SCO responds to IBM's counterclaims

Posted Oct 30, 2003 9:02 UTC (Thu) by maxx (guest, #14608)
Parent article: SCO responds to IBM's counterclaims

Supposed the Judges decide in favour of SCO that the GPL is not enforcable and - worst case - place GPLed code older than 3 years in public domain and Microsoft uses some of that code in Longhorn, what does that mean?

Easy: No Longhorn in EU since there is GPLed code by EU citizen inside and even if the code is public domain in the US it is not in EU since the US cannot restrict my rights withing EU and I still have the right to not allow them to use it. I only need to have written one in 10 Millions of lines and I can stop them to ship their product. However to file for damages all authors need to stand up.

So how much is a Microsoft or SCO or... product worth if it cannot be sold within EU (and propably Japan, Australia,..... as well)?

Still I wonder if I can file a lawsuit against the US for violation of my intellectual property by placing it in public domain.

SCO responds to IBM's counterclaims

Posted Nov 6, 2003 14:21 UTC (Thu) by blane (guest, #16587) [Link] (1 responses)

Still I wonder if I can file a lawsuit against the US for violation of my intellectual property by placing it in public domain.

Funnily enough I was wondering the same thing a few days ago. It's a messy area - if we make a (big) assumption that the courts decide in SCO's favour - do they have any right to put into the public domain any code which has non-US contributors - they would then be effectively over-ruling copyright internationally (if the code is in the public domain in the US, it is effectively PD anywhere). Does any country have the right to do this? I would hope not.

SCO responds to IBM's counterclaims

Posted Nov 6, 2003 15:05 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks (guest, #1288) [Link]

I don't mean this flippantly or facetiously: this is the US we're talking about. They have a long history of ignoring international law and violating international treaties. Whether or not they have the right to do something is separate from whether or not they will do it.