Q&A: Pamela Jones of Groklaw

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I don't imagine you had any idea what Groklaw would become when it started. Can you remember what you hoped from it at that time. D‎id it work out as you planned?

I didn't really plan at all. At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software. I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote. The first articles were not about SCO at all. I started covering the McDonald's "I'm fat and it's your fault" litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked.

Later, when I started to write about SCO, I did so a lot because I thought it was funny. At the time, I was experimenting with graphics and text juxtapositions, and it made me laugh. I thought it was the stupidest lawsuit in the history of the world, and I was just writing to the air.

Then, when readers showed up, and I saw the media in general was taking SCO seriously, I began to realise what could happen. That was the creative moment, when I put all the pieces together and realised that my readers knew the tech, I knew how to explain what was happening in the litigation, and they knew where to find evidence that what SCO was saying wasn't likely to prove true.

I was worried that the lawyers might not know the tech as well as we did, and my largest hope was that maybe somebody would notice what we were finding, and it might help. I had seen some court rulings that indicated to me that the judges didn't understand the tech, so they were getting things wrong. And I knew from working with lawyers that many of them are the last to grasp anything technical, so I realised that I could be a kind of bridge. I understood the tech enough to translate from the geek input for the lawyers; and I could translate the legal stuff to the tech guys, so everyone would understand what was happening. You can only get better case law if everyone understands the facts well, including the lawyers, who explain it all to the judge. My concept was that this could actually make the system work as intended, by speeding up the learning curve.

Does democracy work? Has Groklaw actually influenced the legal process, or has its role been to inform the audience? If it has, what have been your greatest triumphs?

Frank Hayes wrote once that cynicism just shows you've been paying attention. I confess I don't view humans as having many answers to big problems. People are the problem, usually. But I think we as individuals can impact our immediate surroundings by how we act and what we choose to do. In that smaller sense, Groklaw worked. It's not a democracy though. I run it very much like the Linux kernel, a meritocracy, and I get final say, because I'm the maintainer of the project. It is too soon to say what Groklaw's role has been, I think. I believe, however, that it's had an impact.

Finding the BSDi settlement agreement and getting legal permission to publish it was, without any doubt, our biggest contribution. It showed that it was never court-validated. It was just a private agreement between the parties, with no real threat to anyone else from it. I believe, based on SCO's comments, that they had intended to threaten folks based on that then-hidden agreement, and in fact they had made threatening remarks about it, IIRC, and yet after we published, nothing further ever happened on that. Anyway, SCO never presented any actual copyright infringement to shake a stick at. But at the beginning, who knew that would be the case?

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