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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 30 2012 @ 08:41 AM EDT |
Righthaven was slightly different. The original copyright owners kept the
copyrights and sold some "right to enforce" to Righthaven, which the
court found insufficient.
In the SCO saga, the copyrights have been found to still be owned by Novell, so
the copyright part of the IBM suit is over. SCO still has claims for breach of
contract over Project Monterey. So long as the asset sale also includes any and
all rights to the Project Monterey contract(s), then the purchaser should have
standing.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: hardmath on Thursday, August 30 2012 @ 09:16 AM EDT |
Apparently Righthaven misrepresented (more than once) its
standing to sue for copyright infringement as a copyright
holder for content at issue. Certainly Righthaven could
have had standing if they did hold the copyright, or they
could have acted as legal representation for the copyright
owning parties. But they burnt their bridges!
Anyhow, SCO (x/g/t) has no copyrights to sell, having sold
the Unixware business lock-stock-and-barrell to unXis. So
what "litigation assets" can they sell?
The bankruptcy court has been very lenient in treating such
questions, happy to approve the unXis sale with a glib
proviso that SCO wouldn't be selling anything they didn't
own! Still it's hard for me to understand how even SCO
itself still has standing to pursue IBM as a matter of
contract dispute. The business of administering Unix
licenses on Novell's behalf, presumably the primary basis
for the portions of the IBM suit not settled by Novell's
victory, was explicitly abandoned by SCO in order to avoid
costs of curing their performance.
I suppose an argument could be made about tortious
interfernce with SCO customers; an insane argument but a
legal argument nonetheless. Assuming SCO's customers were
Unixware customers, it's going to be hard to prove IBM
responsible for more damage to SCO's business than SCO
inflicted on itself.
However it leaves open the question of how to acquire
standing to pursue such an action. Perhaps Judge Cahn will
have a marketing plan in his back pocket.
--hm
---
Hate the math. Don't hate the mathematician![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 30 2012 @ 11:45 AM EDT |
Technically, yes. So long as the Standing stems from a valid contract or asset
that transferred to the successor in interest, Standing also goes with the same.
Witness Novell's purchases of Wordperfect from the Wordperfect corporation and
the TSG's (then Caldera, a spinoff from Novell (which is one of the reasons I
can't fathom what possessed them to DO this)) purchase of DR-Dos from Digital
Research. In both cases the lawsuit that'd started just before the purchase
transferred to the successor in interest.
Now...having said this...there's not really IP that's been infringed (The
results of the narrowing of the suit against IBM to those aspects, combined with
the loss against Novell on who actually OWNED what they were sued for...) so
what Standing other than being a defendant in a Lanham Act suit is actually here
in this case?
Inquiring minds would LOVE to know.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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