Maybe SCO had a point [LWN.net]

Maybe SCO had a point

Posted Aug 22, 2003 7:03 UTC (Fri) by dmantione (guest, #4640)
Parent article: Maybe SCO had a point

Whatever.

There can be only one outcome of this into court. Assuming there was a copyright
violation of both the BSD license under which the code was licensed as the GPL code it
was combined with, SCO nor any other parrty has suffered damages from it. It's claim
will be rejected.

Copyright violation is normally a criminal act. In adition, the party who has suffered
damaged can claim compensation. There is no criminal prosecution going on here and
there won't be. Combining incompatible free licenses does in general not cause damages
to anyone. There should be nothing to worry about.

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Maybe SCO had a point

Posted Aug 22, 2003 19:22 UTC (Fri) by urulokion (guest, #14350) [Link]

"Copyright violation is normally a criminal act. In adition, the party who has suffered damaged can claim compensation. ..."

No entirely correct. Up until very recently, copyright infringement was civil tort. It is handled totally in civil courts.

Copyright infringement became a federal criminal offense in the late 90's with the NET act (No Electronic Theft). It doesn't auomatically kick in, there is a certain threshold which has to be exceeded. The act is geared torward nailing warez site operator and the like.