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SCO gets more time to file appeal brief regarding its loss to Novell

By Pamela Jones et al.

SCO filed a motion asking for more time to file its appeal brief with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. They needed 10 more days, and Novell agreed to it, so the clerk signed off on it the same day the motion was filed, and the new date for SCO to file its brief will be September 9.

SCO's argument asking for more time is interesting, because we learn that Novell asked to -- and SCO agreed they could -- attach 60 more documents to the Appendix. And Stuart Singer, who takes credit in his bio on Boies Schiller's website for representing SCO as lead counsel at this same court of appeals the last time SCO appealed, is busy with another case, working on a preliminary injunction proceeding. Well. Almost. It doesn't say the "SCO" word:

Won appellate decision from Tenth Circuit (August 2009) regarding ownership of copyrights and contract rights for the UNIX operating system.

Heh heh. They are incorrigible. Not exactly the whole story, eh? What he won was a jury trial to *determine* the ownership of UNIX and UnixWare copyrights and contract rights, but the jury at the trial said Novell retained ownership of the copyrights for UNIX and UnixWare in 1995-6, and the judge ruled that Novell had the right to waive contractual violations, so SCO lost completely, despite the Court of Appeals granting SCO that extra bite of the apple with a jury trial. Which, I must point out, reached exactly the same conclusion that the first judge had on summary judgment way back in August of 2007. Singer's bio makes it sound like SCO prevailed. No wonder Bloomberg got it so wrong today [see News Picks]. That's the trouble with fibs and spin. They detach your mind from reality. Over time, that can't be good for anybody's mental health.

Preliminary injunctions are very, very hard to win, because one of the things you have to demonstrate early in the case, meaning before you've done discovery, is that you probably will win in the end, so it's a legitimate excuse this time. But what might those extra 60 pages be, I wonder?

Full post as published by Groklaw on September 01, 2010 (boomark / email).