LWN.net Logo

IBM's summary judgment motion

IBM's summary judgment motion

Posted Aug 18, 2004 15:18 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: IBM's summary judgment motion by pointwood
Parent article: IBM's summary judgment motion

It does omit one of IBM's arguments.

IBM reminds the judge of the principle in contract law that when there is any ambiguity in a contract, it must be decided against the interest of whoever wrote the contract. In this case, AT&T wrote the contract, so if (as SCO claims) it is ambiguous and could be interpreted to give SCO ownership of all of AIX, but could also be interpreted not to, then the judge must assume the latter.

This comes after they have established that the latter is the only plausible interpretation anyway, by default under copyright law, and also by deposition of its authors, and also by appeal to another principle that an absurd interpretation cannot be assumed.

Both principles are probably contradicted ("amended") by reams of case law, so they don't make their argument depend on them.


(Log in to post comments)

Copyright © 2012, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds