What is the law on stealth copyright?

Posted May 22, 2003 18:55 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: ...and if SCO is right...?

The situation I'm referring to is this: someone writes something, but never publishes it. The author shows it to someone, who copies it, sells it to a publisher, and then disappears. The publisher publishes it for a while, and then the author discovers it, and sues the publisher.

Obviously, the publisher isn't at fault; the content wasn't published at all and was entirely unavailable to the publisher to compare against, even if the publisher were able to compare each "new" work against everything that anyone had ever written before. The plagerist has disappeared long ago. The publisher has done some work and made some money, and the author hasn't made any money. The author may or may not want the content to be published at all, regardless of any royalties.

I suspect this isn't a situation which has happened much before; most authors actually intend their work to be published, and make it available for publishers to do due diligence against even before it is (with their copyright asserted, obviously). But it becomes significant with software, where the programmers write something, and then publish a work derived from it, potentially keeping the source secret.

If an author claimed that a publisher was publishing content owned by the author, but refused to reveal which book it was specifically because this would allow the publisher to stop publishing it, I doubt it would get very far. I'd suspect that it would be grounds for a countersuit, in fact.

Of course, SCO is still (which respect to the courts) at the stage of suing the accused plagerist. On the other hand, if they go after Red Hat next, they stand to lose badly; even if they don't they're in somewhat risky territory now, since they're refusing to provide information which Red Hat might need in order to follow the law. If Red Hat is forced to abandon or delay a project later due to not being informed of SCO's copyrighted work now, it seems like Red Hat would have a case for damages against SCO. And with the large number of companies now considering Linux, that could add up to a lot of money for SCO (or anyone who ends up with SCO's liabilities).