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

A bad day for the SCO Group

Posted Aug 20, 2007 17:10 UTC (Mon) by branden (guest, #7029)
In reply to: A bad day for the SCO Group by Max.Hyre
Parent article: A bad day for the SCO Group

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...

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