SCO Denied Again In Court

CDWalton writes "Groklaw has the latest in the SCO v. IBM case. Judge Wells denied SCO the opportunity to get depositions from involved parties after the date she had specified as the cutoff for those activities." From the article: "Brent Hatch started out talking about the request to take the depositions of Intel, Oracle, and The Open Group. Judge Wells brought up her October 12, 2005 order and said that depositions MUST be completed by the cutoff date. That any that cannot be taken by that date must be forgone. Brent stated that they properly noticed the depositions before the cutoff date and that they were not taken for reasons outside his, or his client's, control ... Judge Wells asked if the subpeonas were defective in some manner. Hatch: Yes, they were."

Re:Why do cases take long?

[Odensgatan15]

Because lawyers get paid by the hour. That's why.

Re:Why do cases take long?

[v1]

The legal system is full of loopholes, extensions, exceptions, and other silly rules that are designed to cover up for inadequecies in other laws. This helps to give everyone a fair chance by providing an abundance of opportunities to get justice, but as a result, the cockroaches that are running from the light have plenty of dark corners to hide for awhile. It usually delays the inevetable, but in some cases if they stall for time long enough it can work out in their favor. Though it also can mean the farther you lift the hammer in the air, the harder it hits when at last it lands. I'm looking forward to SCO getting "nailed". It will be entertaining to watch their entire world suddenly collapse in on itself under the weight of justice, as the last of their shoddy bracing gives way at once.

Re:IANAL, so......

[HermanAB]

The gist of it:
"Magistrate Wells supposes that the court orders and rules are for no other purpose than to be broken."

Essentially, SCO asked for information and IBM responded with a deluge of 340,000 documents. SCO is unable to process the information and the magistrate is getting annoyed.

All these legal costs are piling up..

[AnonymousPrick]

at the shareholder's expense. When this is over, and if/when SCO loses, there's going to be a shareholder lawsuit. I guaaraannnteee it! Which will mean the death of SCO as we know it. Sure, it'll come back somehow, restructured and all, but it'll be a eunuch.

Re:Why do cases take long?

[killjoe]

I think the fact that SCO is able to drag it's feet is result of the inefficiency of the system. SCO has so far not been asked to make a specific accusation yet for gods sake. They have changed their complaint mid stream too. How is that not inefficient?

SCO started out this case by making a copyright violation accusation. Nobody is the court system said "which copyright, when and how?". During the pre-trial phase (more then two years!!!!!) they dropped that complaint and went on to other complaints.

Why hasn't anybody asked SCO what bits of unix they own, what pieces SCO alleges Ibm stole. They still haven't said what IBM stole form them.

Finally. Novell claims they own UNIX, not SCO. SHouldn't that case be settled first? If SCO does not own unix then this whole case has been a wasted time.

Re:Why do cases take long?

[mordors9]

Their ability to drag their feet is not really an inefficiency in the system. The delays are perhaps abuses of the system. The system itself will run as efficiently as the parties want it to. Given willing and cooperative parties, justice can be dispensed very quickly. In this case, SCO doesn't want to move the case forward as they know it is a loser. They seem to be hoping that they can keep hanging around long enough that someone will pay them off to go away and they can declare victory. They don't seem to be willing to read the tea leaves here as it seems clear that IBM is not going to bite.

what's taking so long?

[jafac]

Jesus jiminy cricket on a rocket-powered pogo stick!

Why aren't these SCO assholes and their coconspirators behind bars already?

This is ridiculous! - Since this SCO thing started, Martha Stewart traded stocks, got indicted, lied to investigators, got tried, found guilty, sentanced, finished her sentence, and returned to public life, and they can't even get this worthless SCO thing through depositions so they can decide it needs to be tossed out of court?

And they wonder why people think the court system is broken in this country.

Well put! Just a few additions:

[rewinn]

From the article:

1. "...the January 12th subpoena was defective in both substance and service." The subpoena is a document compelling the other side to show up at a deposition with certain documents, ready to talk about certain topics. Its substance was basically its content, what it was intended to communicate. The service is the procedure by which the document creator gives it to the target person (organization) in a legally effective way. The judge says the subpoena was defective in both characteristics, so it's not legally binding.

2. "...That even had it not been defective it provided inadequate notice and time.
Judges like to give 2nd reasons, when available, for their decisions, out of meticulousness (which is a good thing in a judge) or desire to forestall appeals (not a bad thing). Here, the judge is saying that even if she was wrong about point #1, the subpoena is no good because it didn't fulfill legal requirements as to the amount of time before the deposition that the subpoena has to be delivered, and warning (notice) about the content of the deposition. Ideally, depositions are not supposed to be occasions for surprising witnesses with weird questions, but a Search For The Truth, so witnesses are supposed to be given fair notice & time to prepare.

3. "[the judge's] October 12th orders were clear, not subject to unilateral decisions to violate."
TRANSLATED: the judge is really, really pissed. SCO's lawyers are giving totally bogus arguments, in her evaluation, which not only needlessly delays this particular case, but also strikes at the integrity of the entire judicial process.

It appears from this article that SCO believes its only hope would seem to be to bait the judge into saying or doing something stupid, like Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case a few years back.

Re:Why do cases take long?

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

Why does software take so long to build? I mean, how hard can it be?

Re:Why do cases take long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually for most of your examples, you would have to dismiss the the charges and refile the correct ones. Amending would be if you accused Bob of 5 things, found out 3 of them were not valid, but there were 7 new ones. You can amend because of the two that survived discovery. You cannot amend to accuse a new defendant as far as I have ever heard..

20 years of AIX revisions

[walterbyrd]

Scox requested, and got, complete code to every revision of AIX, released in the last 20 years.

The request makes no sense. Scox doesn't own AIX, in fact scox doesn't own sysV. And even if scox did, the AIX code has nothing to do with scox's accusations. These accusations are nothing but assertions on scox's part, after three years, and three court orders, scox has not provided a shread of evidence.

When scox first requested the AIX revisions, Wells only gave scox five years worth. Scox whined and whined; and finally after a 5 month "under advisement" period, scox was granted all the discovery they requested. Billions of lines of code. Of course, scox also had to be given time to sort though all the discovery.

Scox is still requested more irrelevant discovery, even though the discovery period is over.

Becasue the the judge did not fully grant scox's request, the cheerleaders on groklaw are having a party about scox got their asses handed to them.

Go figure.

SCO is not the losing party

[Infonaut]

A losing party should not be allowed to drag out the proceedings hoping to force the opposition to spend money.

You are assuming that SCO is the losing party, but the case has not yet been tried. The jury trial isn't scheduled to begin until next February.

The system is deliberately set up to allow both SCO and IBM to file crossclaims, bring in parties that are necessary for full resolution of all the issues, and conduct thorough discovery. It emphasizes thoroughness over speed.

It is expensive and time-consuming, which is why most businesses would prefer not to bring lawsuits. SCO obviously brought suit because they realized they couldn't survive without a successful lawsuit. It was a desperate gamble, but before discovery, nobody actually *knew* that IBM would prevail, which is why it survived a motion for summary judgment. The facts were very much in dispute. Everyone talks about it as if at the moment the original complaint was filed, we all had the facts at our disposal to disprove the SCO case. But what if during discovery, SCO had come up with a "smoking gun" of some kind?

My point is that the judge's role is to be an impartial referee in the fight between SCO and IBM. A judge who decided the case before trial would have his decision reversed in a heartbeat.

If we operated under the so-called "English Rule", which is used throughout most of the world, the loser would pay costs. This would cut down on frivolous lawsuits, but it could also potentially stifle legitimate use of the courts by parties. There is serious and ongoing debate [repec.org] as to whether the English Rule system actually reduces the cost of litigation or leads to a more "just" outcome.