SCO v. Novell Goes To the Jury

Excelcia writes "Closing arguments in the six and a bit year old slander of title case between SCO and Novell occurred today and the case is finally in the hands of the jury. It's been an interesting case, with SCO alternately claiming that the copyrights to UNIX did get transferred to them, and that the copyrights should have been transferred to them. 'Judge Ted Stewart said, after the jury left to begin to deliberate, that in all his years on the bench, he's never seen such fine lawyering as in this case.' We're not going to find out the results until at least Tuesday, however, as one juror is taking a long weekend. Great lawyering notwithstanding, we can all hope next week that the Energizer bunny of all spurious lawsuits will finally go away."

Re:Prediction

[shentino]

It is the final chapter however.

As an issue of fact, the ownership of the UNIX copyrights is not very open for appeal unless something screwy happens.

Unfortunately, having the issue decided by twelve idiots who couldn't get out of jury duty, and who probably further got picked clean of any sanity during voir dire doesn't cut it.

What if SCO wins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will we see copyright infringements suddenly popping up on program names like cd, mkdir, netstat, or ping regardless of the differences in source code? Will sysv now be a copy-written software design that could be held to some stupid software patent? All this just because a telco wrote some names in code.
Can we trust Novell, with their financially romantic relationship with Microsoft to remain active in the Open Source community or will they become the replacement for the litigious SCO which was backed into this action with money from Redmond in the first place?

Stay tuned Penguins the wrath of Mount Rainier shall not be assuaged until the Ring formed in Redmond is thrown into the fires of mountain.

Re:Huzzah to groklaw, and 'good grief, jurors'

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... No. The jurors where empaneled March 8th.

Re:Is UNIX even worth suing over these days?

[yuhong]

Not to mention OpenSolaris, which because of the SVR4 code, Sun had to ask permission from SCO in 2003 before they could open source. After the ruling that Novell really owned the SVR4 code, Judge Dale Kimball wrote that [groklaw.net]: "In this case, Sun obtained the rights to opensource Solaris, and SCO received the revenue for granting such rights even though such rights remained with Novell. If the court were to declare that the contract was void and should be set aside, the court could not return the parties to the same position they were in prior to the 2003 Agreement. Sun has already received the benefits of the agreement and developed and marketed a product based on those benefits. There was also evidence at trial that OpenSolaris directly competed with Novell’s interest. The court, therefore, cannot merely void the contract."

Who should win?

[Helldesk Hound]

I think that the facts of the case clearly support Novell.

I think that Novell should win for multiple reasons:

1/ that the copyrights did not transfer to the S.C.O.

2/ that NewSCO tried to get Novell to assign the copyrights, that Novell didn't want to do so and therefore NewSCO took Novell to court in an attempt to take the copyrights from Novell.

3/ that NewSCO has been such a slimy corporation and has been so malicious to Novell that NewSCO doesn't deserve to get the copyrights.

HOWEVER, I think that given the jury may consist of persons who may be lacking in education, and may potentially be scammers themselves (you can't tell what the predisposition of any jury person is due to not actually knowing who they are and what their background is) there is at least a chance that NewSCO's lawyers may have been able to pull the wool down far enough so that at least one person on the Jury might just have believed NewSCO's pathetic bleating.

I agree - such a stupid case as this could only ever have been strung out this long in the USA. Every country that actually has a savvy and just legal system would have thrown out this case as having no chance of success and therefore not worth following through.

Since this lawsuit started

[Lord Byron II]

Since this lawsuit started...
I got an undergraduate degree in math.
I got a master's degree in physics.
I got a doctoral degree in physics.
I got a dog and a cat.
I meet a wonderful woman.
I married her.