Re: English article [LWN.net]

Re: English article

Posted Aug 14, 2003 14:08 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065)
In reply to: SCO's earnings report by jeroen
Parent article: SCO's earnings report

That seems to be a poorly researched or hastily written article.

The GPL doesn't disclaim copyright of a work, so while it may be true
that disclaiming copyright is difficult or impossible in US law (Lessig
has noted this), that is not relevant.

The article also says that SCO legal firm said it will claim that
copyright restrictions preemt licenses. For example, that you can only
make one copy of a work for backup purposes. If true, this would
invalidate most restrictions in most copyright licenses.

In any case, if what they say is true, then they are still in violation
of the copyrights on the Linux kernel. If the GPL is invalid, nothing gave
them the right to create and distribute copies of it themself.

If software licenses as a whole can only grant those rights explicitly
granted by copyright law, the SCO would also be in violation of other
Unix copyright holder's rights and its coveted agreements with IBM, Sun,
Microsoft, Sequent, and others would also be void because they wouldn't
be able to grant the right to modify Unix to those companies.

That argument sounds so flawed and so likely to hurt them that I don't
think even SCO would use it. Maybe SCO told their lawyers to start
spreading the FUD.

Of course IANAL and SCO has done some crazy things already so we'll see...

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Re: English article

Posted Aug 14, 2003 15:17 UTC (Thu) by kunitz (guest, #3965) [Link]

I have an subscription to the WSJ website.

It is reported that Mr. Mark Heise of Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP said, that SCO will argue that the GPL itself is invalid. In Heise's legal theory US federal law pre-empts the GPL by allowing only one single backup copy.

I can't comment on this nonsense.

Re: English article

Posted Aug 14, 2003 15:44 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

I can; that's ridiculous.

If the copyright holder allows redistribution of the work, then that would override any fedaral law. There is no way this Government is going to tell me, the creator of a work of art, useful or otherwise, how many backup copies I can permit others to make, nor whether I may or may not permit others to redistribute my work without limit. Because if they *are* going to try that, and they succeed, it's time for a full-scale revolution--this has become a dictatorship.

I will be positive, and assume a sensible judge would stop that one good.

Re: English article

Posted Aug 14, 2003 16:08 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Second comment:

I went to read the Register article, which talked about this.

When I think about it more, I believe the Federal law was applicable if the copyright holder had reserved all rights. That law was supposed to be a way for people to preserve their investment in a software package, even if the copyright holder prohibited any copying at all.

If that's true, either Boise's team is incredibly stupid, or they're out to misuse the law for their client's gain. Again, I would hope a judge wouls squash this like a bug.