SCO legal manoeuvres continue despite setbacks

Mixed fortunes in lawsuits against AutoZone, IBM and Novell

Peter Williams, vnunet.com 20 Jul 2004

SCO has enjoyed mixed fortunes as its various lawsuits and responses churn through the US legal system.

Last week AutoZone, which SCO claims breached SCO's Unix copyright, won an indefinite stay against action to await developments in SCO's legal cases with IBM and Red Hat.

SCO has 30 days to convince the judge that it qualifies for a preliminary injunction based on "irreparable harm" and that it can carry out limited discovery for 60 days to support that.

The company said in a statement: "SCO looks forward to conducting the discovery and depositions in this case."

Meanwhile IBM has requested a summary judgment in its case with SCO.

Last week, in a counter-filing to the request, SCO claimed that IBM had "mischaracterised the matter", and has now submitted another filing complaining that IBM has not handed over "source code of multiple versions of AIX and Dynix/Ptx [Unix] and related documents SCO has sought for over a year".

But Roger Bickerstaffe, joint head of the IT law group at Bird & Bird, told vnunet.com: "This is tactical rather than strategic. SCO is trying to churn out battleground weapons to make it difficult for the judge to give the summary judgment."

IBM supplied all its distributed Unix versions, but SCO was asking for internal versions as well, he added.

In its 'slander of title' claim against Novell, SCO was last month granted 30 days to provide specific examples of actual financial harm. SCO filed a response just before the deadline expired, pointing to the costs of its ongoing court actions.

In a statement SCO said: "Defendants in those cases have relied on Novell's claims of ownership of Unix as a defence to SCO's claims, thereby hindering SCO's ability to protect its copyrights and causing SCO to incur significant additional attorneys' fees and cost."

Neither IBM nor Novell were willing to comment on their respective cases.

See also: