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This reminds me of the recent story about GPL code found in OpenBSD. There too, an OpenBSD developer took someone else's code and started modifying it without keeping the GPL license. He apparently thought it was ok to do this as long as all the offending functions would be renamed in the final release, but was caught checking in unmodified functions by accident.

Google is well known for using a lot of GPL software, but it is also true that they do not distribute the source code of their flagship programs to the public. Episodes like this make people wonder if they "accidentally" use some GPL code in their distributed products without telling anyone.

There have been many strange articles in the media, for example in this forbes article they report that IBM may have destroyed evidence. However that evidence was what SCO used as a basis for starting the case, and so SCO "must" have had it to begin with. Forbes and other similar media outlets report large amounts of SCO material without comment.

The question has been raised: where are they getting this material and why are the reporting it as it is. The primary place where that's been raised has been Groklaw and the accusation has been that parts of the media are actively backing SCO even against all possible evidence. Now SCO and those parts of the media have started an intimidation campaign against Groklaw both in court and in the media, along side attempts to by SCO's media friends to invade her privacy. This recent posting is showing the hypocrisy which is behind this campaign and it's media backers who use as accusations in court filings things that they themselves also do.

Read the SCOG complaint ...

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-1018.pdf

In that motions, SCOG make the claim ... "In fact, most of the servers on which Groklaw.net and other ibiblio publications run are hosted on IBM-donated servers. IBM's support of ibiblio is, according to the project's director, continuing in nature."

OK, so groklaw simply points out that SCOG material is found amongst the "other ibiblio publications", and the entire SCOG motion is easily exposed as the utter nonsense it truly is.

In November 1988, at the BSD Workshop in Berkeley, Keith, Mike Karels and Kirk McKusick announce the completion and availability of BSD Networking Release 1. NET 1 was a subset of the then-current Berkeley system. It was quite similar to 4.3-Tahoe, including source code and documentation for the networking portions of the kernel, the C library and utility programs. It was available without evidence of any prior license (AT&T or Berkeley), and was (re)distributed via anonymous FTP. The source carried a Berkeley copyright notice and a legend that allowed redistribution with attribution. (The Berkeley license was, and still is, different from the GPL. Keith and rms had debated the various aspects of the licenses repeatedly, without convergence. I will discuss this later.)

Wikipedia: BSD

Until this point, all versions of BSD had incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and therefore required licenses from AT&T for their use. Source code licenses had become very expensive by this point, and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the permissive BSD license. It was released in June 1989.

The role of FSF (and a BASIC sidestep)

I hope you do understand that the GWBASIC part was used to convey an image. I had no idea when the BASIC standard was made, nor was my point directly related to that. Sin

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704072 21422994

OK not really but you can make a case that SCO relies on ibiblio servers donated by IBM. Therefore SCO is supported by IBM just as much as Groklaw is. LOL

Remember that PJ worked for something like 2 weeks at ODSL...

Actually, I was looking to see if Timesprout could defend his allegation that PJ had been "hugely evasive" about working for IBM, rather than asking if there were any grounds (however flimsy) for the BSF motion.

I mean if she has been "hugely" evasive, it should be easy to dig up a few specific instances of her aoiding the question. So far, no support has been forthcoming.

On the other hand, it's not hard to find instances of her being hugely un-evasive on the subject. A couple of minutes googling got me this:

Well, the joke is on them. I am a paralegal with nothing better to do than Groklaw, and there is no Big Blue looming behind me. ibiblio hosts literally thousands of websites. IBM had nothing to do with Groklaw getting started, and we were already a force before we moved to ibiblio, and IBM had nothing to do with ibiblio accepting Groklaw. We were accepted because we qualified. Just because ibiblio hosts Groklaw doesn't mean I work for IBM. I don't. And I'd like to say thank you to ibiblio for hosting us. I'm deeply grateful that they don't allow the nonstop slime to cloud their vision.

That doesn't sound particularly evasive to me; rather more like a categorical denial.

(I know you're not trying to support BSF and SCO - I'm just having problems keeping the tone non-confrontational. Put it down to annoyance at SCO and BSF.)

According to PJ's next story, her vacation took place in her bedroom down the hall from the computer she normally uses to write Groklaw.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704051 23029796

SCO's filing makes it quite clear that PJ works for IBM, and has been dodging their subpoena like so many Bill Clintons during the Nam war.

Beginning on page 3 of
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-1018.pdf

You will see *numerous links to all sorts of blogs that reinforce SCO's theory about her. This, obviously, is damning evidence. Also, for about eleven minutes on August 6, 2006, the Wikipedia article on PJ clearly stated that she was an undercover IBM agent and a "$£77¥ h0!!!!"

The ironic thing is that if Novell wins their suit against SCO, then SCO will have to fork over that licensing $ from Microsoft to Novell.

For example: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2007 0114051543227

from what I understand of US law free speech does not extend to those involved in a legal case being able to comment on that case

But then I remembered that you're just a sour cunt, jealous because Mr. Piquepaille provides a damn useful service to a great many people. Yeah, that's right. He lives a productive life, while you waste away in your parents' basement, stroking your semi-flaccid cock to movie stills of Carrie Fisher.

This is possibly the funniest thing I have read on the net today, as if your cover was not blown already Roland Nobappeal. Then you posted this.

Honestly, I don't know what's funnier, you acting like a complete twat or the bit about the parent being a 'sour cunt'! How exactly is submitting advertisments to Slashdot 'leading a productive life'?! You've even stolen your blog design from Groklaw!

I had no prejudice against you, Mr Nobappeal, until reading this post and your astroturfing. Now I have: nice one. Now fuck off to digg.com, whatever, this meeting is over, you suck, buh-bye!

Watch, in fascination, as the RIAA "expert" in the Lindor case is eviscerated....

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200703020 73736822

This is why the RIAA wants to go on a fishing expedition. They have no case, and what they have is ...less than unassailable.

--
BMO

Read it over and over for the next 3 days.

You do know what "blatant" means, don't you?

"(of bad behavior) done openly and unashamedly"

Definition courtesy Apple's Dictionary.app ;-)

I wouldn't say that mentioning Microsoft's frequent misdeeds is "bad behavior", nor do I see why it *wouldn't* be done "unashamedly". If anyone's got anything to be ashamed of here, it is the Beast of Redmond. Take a look:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page= 2007021720190018

By the reports from the court proceedings of some of the few cases that have progressed this far, it certainly looks like RIAA has been proceeding without any kind of proof that will stand in court (for example see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200703020 73736822 another good site is http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/ ).

Give them time to sue a few thousands more, and sooner or later some lawyers will realize the bloody fortune they will make by suing RIAA for what they've been doing. And when they start doing so... Well, not only those lawsuits will stop, but those execs will be the ones doing some paying up... and it's not going to be thousands but millions.

The problem is that nobody knows how many innocent people the RIAA has extorted money from. What about those who don't own computers? What about the 10 year old girl they just attacked? What about the dead woman? ...

The only reason the college kids are paying up is because they can't afford to defend themselves. It is a lot like the protection racket used by organized crime and gangs today. Pay us or we'll really hurt you.

There was a deposition on Groklaw that pretty much sums up the fact that the RIAA identification techniques probably wouldn't stand a chance in court. There is a LOT of Doubt about the accuracy of the RIAA tactics. More than reasonable too.

If you read their expert witness's deposition you'll see why it happens; it's because their "investigations" are a sham. See also commentary on Slashdot and Groklaw.

Viacom have adequate reason to believe that this infringes copyright.

On what basis do you make such an assertion?

And on what basis would they get around 17 USC 201(a):

Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are co-owners of copyright in the work.

"The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.

I don't think the creators of this video have a strong enough claim that this was deliberate misrepresentation.

By Definition, a DMCA notice must include "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." Emphasis added to point out how serious the misrepresentation is, even if it isn't deliberate. IAmALaymanNotALawyer, but someone else claiming "under penalty of perjury" that they are the rightful copyright holder to a parody you created sounds like almost enough for a Slander of Title lawsuit. (Alas, it probably isn't.)

With so much FUD in the air, I am glad we get our own reports like this, with audio, so we can reach our own conclusions [... Anonymous:] The biggest mistake SCOG has made, and MS is continuing to make from the very begining of targeting Open Source: It's a community the likes of which has never formed before. It's a community without Country borders. A community that chooses to communicate and protect itself the world-wide.

Linus reaffirmed that in a story on Groklaw.

im not going to go into the whole saga on this but
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200507182 04313749&query=ritchie

This is a declaration by BRIAN W. KERNIGHAN who
1 Co wrote one of the standard bocks on C
2 worked on the team that create UNIX
3 (just picking another from the list at rhandom) a member of the National Academy of Engineering ("NAE"), to which I was elected in 2002, and I am currently a member of the NAE Peer Committee for the Computing Science and Engineering section.

TSCOG has no case FULL STOP

A link to "The Complete April Fools' Day RFC's" from Groklaw

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200703150 85354813

What do you want to bet that their idea of good OSS will be BSD and they'll want to get rid of the GPL for being "too political" and "anti-business" and "a divisive force in the OSS community"?

Anyhow, what do they think an evangelist will even be able to do in the community? Contribute code? Say "Please don't hate Microsoft! We only used dirty tricks on our competitors!" Encourage us to "respect" copyrights the way Microsoft does? Especially things like Seattle Computer Products v. Microsoft and Sendo v. Microsoft...

One wonders just what they're thinking here, or if it's meant to be a fluffy bit of PR that evaporates into nothing.

Oh, him. Does anyone actually pay attention to him anymore?

Some folks still do... :-)

Damn. I need to learn to use Preview.

Dennis Ritchie says it's et cetera.

Dennis

According to Dr. Peter H. Salus, it means et cetera.

According to Dr. Salus, "Editable Text Configuration" is alien to the thinking of the creators.

That is exactly what's going on. Non-GPL code can be easily embraced, extended, etc... you know the trick. GPL code is a much harder nut to crack. Many have tried to "get cute with the GPL" as PJ of Groklaw puts it, but none have succeeded. If you can marginalize the GPL, eliminating the non-GPL competition by embracing, extending, extinguishing is a much easier task. GPL is their only threat, really.

Occam's Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." As detailed at Groklaw, ODF reuses other standards such as SVG, Dublin Core and XLink, while MS tries to bring up new ones. I believe much of this contributes to the bloat in the spec, and will translate to bloat in an actual implementation.

As of this morning.

According to MathFox on Groklaw (sitting in for PJ during her health break - we hope that's all it is),

"These documents are all public domain materials by order of the judge in the case."

Groklaw has the entire archive.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200702200 83801959

Sorry, said that backwards... If MS loses this, then software patents are confirmed.

Having said that, and assuming you meant what you almost said, I think you are wrong. I seriously doubt anyone at Microsoft was stupid enough to turn this into a software patents debate. It was almost assuredly the lawyer. How he screwed up that majorly, I cannot imagine.

JUSTICE BREYER:I take it that we are operating under the assumption that software is patentable? We have never held that in this Court, have we?
MR. JOSEFFER: No,...

Can we get LinuxTag to do to MS what they did to SCOX? Basically, get a court ruling that says, "Put up or shut up"?

Microsoft blasting IBM over standards is another paranoid delusion of MS. IBM and 20 countries did not object to the its OOXML standard because MS proposed it. They objected because the standard is fundamentally flawed. The arstechnica article doesn't go into depth about the objections but Groklaw had a better analysis.

My personal opinion is that MS did a poor job of the standard on purpose. They propose their standard so that technically they are working towards interoperability if anybody asks. However, they do it so badly that it could never be adopted. Then they can point to that reason as why they chose not to open up their format.

The whole thing seems silly. I recall a story a long time ago (2 years ago.. has it been that long?) that basically was an expose on PJ. Which turned out to be a stalker based reporting not showing anything except how creepy a reporter paid for by SCO could be.

It even got to a point where PJ declared that she was not suicidal in anyway (after a mysterious suicide in relation to the SCO case) in the event she was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

This will get you started researching it..
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2005 0509145744287

To the layman reading Groklaw/Slashdot it clearly looks like an elaborate pump'n'dump share scheme by SCO (or rather the group that bought them). Having people actively pointing out this is what is hurting it.

The sooner SCO go to jail for what they are doing the better.

...thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that defends bloggers.

That was also my first reaction when I read that. It is obviously an attempt to marginalize the EFF by making it look like a stupid hippie organization from SF that defends kooks on the Internet. I always thought the defense of Free Speech was everybody's responsibility, and the Constitution is not exactly new technology.

This should come as no surprise as the reporter is Daniel Lyons (ugh... human resources... what a creep). PJ appears to have gotten after him in this Groklaw article (which points to this Forbes.com article). And has mentioned him in several other articles(no, I am not going to read and comment on all of them for this post -- do it yourself). He refers to PJ's criticism in today's posted article:

Jones also has criticized some journalists who cover the lawsuits, including this reporter, accusing them of being biased in favor of SCO.

As an interesting side note, the reference Groklaw and Forbes articles mention this odd little tidbit:

Another beneficiary could be John Wall, chief executive of Vista.com , a Redmond, Wash., company that last August struck a licensing arrangement with SCO.

Does anybody else find it interesting that there is a Redmond, Washington based company named, of all things Vista.com that invested in SCO at the beginning of the lawsuit? We all know that MS used Baystar as an investment front for the SCO litigation, but this makes it appear that MS had as many as three fronts set up to invest money in SCO right before the lawsuit (MS's purchase of a SCO license was the third).

Considering Windows Vista is MS's new "killer" product which incorporates hardware DRM to defend MS from Linux, could "Vista" mean a broad plan to attack FOSS in general?

I thought the devil had many names. Why is he using the same one more than once this time?

...thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that defends bloggers.

That was also my first reaction when I read that. It is obviously an attempt to marginalize the EFF by making it look like a stupid hippie organization from SF that defends kooks on the Internet. I always thought the defense of Free Speech was everybody's responsibility, and the Constitution is not exactly new technology.

This should come as no surprise as the reporter is Daniel Lyons (ugh... human resources... what a creep). PJ appears to have gotten after him in this Groklaw article (which points to this Forbes.com article). And has mentioned him in several other articles(no, I am not going to read and comment on all of them for this post -- do it yourself). He refers to PJ's criticism in today's posted article:

Jones also has criticized some journalists who cover the lawsuits, including this reporter, accusing them of being biased in favor of SCO.

As an interesting side note, the reference Groklaw and Forbes articles mention this odd little tidbit:

Another beneficiary could be John Wall, chief executive of Vista.com , a Redmond, Wash., company that last August struck a licensing arrangement with SCO.

Does anybody else find it interesting that there is a Redmond, Washington based company named, of all things Vista.com that invested in SCO at the beginning of the lawsuit? We all know that MS used Baystar as an investment front for the SCO litigation, but this makes it appear that MS had as many as three fronts set up to invest money in SCO right before the lawsuit (MS's purchase of a SCO license was the third).

Considering Windows Vista is MS's new "killer" product which incorporates hardware DRM to defend MS from Linux, could "Vista" mean a broad plan to attack FOSS in general?

I thought the devil had many names. Why is he using the same one more than once this time?

This article about her experience at LinuxWorld 2005 in Boston comes to my mind whenever doubts are cast about her existence.

..she is one of the few public intellectuals who really inspire with her integrity, honesty, and quirkiness. I swear I almost shed a tear when she resigned from a paying job to quickly dispel the FUD-of-the-week about her.

As far as I know, everything hosted on Groklaw has been a matter of public record, and the blog has been clear in its anti-SCO bias from the get-go. There's no gag order in place, is there? And there's no rule that says you need to be honest on the Internet. I mean, since the info is true, does it legally have any bearing if PJ is one of IBM's lawyers, a real person, or the Easter Bunny?

Also, if Groklaw was run by IBM lawyers, why would it get involved in the Sony rootkit fiasco? I mean, IBM wouldn't want to come out against Sony if they could avoid it (supplying the PS3 with parts as they are) and also, why have your lawyers handle stuff like that?

Here is what they said in an interview published on Groklaw. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200610110 8382797

"23:35

MB: Because their theory has always been to say: we take, and if you don't agree, you have to contact us, and we will then remove your content. But if you enter into that logic, you admit that it's normal what they do. So we said "No". That's not how it works. It's you who has to come to us to request authorizations, and possibly pay us, or negotiate a sales agreement, which could take any form you choose; it could be sharing advertising receipts, it could be a joint-venture with a common entity -- everything is possible. Everything is possible. But it's in this sense that it should work." (MB is Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse)

It seems to me that they were wanting a slice of the financial action.
  This part of the interview "Because their (Google's) theory has always been to say: we take, and if you don't agree, you have to contact us, and we will then remove your content." seems to be what the ruling states.

>> IANAL, but copyright infringement must require intent, no?

No. Copyright infringement is a strict liability offense. Intent is not required.

IANAL either but I just read this today and it seems to disagree with what you're saying... groklaw article on Capitol v. Foster

I don't know if I'm talking apples and oranges here but the impression I got from this is that just because you
somehow facilitate infringment doesn't automatically imply guilt. Intent is required. But maybe I'm stretching
what appies to facilitation to apply to actual infringment... As I said, IANAL either!

Negligence and damages are more likely avenues to succeed.

Per Groklaw - Slander of Title would apply to this, if you can show some sort of malice. If there were a pattern of the types of videos they 'erroneously' had taken down, it would go a long way towards establishing malice. However, if there is just a bunch of random crap thrown into the legitimate claims, then it's unlikely that you would be able to persue a Slander of Title claim very far.

They have obviously failed to check on the actual status of the Copyrights for the video, which would set them up for a negligence suit. Since it's a tutorial on using a companies software, you might sneak it in under 'Tortuous Interferance' - ie. their actions are causing harm to the company's business and are not related to competition by VIACOM itself. [irony]MS couldn't claim interfierance by Apple just because Apple sells an OS. If Apple were to blackmail/bribe software houses into not developing for MS, then there would be a legitimate suit.[/irony]

Of course if you want to be boring, you could go with

• libel - they have accused you in a writen document of engaging in copyright infringement without proof.
• damages - lost time/effort/expense to correct their error.
• emotional distress - hey, it's an old standby - works better for people than companies.

Depending on how many of the videos they asked to have taken down were not infringing on their copyrights, then this might be a prime target for a CAS against Viacom. That would rattle their chain - and might give the other big distributors a pause before they sent out mass takedown notices as well.

Also note: Samba is very much a replacement for the older Novell Netware in its basic features. Novell's support for Samba just fell apart, because Jermey Allison (one of the key Samba developers) just resigned from Novell because he thinks this agreement violates the GPL. His resignation letter has been published, and is viewable at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200612210 81000710 .

Samba is pretty obviously one of the things Microsoft wanted to manipulate through this deal. Jermey Allison just took away one of their big hooks to manipulate the protocol and the standard implementations, at serious personal cost, by leaving Novell. Google grabbed him: expect to see some fascinating shared and large-scale storage work going on at Google.

FWIW, the folks at GrokLaw have dug out copies of the Bill Gates deposition videos from the anti-trust trial. It's a pretty big download, but funny and sad as hell when you look back at it.

Is this not the same thing Groklaw covered quite sometime back? There are several updates in the link, including a clarification from Allchin on that 'I'd buy a Mac' quote.