[Paleo Conservative]

[Duke Nukum]

I'm all for fighting for stuff, but...Well, you'd think people wouldn't fight this hard over something that sucks so much.

[AmericaUnited]

HAHA!! SCO is going to get crushed. These people are just so pathetic.

[taxcontrol]

SCO, for your information, should I receive an invoice, you will receive a cease and desist letter from my lawyers.

[Salo]

Should I get one of these letters, and God knows, I've been eagerly awaiting one, the first step is to contact the postmaster about the mail fraud and step two is contact the attorney general. If you haven't purchased from SCO, they can't invoice you for anything. Sending this invoice via USPS mail is mail fraud.

[Mr. K]

this smells like the makings of an urban legend... is their any confirmation that this is true?

[Salo]

We need a little bit of FUD remover.

[Nick Danger]

There was a famous scam some years ago in which the fraudsters sent bogus invoices to various companies, usually for things like office supplies, toner cartridges, etc.

The scam worked because many companies paid low-dollar invoices as a matter of routine. By the time their internal systems caught the fact that there was no purchase order to match against the invoice, the fraudsters had moved on, leaving no trace.

This led to the passage of a law that made it a federal crime to send an invoice through the mail to any company with which the sender had no prior contract or purchase order for the items invoiced. This is now a form of mail fraud.

For press release purposes these will be referred to as "invoices," but SCO's lawyers cannot be so dumb that they would advise sending something out that actually demands a payment. Instead these are very likely to be more vague threats of bad things to come unless the recipient calls SCO to "arrange terms."

Either that, or this whole thing will turn out to be another empty threat like the auditing of AIX customers or the imminent filing of lawsuits against linux users.

SCO was just fined E10,000 (about $10,500) by a German court for stating on its German web site that linux users may be liable for infringing on SCO's "mental property." The German courts had previously prohibited SCO from making any more of those sorts of claims until it proved that there was some truth to them. Rather than proving anything, SCO cleansed their web site of the claims. Except they missed one, and that just cost them ten thousand bucks.

[Publius6961]

Hey what a clever idea.
I'm going to have to try that.

Jesse Jackson, SCO whatever.
Send the pigeons an invoice and see if they pay.

If only 10% cough up that could be pretty good.

[Liberal Classic]

Since this issue hasn't yet been decided in court, SCO could run afoul of the Postal Service mail fraud regulations for fraudulently sending out invoices.

[AFreeBird]

$700 bucks for how much alledged UNIX code? Seems a little extreme to me. But hey, they learned from their master - His Billness.

Seems to me like SCO is trying to steal code from LINUX.

[Still Thinking]

I hope I get one! I'm almost out of TP.

[gore3000]

How can they go around suing people, if their right to the code has not even been established in court yet?

Seems they are putting the cart before the horse and that they are utterly desperate. Maybe they are trying to bump the stock price up a bit so they can sell some more of their shares?

[flamefront]

plans to begin sending invoices to companies

What are the statutes about misuse of the mail? Sounds like fraud to me; they know they have no case.