Patrice Riemens on Tue, 5 Aug 2003 17:46:57 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Red Hat Fires Back |
Reposted from the excellent commons-law mailing list maintained by Sarai (original post by Sunil Abraham) ----------------------------------- http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/08/04/1813224.shtml?tid=23 Monday August 04, 2003 - [ 06:09 PM GMT ] Topic - GNU/Linux - by Joe Barr - Red Hat announced today a two-pronged attack against the SCO Group. Red Hat filed a claim for two declaratory judgements: that they had not infringed on SCO's copyright material and that they didn't misappropriate SCO trade secrets. The complaint also seeks a permanent injunction against SCO for their "campaign" against Linux and Linux customers. Red Hat also announced a one milliar (million? PR) dollar donation to a fund for the defense of open source developers against open source developers for infringement and invited other companies to follow suit. Red Hat came out swinging in the 27 page complaint filed in the U. S. District Court in Delaware against The SCO Group. The opening sentence of the complaint states that Red Hat "has commenced this action in response to the unfair, untrue and deceptive campaign now being waged by the defendent, The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO"), to harm the market for Red Hat's highly successful operating system based on the open source LINUX kernel." In addition to asking for declaratory judgement of two items (that Red Hat did not infringe upon SCO's copyrights or misappropriate SCO's trade secrets), the complaint asks "damages, trebled, as well as injunctive relief, attorneys' fees and costs, for harm caused by SCO's unfair competition and false advertising in violation of Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act... unfair and deceptive acts or practices in violation of the Delaware Deceptive Trade Practices Act... as well as for violations of common law, including trade libel, unfair competition, and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage". In the press conference announcing the suit held this morning at the Linux World Conference and Expo being held in San Francisco, a Red Hat spokesman said the aim of the suit "is to help our customers. Customers were brought into this process and received threatening letters from SCO. Customers have been threatened and extorted that if they don't ante up X amount of money, they will face legal consequences." Shares in The SCO Group fell over two dollars on the news, but have rebounded slightly and are now trading at $11.32 a share, down from its high for the day of $13.75. _______________________________________________ commons-law mailing list commons-law@mail.sarai.net http://mail.sarai.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/commons-law # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net