SCO plans own Web site as alternative to Groklaw

IDG News Service - After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group Inc. has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes.
"We will be launching a Web site in a few weeks to tell our side of the story," said Darl McBride, SCO's president and CEO, speaking at the European Technology Roundtable Exhibition conference in Cannes, France, yesterday. "We think IP [intellectual property] is very important and to go back to the Wild West metaphor, there was a movement in America called the Gold Rush and [open-source proponents] are looking for your gold."
"The new gold is IP," McBride said.
SCO plans to launch the Web site, called Prosco.net, on Nov. 1, said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.
"For some time now, if ever there was anyone who wanted to be provided with updates on how things are progressing with regard to the litigation on various fronts, there was never really a site they could go and hear SCO's side of the story," he said. "We'd like to provide a venue for that."
SCO is involved in a number of legal disputes related to its claim that Linux violates its intellectual property, including lawsuits with IBM, Novell Inc., Red Hat Inc., AutoZone Inc. and DaimlerChrysler AG.
The company's decision to create the Prosco.net Web site is, in part, a response to Groklaw, a Web site that has been highly critical of SCO's position, he said.
The site will include a calendar of the cases SCO has in litigation as well as access to the legal filings made in SCO's cases. There are, however, no plans to allow readers to discuss the documents on the Web site.
"If we opened it up to that, it would simply become another one of the message boards that our detractors use to try and overwhelm us," Stowell said.
Started shortly after the 2003 launch of SCO's multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, Groklaw began as a Web log for Linux enthusiast Pamela Jones, a paralegal working for a law firm at the time. It has evolved into an open-source project itself, where legal filings are meticulously dissected by an army of volunteers. Jones' scathing critiques of SCO's legal maneuvers and Groklaw's lively discussion postings are now routinely read by executives, lawyers and journalists following SCO's disputes, Jones has said.
Jones expressed surprise that SCO's lawyers would allow the company to comment on any ongoing litigation,and said that she would welcome another site that would be a venue for "trolls," or people who have posted inflammatory messages on Groklaw. "If all SCO's trolls would desert Groklaw and head on over to the new SCO Web site and stay on the compound over there, that would be lovely," she said via e-mail.
Scarlet Pruitt in Cannes, France, contributed to this report.

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