Judge Kimball Strikes SCO's Jury Trial Demand

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."

Interpretation

[inode_buddha]

Interpretation: SCO screwed themselves. If one has been following the case all along, this should be no surprise.

english not good enough

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

since english is not my primary language, can someone help me with all the legalese ?

is this another nail on SCO's coffin, or several of them at the same time ?

Re:english not good enough

[Crypto Gnome]

America may have many things wrong with it, but in this case (pun intended) it's very nice to see a sitting judge wield a powered nail-gun with such accuracy.

Re:english not good enough

[advocate_one]

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.

I want to see them go and pierce the "corporate veil" and go after the source of the money SCO used to bankroll the lawsui^H^H^H^H^H^Hscam... I want to know who the real "PIPE Fairy" is... we all suspect Microsoft, but I want to see hard evidence that can be used against Microsoft.

Maybe the most important remaining issue

[Anonymous Coward]

One question that will be settled at trial is apportionment. That is, how much of the money paid by Microsoft and Sun belongs to Novell. The judge has clearly said that some of the money belongs to Novell. The best SCO can do is argue that it is a very small amount.

SCO's problem is that they basically told the SEC that all the money belongs to Novell. SCO tried to have that evidence excluded but failed.

It is likely that Novell will get more than 50% of the money. The judge will grant a constructive trust. SCO will be immediately bankrupt. The trustee will march in and kick the current SCO management out. The trustee will agree to anything the creditors (IBM, Novell mainly) tell him. The cases will end immediately.

AllParadox, a retired lawyer who has been following the case closely, predicts that Judge K. will issue an order sanctioning SCO's lawyers. Some of them could end up being disbarred. It will serve them right. This case has been an incredible misuse of the courts.

Re:Poor, Poor SCO

[Orange Crush]

Don't they have a right to a jury trial?

Sure they do. They just need a case first.

Re:Maybe the most important remaining issue

[keraneuology]

AllParadox, a retired lawyer who has been following the case closely, predicts that Judge K. will issue an order sanctioning SCO's lawyers. Some of them could end up being disbarred . It will serve them right. This case has been an incredible misuse of the courts.

One can only hope, but this is very unlikely. The legal system is loathe to expel their own - when judge Susan Chrzanowski was caught having an affair with a defense attorney who was a) pleading cases before her b) given a virtual monopoly on court-appointed indigent cases, c) murdered his wife the day after having yet another sexual rendezvous with the judge and the judge was caught in several lies regarding her involvement her only punishment was 17 months paid "vacation" (they called it a suspension, but she collected around $200,000 and full benefits), six months unpaid leave, and instead of being disbarred was allowed to return to the bench. Retired state justice Charles Levin who oversaw Susan's review originally ruled that she had done nothing whatsoever that merited punishment.

If cases like this don't merit any punishment from the ranks of the legal system, why would a couple of lawyers playing hardball in a case that most americans don't understand or care about be prohibited from paying more dues to the various lawyer associations?

Re:Here's an example

[keraneuology]

Yes, Nifong was disbarred, but this is a rarity and involved a case that was front-page news across the country for months. What % of the national population knew about the Duke lacrosse incident? What % have ever heard of SCO? What % know that SCO, IBM and Novell are all in the same industry? If Nifong hadn't been disbarred then the profession would have taken a major black eye. If the attorneys involved in this case aren't disbarred, who - outside of /. readers - would know or even care?

I have my own personal feelings here - not only should the lawyers be kicked out but their masters should be personally punished. If your dog bites somebody on your command then you'd better believe that you'll face the music. If you are a corporate exec who issues the sic 'em command to your lawyer then you had better be ready to face the music. Personally.

But my personal thoughts are irrelevant, and these lawyers are likely to get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. In fact, in Michigan (and probably many other states) a lawyer is held responsible if he doesn't pursue a case to the utmost, and bringing about frivolous charges are just part of the game. How many cases are filed alleging racial discrimination where there is clearly zero evidence, let alone plausibility that it ever happened? Those lawyers are never punished for making false allegations, if the charges don't stick then all of the lawyers and judges say "oh well, no harm in trying".

The Darl McBride response

[merc]

Darl just can't keep from flapping his festering pie-hole. Up until now SCO attorneys have been fairly good at keeping him quiet and from making public statements. However it looks as though he couldn't resist doing a computerworld interview. I'm not sure what he thinks he has to gain by attempting to try his case in the courts of public opinion:

We absolutely and fundamentally believe we are right in this case, and we believe in the justice system. But we also know that things don't always happen the way they're supposed to, and we're realistic about that point.

And this gem is fascinating as well:

Let's call a spade a spade: We just took a literal pounding. We got knocked down -- there is no doubt about it. This is not a good ruling for us. But it's not the end of the line of the legal battle. In fact, there's some very encouraging things that came out of even this ruling. And we will continue to fight on those fronts.

Original article here [computerworld.com]

I can only guess that the "encouraging thing" he is speaking about has to be that Kimball ruled that they own their own derivitive works of UnixWare. However these are facts were never in question. At this point we can expect SCO to argue that the M$ and Sun licenses were SCOsource licenses and not SVR4 UNIX. Good luck with that since I believe they have made conflicting public statements about that in the past as well.

Re:One-armed man

[Eponymous Bastard]

I doubt it. He's probably been hearing that joke all his life. Bringin it up again is not going to get you on his good side.

scox not hurt - justice not served

[walterbyrd]

Scox was as good as dead before the scam. In fact, scox still has a higher market cap now than before the scam. Scox had never been profitable before the scam, they were losing money every quarter. Scox had no hope of turning that around. Since the scam, scox execs and lawyers have made a ton of money.

Msft's objective was to put a legal cloud over linux, and that was probably accomplished as well. Msft's other objective was to send this message to any company that might be thinking about contributing to Linux: "anybody who contributes to linux will be punished with a $100 million lawsuit, and five years in court."

Scox got away with outright lying to the SEC *many* times. Numerous public lies, extortion, mail fraud, barratry, vexatious abuse of the legal system, securities fraud, and more. Scam planned to go bankrupt all along, it's the only way the scam would make sense. As always, msft got away with the scam as well.

All this "lawsuit" amounts to nothing more than a msft PR stunt. This lawsuit is about 1% of msft's on-going fud campaign. Msft paid some scammer hillbillies from Utah to file bogus claims against ibm (not even a linux distributor) just to slime linux.

All of this "scox screwed themselves" cheerleading is laughable.

Sorry.