That is an error of fact. What the judge ruled on was SCO's "Plea for leave to file an amended complaint." At this point, the only thing that has happened is that the judge has ruled that yes, SCO has permission to file an amended complaint. That is not at all the same thing as the judge "accepting the changes."
The author does not understand what that first part means, and has therfore told us something that is not true in the second part. This is lawyers dancing on the head of a pin. What IBM did not oppose was giving SCO leave to file an amended complaint. They explicitly reserved the right to "move against the amended pleadings" themselves, when they arrive. Between where we are now, and the judge actually "accept[ing] the SCO Group's changes," there are at least 4 steps. SCO has to actually file the amended complaint. Then IBM gets some period of time in which to "move againt the amended pleading." SCO gets to answer that, and sometime after that there will be a hearing, followed by a decision as to whether to accept the amended complaint. To read this article, you'd think all that is done. But it hasn't even begun yet. How might IBM move against a claim of copyright infringement? They will almost certainly demonstrate to the court that two separate companies have registered the same copyrights, and that those are the ones at issue in SCO's amended complaint. There is therefore a dispute concerning the ownership of these copyrights, a dispute that SCO should be required to settle before they bring charges of copyright infringement against anyone. Why waste the court's and IBM's time trying a case that may be moot? This is a reasonable request on IBM's part, and it has a very good chance of being granted. SCO will have to go off and resolve its contract dispute with Novell over who owns the copyrights. IBM is not even a party to that dispute, so it's not something that can reasonably be addressed as part of this lawsuit. Meanwhile, SCO has done something useless and stupid in the form of suing Novell for "slander ot title." Well, they can't really do that either, because that also gets back to whether SCO even has title. Somewhere out of that dreck there has to come a new lawsuit, a contract dispute, over how all those contract terms and amendments between the old SCO and Novell are to be interpreted. SCO says it means this, Novell says it means that, both companies have registrations on file with the Copyright Office, so until some court rules one way or the other, no one can be sure who really owns the copyrights. So it may well turn out that the judge in SCO v IBM will decide not accept SCO's amended complaint, on the grounds that SCO cannot demonstrate that they even own the copyrights they are accusing IBM of infringing.
We are left to wonder who the "he" is that sentence. It is not Magistrate Brooke C. Wells.The reporter didn't even check. That's how sloppy the reporting is. |
This has all become so complicated that hardly anything reported in the press is true. The reporters are either too sloppy, or too ignorant, to understaand what is going on.