A bad day for the SCO Group [LWN.net]

A bad day for the SCO Group

Posted Aug 12, 2007 7:56 UTC (Sun) by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
In reply to: A bad day for the SCO Group by mgb
Parent article: A bad day for the SCO Group

SCO was never a real concern and Novell has no basis to sue either.

1) The BSD case seemed to show that most of the Unix code was public domain due to the copyright laws at the time.
2) A lot of the ancient source were released under free licenses anyway.
3) SCO was distributing Linux under the GPL.
4) There were only 300 lines of code that were arguably similar between IBM's (not SCO's) flavours of Unix and Linux.
5) Most of those came from legitimate third party sources.
6) None of them were proven to be copyright violations.
7) The statute of limitations had passed anyway.

We never actually got to see the 300 lines. Beyond that SCO claimed that Linux developers used "negative know-how" by not copying Unix mis-features. In other words, Linux developers were stealing just by knowing what Unix did wrong. That was never going to be an easy case to win.

When it turned out that SCO didn't even own the copyright that made for great comedy but it wasn't really needed.

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A bad day for the SCO Group

Posted Aug 13, 2007 18:56 UTC (Mon) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

7) The statute of limitations had passed anyway.

There's a statute of limitations on copyright infringement?

A bad day for the SCO Group

Posted Aug 20, 2007 17:10 UTC (Mon) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

The federal statute of limitations for non-capital crimes is five years from the date of commission of the act. I don't think Title 17 specifies a different one for copyright infringement.

A few notes on this:

* The SCO/Novell/IBM/USL/UCB lawsuits were all civil, not criminal, so the statute of limitations is inapplicable.
* The running of statute of limitations would probably be tolled (suspended) in the case of infringing code in the Linux kernel, even if recent releases were to remove it, because many sites continue to distribute historical versions of the kernel.
* The civil counterpart to the statute of limitations, roughly speaking, is the defense of laches.
* Disney may yet succeed in making copyright infringement a capital crime...