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SCO's Appeal Brief, as text, and Something Odd - Update: Hearing May 6

By Pamela Jones et al.

Here's SCO's appeal brief [PDF] in SCO v. Novell as text. The Salt Lake Tribune has an article on the filing, of course.

[Update: 03/09/2009 There will be a hearing on the appeal on May 6, 2009, at 9:00 a.m. in Courtroom I, Byron White U.S. Courthouse, Denver, CO. - end Update.]

I wanted to highlight something odd I stumbled across going through old documents, something I never noticed before, that relates to one of SCO's allegations. In SCO's appeal, you find this statement:

Within two hours of Novell's public claim that it owns the UNIX copyrights, SCO's stock plummeted, even though SCO had announced record revenues that day.

I'm not sure that is accurate. According to what I've found, as I'll show you, Novell put out a press release early in the morning, apparently even before the market opened, and yet IDG reported that same day that the stock at mid-morning was trading *up* by 3.33%.

By the end of the day, the stock was down, for sure, but what made it happen? We can only guess. SCO also put out a prepared statement in the morning, almost immediately after Novell's, and then at 11 AM, SCO held a conference call. If the stock went down by the end of the day, who is to say that it wasn't the conference call that caused it? Or SCO's prepared statement, for that matter? Or some combination of all of them? What is SCO's basis for its claim that it was Novell's statement that caused the stock to "plummet"? At any rate, piecing together all the evidence I have collected, I am unable to confirm that the stock plummeted within two hours of Novell's statement, and I see indications that it didn't happen that way. I will show you what I found so you can draw your own conclusions.

Full post as published by Groklaw on March 08, 2009 (boomark / email).