A U.S. federal appeals court has rejected an appeal by Xinuos (UnXis), which acquired SCO Group in 2011. Xinuos sought to reopen the lawsuit against IBM and Red Hat, which are accused of transferring SCO's intellectual property into the kernel. LinuxA three-judge panel declined to review an earlier ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York because the statute of limitations had expired.
The appellate court also upheld the invalidity of the lawsuit, as Xinuos had attempted to present the case as a dispute over licensing someone else's property, but the court found that the dispute actually concerned ownership. In its lawsuit, Xinuos claimed that IBM knew that the code it contributed to the kernel Linux It does not own it, but only has a non-exclusive license to use it, and by transferring the code, IBM violated the terms of that license.
Let us recall that in 2003, SCO accused IBM of handing over Unix code to kernel developers. Linux, after which it was discovered that all rights to the Unix code belonged not to SCO, but to Novell. Novell then filed a lawsuit against SCO, accusing it of using someone else's intellectual property to sue other companies. To continue its attacks on IBM and users, Linux SCO needed to prove its rights to Unix.
SCO disagreed with Novell's position, but after years of repeated litigation, the court ruled that Novell had not transferred ownership of its intellectual property to SCO when selling its Unix-related business, and that all accusations leveled by SCO's lawyers against other companies were baseless. In 2021, Xinuos, the successor to SCO, attempted to launch a new lawsuit, accusing IBM of violating antitrust laws by preempting competing systems and illegally using someone else's intellectual property to create a competing product. The court hearing the case rejected the claim, and Xinuos filed an appeal, which was dismissed this month.
Xinuos intends to file a motion for a rehearing before the full Court of Appeals. A rehearing is considered unlikely, as rehearings are granted in exceptional cases where significant errors in the previous proceedings are identified. According to the law firm Kaplan, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted review to only 0.03% of the cases it has reviewed.
Source: opennet.ru
