Well. I would want that too, I'm thinking, all things considered. It's comforting to know there are still people on earth who still want SCO stock. Relax. Just joking around.

The first motion has to do with stock options granted under the SCO 2004 Omnibus Stock Incentive Plan, attached as Exhibit A [PDF], options that SCO granted on August 26, 2008. That was Tuesday. So they granted them and now they are asking the court to say it's OK and to let them do it again in the future.

The plan "is designed to promote the interests of SCO and its stockholders by incentivizing and rewarding employees who make a long-term contribution to the success of the company," SCO says. But trust me, if you want to know just how incentivized the SCO executives have been, you probably want to read their 2008 Proxy Statement, filed with the SEC on March 5, 2008. Looking at both documents together brings them both into a more nuanced context.

But then I noticed media reports that Psystar has announced that it will be filing antitrust (!) counterclaims. Antitrust? I couldn't help but reflect -- and I confess it was my first reaction -- that it's so odd that all Microsoft's competitors end up dealing with unexpected allegations, sometimes from small companies, against them in court or before regulatory bodies that just happen to threaten their viability in the marketplace.

Remember Google was accused, and cleared, of an antitrust allegation in the US and before the EU Commission? And IBM was accused of copyright infringement in connection with Linux by SCO, as laboriously chronicled right here on Groklaw. And now Apple has to deal with litigation counterclaims that, so far, seem to me to be dubious at best from a company that just suddenly showed up last year doing things that a first-year law student, or even a mere paralegal like myself, would assume were going to get them royally sued into nonexistence. Now there are announced counterclaims that just happen to go to the heart of Apple's business.

Also, I was going through some older materials, and I found a color-coded comparative chart [PDF] that a volunteer made for us long ago. It's a comparison of a July 8, 2003 S3 with an October 14, 2003 amendment, an S-3/A. There was a further amendment, an S-3/A filed on October 23, 2003 as well. It's fascinating to watch the SCO story morph just in these three versions, particularly now, when we can compare all three with what SCO testified to at trial.

So I asked Richard Hulse of Radio New Zealand, the station's media manager, to tell me how they came to decide to add Ogg Vorbis to their collection of interviews and broadcasts, already offered as MP3s and in Windows Media Audio. His answers are instructive, and you may find it helpful to note his suggestions on how to effectively request other sites to offer Ogg Vorbis files. And if any of you wish to respond to his requests for help with a how-to, please feel free to lend a hand to make this a success.

At first I was going to put the FSFE press release in News Picks, but I consider this such a wise legal decision on KDE's part, because -- as the press release phrases it, it "enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court" -- that I am putting it here, so you will consider it too for your project, especially if yours is an international project. You may recall Groklaw's Sean Daly interviewed Shane Coughlan, who leads the Freedom Task Force project, when it was first announced in early 2007. If you have questions, here's the Freedom Task Force contact page. Notice in the press release that the FLA template was used to come up with an FLA for KDE in particular, and you can do something similar for your project, with the Freedom Task Force's help.

I also wanted to mention that FSFE has a Legal and Technical Network now:

The Freedom Task Force coordinates a European Legal and Technical Network. Each participant is referred to as a 'delegate' of the respective network. Membership is by invitation only and if you are interested in participating you can contact us.

Our goal is to strengthen the legal foundation of Free Software through building connections between professionals and researchers active on the continent. The network currently has over 50 legal experts, over 30 technical experts and covers sixteen European countries. It also maintains contacts in Canada, the USA, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

Some network delegates are explicitly recommended by FSFE. To be explicitly recommended the delegate must be approved by the governing council of FSFE.

I think, after thinking a lot about Jacobsen v. Katzer, that the US needs something similar, a place where you can go to find attorneys who know something about FOSS and understand how to protect your interests without doing damage to the FOSS ecosystem at large.

So, what do you think? Can Novell get its money from a Hong Kong foreign subsidiary? I'm sure we all agree that SCO would never try to stiff anyone, so the fact that they are setting this up just before the bankruptcy court is about to decide on the question of how Novell will get the money the Utah court decided SCO owes them must be entirely coincidental. I feel a song coming on:

Ah, sweet mystery of life
At last I've found you...
T'is love and love alone that can repay

I hope Novell likes music, because methinks it will never see that $3 million. The other creditors? Do they still hope? Like a raisin in the sun. Hark! There is one, buried in the bills, asking about the status of the case. Dream on, my friend! Lie back, try to relax, while I tell you about Hong Kong.

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.

It sounds quite alarming, the way it's worded, but trust me, they don't drag them out at dawn and shoot them for this or disbar anyone. It's just the wording of the notice, which is standard. You can find Special Order 109 [PDF], In re: AUTHORIZATION FOR CONVERSION TO CASE MANAGEMENT/ELECTRONIC CASE FILING, here. It's local to Nevada, but it's part of the federal court system switch to digitalization. The Clerk of the Court is responsible to keep the official record, and so there has to be a way to identify when an attorney is who he says, when a document is filed. So this is what it refers to, that they need passwords and such. It also represents their consent to being served electronically.

Today, Judge George O'Toole lifted the gag order on three MIT students who were sued by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority for discovering a security vulnerability in the MBTA's fare payment system. The Court found that the MBTA was not likely to prevail on the merits of its claim under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. MBTA had argued that the CFAA, which prohibits the transmission of a program that causes damage to a computer, also covers "verbal transmission," such as talking to people at conferences. Judge O'Toole, however, looked closely at the statute, and held that the CFAA does not apply to security researchers like the students talking to people. More details to follow.

[Update: The MBTA had sought to convert the temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction to last for five months, to give them time to fix the vulnerabilities -- here's the motion [PDF] -- and that was denied. It's worth reading, this motion, if only to see why this thing swirled out of logical bounds. One issue is that when the MBTA hears the word hacker, they seem to think it means cracker, and they viewed the DefCon conference as a meeting where people go to learn how to break in to other people's stuff, which naturally panicked them. And they seem to imagine that using Wireshark, which used to be called Ethereal, is "illegal activity", as you can read on page 25. Nor did they understand geek humor. Just a real culture clash, with misunderstandings that led to litigation that now seems to be resolvable, now that the MBTA's attorney says he wants to meet with the students, to learn more about their research findings.]

So the attempt to stretch the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has failed. Please read the statute for yourself, and ask yourself: do you want talking about computers and security to become a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment and subject to FBI and Secret Service oversight? That's what almost just happened. You can find the documents in MBTA v. Anderson here. If you read the MBTA's complaint, you'll find the allegations of violations of the CFAA on page 12. I think you'll find the MBTA interpretation of the statute shocking ("... the damage constitutes a threat to public health and safety... affects a computer system used by a government entity for national security purposes..."). The research was about getting a ride on a subway for free. In any case, the judge didn't buy it, with respect to the restraining order.