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SCO's wacky legal theoriesSCO's wacky legal theoriesPosted Dec 13, 2003 4:46 UTC (Sat) by goaty (guest, #17783)In reply to: The GPL Is a Contract about a License by mik Parent article: The GPL Is a License, not a Contract I love (3), there's a sort of crazed genius to it. Of course, if all GPL'd code was assigned to the public domain, that would amount to confiscation of "intellectual property" on a massive scale. I've no idea what the rules are for confiscation of property, but I'm pretty sure a court can't go confiscating property belonging to people who are not parties to the trial, so the US Government would have to do it. And if the US Government confiscated all GPL software, all us non-US copyright holders would be writing to our political representatives pretty sharpish :-) But I don't think even that would get SCO out of jail. After all, they've already been distributing GPL software for quite some time. No, they need to claim that all GPL'd code is already de-facto public domain, by some sort of intellectual-property version of a "right of way". But then the same "right of way" theory would clearly make Unix public domain too (assuming that it isn't already). What's delightful about this is it basically trashes copyright law, but in completely the opposite way to their other wacky legal theory (the "we own all software ever" one). It would also achieve many of the aims of the FSF were this to become law. It's funny how much SCO's argument resembles:
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