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German Court: SCO Must Pay a Fine. Yes. Again. - updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

SCO was taken to court again in Germany, by one of the companies that got an injunction years ago, Heise is reporting, and now it must pay a fine to the company, Thinking Objects Software GmbH. Three companies took SCO Germany to court back then, and this is one of the three. I'll show you a computer translation first of the headline in Heise. It is perfection:

SCO Group Germany must check software updates of the nut/mother company message to read out

Sounds like a job for ELIZA. I'll try to explain what I understand the article to be saying, but if you have a better translation, please provide it.

SCO was enjoined from making certain claims in Germany, and it signed an agreement in 2003 not to say them there, because its alternate choice was to have to prove them immediately, so it chose silence. As a result, SCO can't say in Germany that Linux violates SCO's IP or that end users could be liable for violations of SCO's intellectual property or that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX. Unless it can prove it. Good luck with that. SCO hasn't been successful proving that anywhere, so it can't say that in Germany. But the US website makes such claims, which were apparently shown in Germany too. Naughty, naughty.

It seems that SCO pled the "we didn't see what the US was doing when it updated the page" defense, but it was told that it used that excuse once before, so now it must pay a fine to the complaining company. Here's an incident that happened in 2007, to refresh your memory. And here's a 2003 offense, for which SCO was ordered to pay a 10,000 EU fine. Are they incorrigible? Well. Let's leave that to God. However, the Heise report indicates that they are at least repeat offenders.

Full post as published by Groklaw on August 20, 2008 (boomark / email).