Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

Transcript of the April 30 SJ Motions in Novell v. SCO - Yay! - as PDF and text

By Pamela Jones et al.

We finally have permission from the court to share the transcript of the hearing on the summary judgment motions [PDF] heard on April 30th, on the second day of the Novell-SCO trial in Utah, with you. Yay!

I'm so grateful to Chris Brown for following through and obtaining it for us, and to those who donated to make it possible, and to the court for its gracious permission.

I enjoyed reading this transcript more than any of the other trial transcripts. If you only have time to read one transcript, this is the one, since it sums up the two sides' positions. Morrison & Foerster's Michael Jacobs is, as usual, able to make complexity seem simple and easy to grasp, and Boies Schiller's Stuart Singer, given an impossible position to argue, does so. I'd love to see what he could do with the facts and the law on his side. To say that Sun got nothing new in the 2003 agreement that it didn't have in 1994 is, of course, hard to argue without blushing, when the latter agreement gave Sun the right to open source Solaris.

On the second motion, it's Ted Normand for SCO, and it is he who presents SCO's complex arguments regarding Novell, fiduciary relationships, ratification, and who gets the money. Or, more accurately, he argues why Novell shouldn't get it. If you look at it as an incredibly creative legal argument, which it is, you will understand why, when Jacobs stands up, he says this:

MR. JACOBS: I have to confess, Your Honor, this is in a case that has had lots of interesting issues, this is one of the more -- more interesting ones because of this issue. And we have had a lot of law school exam questions in this case and this is another one of those. But I think here is the problem with SCO's argument.

He means that Boies Schiller raised arguments many law firms might not have. And the case itself presents a lot of tricky issues. That's what he means by law school exam questions -- that you don't see this every day and to figure out the answers, you have to think deeply after doing significant legal research. For sure, SCO can never complain about the level of its representation. It's just the truthiness thing that sinks its ship over and over, in my view.

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