SCO's copyrights [LWN.net]

SCO's copyrights

Posted Aug 19, 2003 16:27 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: Why SCO won't show the code

SCO might well have a complaint that SGI did not properly give credit for the code it used. But there is no possible way the company can argue that this code's presence in Linux is an infringement of its copyrights.

Two words: advertising clause.

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even without the advertising clause

Posted Aug 19, 2003 17:52 UTC (Tue) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

Even without the advertising clause, the BSD license contains:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

and essentially every other license contains a similar condition. IANAL, but it seems like there is a good chance that this code has been used illegally in the kernel if SGI replaced the copyright notice with its own. It's hard to imagine substantial claims of damages, of course.

(Note that it was a proprietary software company that did this, moreover, not the horrible hordes of hairy hackers. But, to be fair, I think that very few programmers are careful about this sort of thing.)

The code's being published in a book doesn't remove its copyrighted status or allow re-distribution, by the way, so that argument is a red herring (except regarding trade-secret claims).

SCO's copyrights

Posted Aug 21, 2003 6:33 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

My understanding that this stuff appears in BSD 2.11 as well and under Regents of the University of California copyright:

http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c

These guys have officially killed the advertising clause in 1999 on all versions of BSD software:

ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change

So, I'm guessing all the code is "off the hook", right?

Bojan