Are judges allowed to do that? [LWN.net]

Are judges allowed to do that?

Posted Jul 15, 2005 15:02 UTC (Fri) by sethg (guest, #14970)
In reply to: Are judges allowed to do that? by yokem_55
Parent article: The Michael Davidson Email - SCO v. IBM (Groklaw)

If I remember correctly, IBM already moved for a partial summary judgement on the copyright infringement issues, and was denied, because SCO claimed that once they finished with their discovery and had access to every single version of of every AIX file in IBM's version-control system, they would be able to prove that some IBM contribution to Linux was derived (via AIX?) from some code that they owned the copyright to.

Yeah, it sounds like bullshit to me, too. But remember, in order to convince a judge to grant a motion for summary judgement, you have to convince him or her that the facts and the law are *so* overwhelmingly in your favor that further argument would just be a waste of time. If the judge in SCO v. IBM wants to give SCO enough rope to hang themselves in the trial, that's his call.

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Are judges allowed to do that?

Posted Jul 16, 2005 3:29 UTC (Sat) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

You remember correctly. The judge (in PJ's opinion) is being careful to ensure that there is no chance for an appeal. Hence, the judge is making sure to dot the i's and cross the t's.

But the judge also said, that up to this point, SCO has not presented anything that looks like a copyright violation (a paraphrase). Thus, the judge agrees that SCO has not yet come up with any proof.

However, SCO was granted more time and limited discovery to find it. They were put on notice by the judge that this is their last chance to prove copyright infringement.

And you are correct, IBM has a high bar to clear to get a summary judgement. SCO has to only present one fact in dispute to force it to go to trial. So far, they haven't even done that.

Are judges allowed to do that?

Posted Jul 16, 2005 11:04 UTC (Sat) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link]

Unfortunatelly (for SCO) we have Linus. Who is famous for patch-rejection. Patch should be very clear to be accepted - unless it's separate part of kernel (like XFS or some driver). And patch should not imlement new layer of abstraction on top of existing ones - unless there are some very compelling reasons.

In practice this means that if you are porting something from Unix to Linux the only way to do this and get your patch accepted is to look on Unix code and rewrite everything from scratch - architectures are too different for any other approach.

And this means that even if some code is "ported" from Unix this code is still written from scratch - thus non-infringing (ideas are not copyrightable!).