Teleidoscope

Sun, Aug 12, 2007

Big Companies

Posted at 2:42 pm MDT to Current Events

Our company, as a small suppplier, has had problems with big companies that try to dictate outrageous terms or retroactively chnage deals on us. But I don't think we have ever had to deal with outright extortion. We should probably consider ourselves lucky.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden at Making Light has a commentary on an exchange of letters between an officer of a large Australian book store chain and the head of a small publishing company. Some of the comments are a lot of fun, too.

This weekend seems to be full of examples on how not to do business:

1. (SCO) Don't sue your customers.

2. (A&R) Don't try to extort money from your suppliers at usurious interest rates. Especially, don't do it in writing.

I wonder if going to Business School sonehow destroys common sense.

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SCO PSJ

Posted at 1:32 pm MDT to Current Events

A quick recap:

SCO is the company that sued IBM for billions of dollars, claiming that Linux violated some of their UNIX copyrights. Then they sued Novell for saying that the copyrights in question actually belong to Novell. Redhat sued SCO, more or less for slandering Linux. And SCO sued some of their own customers, more or less for switching from SCO UNIX to Linux and claimed that all Linux users should pay them lots of money for the copyrighted material that was supposedly in Linux. There were also counterclaims all over the place.

After years of litigation SCO was never able to identify the copyrighted material of theirs that was supposedly in Linux.

On Friday the judge in the SCO/Novell case (same judge as for SCO/IBM) published a 110 page Preliminary Summary Judgment that Novell did own the copyrights, and decided a number of other contractual questions in Novell's favor as well. See the Groklaw report for more details.

SCO's claims against Novell are basically gone. Novell's counterclaims mostly stand, including one for conversion (i.e. theft) of license fees that SCO should have handed over to Novell.

SCO probably doesn't have the cash to pay the license fees that were withheld, much less damages asked for in Novell's counterclaims.

SCO's side of the IBM case mostly falls apart because if they didn't have the copyrights, they had no standing to sue. Some of IBM's counterclaims don't make sense any more, but others (like a Lanham act claim that SCO was engaged in the business equivalent of libel) become basically a slam-dunk.

This coming week could be very entertaining as the repercussions of the PSJ begin to take effect.

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