exclude press coverage and evidence from the IBM case, granted Novell's motion in limine preventing SCO from contesting his summary judgment ruling at trial, granted Novell's second motion in limine preventing SCO from arguing that SCOsource licenses that license SVRx only incidentally aren't SVRx licenses, denied another SCO motion in limine which improperly asked the Judge to issue rulings on contractual issues and denied Novell's final motion in limine which sought to prevent SCO from contesting Novell's apportionment of royalties analysis. Looks like SCO will be facing a trial in-front of a judge which has already ruled against them numerous times."
Re:english not good enough (Score:5, Informative)
For those not understanding what's going on: Kimball ruled that the copyrights on UNIX System V don't belong to SCO, they belong to Novell, because the Asset Purchase Agreement, signed between Novell and Santa Cruz never transferred the copyrights, just the business. Santa Cruz was to collect UNIX royalties for SVR5 for Novell and keep a portion for themselves in exchange. The SCO Group stopped paying Novell for UNIX sometime ago, and Novell wants its money.
Now if SCO doesn't own the UNIX copyrights, then how can they sue IBM? The answer is, they can't, especially since Novell told them they can't. Now SCO wants to appeal this decision before the Novell trial is over so they can still sue IBM. And they want any evidence from the IBM trial to not be used in the Novell trial (they filed a similar motion in the IBM trial). And Kimball said "No, and no."
In short: SCO is screwed. After Novell is through with them, if anything is left, IBM will launch its Lanham Act claims against SCO and there will be a smokin' hole in Linden, Utah, where SCO HQ used to be.
Re:Will Novell free the SVRx source code? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:english not good enough (Score:5, Informative)
"equitable relief" == court-ordered restitution of property, as opposed to fines and punishments. Suing someone to enforce a contract they signed or pay back money they owe you is equitable relief, as opposed to suing them for punitive damages, which is a legal matter. The relevancy here is that equitable matters don't warrant a jury trial, whereas legal ones do.
"waiver" == A formal way of stating that you, or someone acting on your behalf, will not enforce one of your (or their) rights. In this case, Novell issued a waiver on behalf of SCO over whatever it was that SCO was suing IBM over (Normally you can't waive someone else's rights like this, but SCO signed a contract that allowed Novell to do just that)
"dismiss" == to throw a court claim out and not hear it.
"summary judgment" == A judgement on a claim instead of an actual trial, because there was no disputed evidence to hear, so the Judge could rule on it immediately.
It's bad for SCO, this ruling; it doesn't get to bamboozle a fresh naïve jury but instead gets one of the two judges they've been irritating for the past 4 years, so that's it's next-to-last hope for a favourable ruling out the window. The only ray of hope is that it might be able to use some new evidence out to show that whatever Microsoft and Sun paid for wasn't the stuff that Novell was recently ruled to have owned. But it'll be fighting against it's own public statements and anything it's said in other courtrooms, so it's chances are slimmer than slim...
Re:Poor, Poor SCO (Score:5, Informative)
So I do think SCO are treated fairly here.
Re:english not good enough (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding as that they were to collect UNIX royalties for Novell and hand them all to Novell *then* Novell would pay them their cut. (Which of course they never did, so Novell is demanding *all* royalties ever collected by SCO.)
Re:english not good enough (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor, Poor SCO (Score:4, Informative)
From what I can work out, they only need a jury to decide if there is a dispute about the "facts" or if Novell were asking for punative damages. It seems that for the claims made, no facts are disputed, and Novell dropped their claim for special damages. All that left are decisions about the Law, and Judge Kimball gets to do that without a jury.
The facts of the case are the contracts etc. Both sides agree on the text of those, but the interpretation is a legal one and thats down to JK.
Re:Interpretation (Score:2, Informative)
It was DIFFERENT SCO.
It was a company from Santa Cruz, California called "The Santa Cruz Operation". When their Unix business started to go downhill they sold it to Caldera - a company from Utah. The same Caldera that purchased DR-DOS and won Millions in a lawsuit from Microsoft.
After selling Unix business to Caldera The Santa Cruz Operation renamed itself to Tarantella and later on Caldera renamed itself to The SCO Group, Inc. and started suing its customers, former customers, business partners and former business partners.
Re:Interpretation (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably thinking of the Santa Cruz Operation, not these bozos at Caldera doing business as The SCO Group, after they bought Santa Cruz's Unix business and Santa Cruz changed its name to Tarantella.
SCOG (The SCO Group aka Caldera) has deliberately blurred this distinction all along.
Re:Poor, Poor SCO (Score:4, Informative)
Almost,
They could insist on a jury if it were a matter of law, like punitive damages, but it is only matter of equity, that is, make me whole by payin what you owe. Novell dropped the punitive damages so they could avoid a jury. There still is a matter of fact in dispute, that is, how much of the Sun and MS licenses were SysV, for which SCOX must remit to Novell in full in return for a 5% fee, and how much were for other things, for which SCOX should not owe anything to Novell.
Re:Poor, Poor SCO (Score:2, Informative)
Because they're insecure, and have to put on superior nasty attitudes to feel good about themselves. They don't deserve your attention, and they're not worth stressing out over.
Anyway, the disconnect with the seventh amendment is that it only applies to matters of equity in federal courts. This, as most civil suits are, is a state case, and few states have the same guarantees of civil juries for equity disputes.