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SCO Invokes DMCA, Names Headers, Novell Steps In
Sparky writes "We've already heard that SCO have invoked the DMCA via 'letters sent to select Fortune 1000 Linux end users.' The specifics come via a copy of the letter reprinted at LWN.net - they've decided that they own the copyright to about 65 header files contained in Linux - largely errno.h, signal.h and ioctl.h." balloonpup also notes "CNet News has reported that SCO has reported a fourth quarter loss of $1.6 million, owing mostly to hefty legal fees in its war against Linux. SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers. Way to go, SCO!" Many readers also point out a Groklaw article indicating Novell has registered for the copyrights on multiple versions of Unix with the U.S. Copyright Office, so that "both the SCO Group and Novell have registered for UNIX System V copyrights for the same code."
As with most lawsuits, especially ones that drag out like this, the only people that really win are the lawyers.
The investors must be getting worried.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
This letter is designed for PHB's who will look at it and then look at Linux and say "Crap! errno.h IS in Linux," not people who look at it and think of defined standards and realize that SCO is stooping to the lowest levels in order to keep their schemes going.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The gun industry is trying to get that point across as well. I honestly hope they succeed. Almost every device on the planet can be used in a nefarious manner, but it seems some opportunistic folks in the world think they should get paid by the device's creators when someone actually does something with the device that it was not intended to do.
I would disagree with you on your subject title though... not all YMCAs are plagued with moral improprieties.
TurboD
SCO knows that without the lawsuits they have a losing business model. If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em, and hope that 1)One of the charges stick, or 2)Somebody buys you out.
This isn't the first time that someone has tried this.
It should then be enough to copy the BSD comments in the beginning and replace the copyright on errno.h, signal.h, etc.
Or?
(As another user noted, errno.h et al are also parts of ANSI standards for C...)
Otherwise -- thanks, SCO -- finally I might get a kick on my backside to take the trouble to install and try OpenBSD! :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Same here, but I would contend that AIX really shines in huge enterprise settings, which most people have never come in contact with and do not really see the benefits of it.
Finkployd
Claiming copyright on this list of files is so nonsensical, it must be a distraction tactic.
After all, SCO have already stated that 2.2 does not infringe.
So what are we supposed to not be looking at at the moment? Oh look, the quarterly financial statement just got published. And even booking revunue on shipment rather than payment (along with other dodgy accounting practices) couldn't stop a net loss.
Something crooked is going on here. This letter is an irrelevance.
The solution is easy.
Get rid of the law.
Replace it with nothing.
Circumventing copyright protection should not be illegal. US copyright law grants the enduser the right to make a backup copy of any copyrighted material he owns. Also anyone is free to make copies of uncopyrighted material. The DMCA clearly violates established consumers rights.
What it amounts to is a law saying that it is illegal to pick locks. Well then what do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?
The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.
Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.
In short there is no reason to make a law to protect something that is already protected by law.
Gee, my company's error.h and types.h are similar. Oh wait, every god-damn company I've ever worked for has similar .h files because this is basic, common interface shit.
Its like saying "we patented the play, pause, record and rewind buttons on our model of VCR, the rest of you fuckers with tape, CD and DVD players on the market better pay us for this inovative interface!"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
Or, they have a common ancestor, under a legitimate license, that both were derived from.
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
SCO said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers.
Of course, if they hadn't paid a team of lawyers $9 million, then they wouldn't have had any net earnings to report (again).
By sending out these clearly fraudulent DMCA notices-- which at best claim copyright over something which is uncopyrightable, and at worst is an attempt by a third party to claim that it is illegal for people to use the materials owned by the BSD raegents under the BSD license in the manner in which the BSD raegents intended the BSD license to be used-- has SCO opened itself up to legal action?
SCO has in the past managed to sidestep most allegations of fraud by being horrendously vague. They said that they were owned money but never sent any invoices, sidestepping mail fraud. They tried to present things as if you needed an SCO license to use linux, but if you tried to talk to talk to them, they were actually selling UnixWare licenses and not in the process actually distributing linux to you, sidestepping GPL violations. However, this is entirely non-vague. It seems to me that SCO has stepped over some sort of line here and this is actionable.
I know that the DMCA does not seem to have many consequences for people who send out bad takedown notices, but surely there must be something preventing company A from finding lists of competitor B's customers and sending them takedown notices for using some portion of competitor B's product that company A does not, in fact, own.
At the least, can this be added to the lanham act/ restraint of trade/ libel or whatever countersuits that Redhat and IBM have going? What are the options from here, and what will actually happen?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Great. Now if Novell gets any patents *they* will be able to sue and try to claim ownership of linux.
Just what we need...
The writer above has lots of good ideas for reforming the American DMCA law, but it goes against the current American political climate for any positive changes to take place.
The trend of the Americans to start using their vast police and military internal forces to enforce the whims of corporate copyright laws will multiply the effect of the parallel trend of outsourcing their technological corporate infrastructure to the third world. They are inducing a massive shift of their technological industry to the third world, without any thought given to the long-term consequences of such a strategy.
By the time that they realize how much these two trends are reinforcing each, their positive-feedback loop of technological suicide will be too far advanced to retard or reverse.
In another generation or two, America will be the new Argentina. Or even worse off considering that they created so much global hatred toward themselves in their schitzo period (1980-2010; when their mounting arrogance and delusional-self congratuation inversely paralleled their financial global decline) that the rest of the world will have no interest in revitalizing them.
In 2004 the smart young Americans are beginning to question the alternatives to being so closely tied to this declining empire, even if they rarely publicly acknowledge their doubts. Which is probably just as well, given the jingoistic politcal climate there.
An excellent overview of this trend is found in the book "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg. They missed the revolution that technology is creating in corporate copyright, but they foresaw everything else.
"The DMCA was created in the spirit that new forms of electronic media were not safe from potential copyright violations, and the act did what it set out to do."
Except that existing copyright law already made copyright violations illegal whether on a fancy new media or not. The DMCA was never needed to begin with. Being on digital media doesn't invalidate copyright on material under the laws that have been around since 1976.
"Pointing fingers makes us feel good, but unless we propose alternatives and compromises, are we really doing anything but venting? Does anyone else have potential solutions/thoughts on how to resolve this issue?"
What compromise? This law never had a purpose to begin with except to enact additional restrictions on certain types of copyrighted media. Why on earth do people feel that every few years the same issues of corporate interest need to be raised again and that the people should "compromise" a little further. We compromised when we created copyright, we compromised again in 1976, they compromised DESPITE US in 2000. Exactly how far do you feel we should compromise before we draw the line and say we won't give another inch, in fact we are taking back a few we shouldn't have ever given in the first place?
If you start with harsh restrictions on a subject, then compromise, the end result is more harsh than what you had to start with EVERY time. Now you do it on the same subject every few years over and over again and you have a pattern that results in giving more and more ground until you look back and realize that there isn't anymore ground to give and their just making up new bullshit ways to screw you now.
Accept hypothetically that some Linux coder got a little too happy with his cut and paste from BSD code and left out some copyrights. Then all that needs to be done is add the copyright notices back in.
Now the important question: How has SCO been monetarily damaged by the lack of BSD copyright notices in a few header files? About 37 cents? 'Cause all they can do is ask for damages and that the copyright notices be fixed.
The problem isn't "Democrats" or "Republicans", it's the public at large has absolutly no respect for freedom.
The thing is, freedom is often seen in the US as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. Freedom is seen as something you are given, not as something you give. Notice that pretty much everybody will completely trample any reasonable concept of freedom, as long as they get what they want.
The answer is not in politics, but in cultural change. American politicians, for the most part, are either too patriotic, or too pandering to say..yes, we are very flawed, and we can be better than this.
And frankly, Libertarians are the worst. For all their talking about freedom, they still would tear down enviromental and private privacy law that probably does the most to protect our freedom.
Nothing ... if it's the only way, or one of a very limited ways to implement the standard, it's not copyrightable. I believe the format and switches are specified by the POSIX standard, which means you have no choice/originality involved. Do it their way or it doesn't work.
Leaving the copyright notice off, even on a one-liner, is wrong, but it's not a fatal error. Tracking down who may have stripped a 20-line notice from a 1-line header for an OS that's been around since the 1970s is not going to be an easy task, and a judge would probably say "screw this, de minimis non curat lex* applies" and tell them to shove off. (*the law does not concern itself with trifles, nothing to do with Lex Luthor)
Still, what you CAN do is research the candidates on the major 2 platforms and pick out the ones who side with Libertarian beliefs.
Sounds like what you really need is a system like Instant Runoff voting where you don't have to worry that you're "throwing your vote away" on a third party candidate. Then you (and everyone else) could vote for that Libertarian candidate without worrying about the bad guy winning.
What it amounts to is a law saying that it is illegal to pick locks. Well then what do you do if you are locked out of your house or car?
Close, but not quite. A better analogy would be to make it illegal to make a hairpin, as it could be used to pick a lock. It's the instrument that the DMCA bans, not the action. The action (of breaking a lock that wasn't yours) was already illegal. Piracy has always been illegal, it just wasn't illegal to make the tools until the DMCA.
Think about it:
Novell is a company who used to be REALLY BIG then got spanked by the Great Beast in Redmond because of their marketing-department-that-couldn't. They had the best enterprise products, but nobody wanted to write apps on the NetWare platform. They've been in steady decline since '96.
NetWare is dying and Novell needs a new platform. Linux is perfect because people are writing applications for it. So, in Novell's thinking, if they can deploy the NetWare services like file/print/Directory/Web Svcs on a Linux kernel, they have the best of both worlds.
The one thing that they have to be conscious of, and I believe they have, is their perception in the OSS community. Novell knows that they need community approval in order to be successful. If the community dislikes what they're doing, people won't buy their products and they will become irrelevant.
So, I re-iterate that Novell has to be one of the "good guys" or they will just end up screwing themselves.
Allow for the use of back-engineering tools with HARSH punishments for people who knowingly use them to break copyrighted material with intent to distribute.
I call bullshit. only a person that is so seperated from reality would say such a thing.
PROPER punishment for illegal use. Sorry but someone violating the DMCA should get 1/10th the punishment than a mass murderer. Currently under US laws if you violate the DMCA, you will get a lighter sentence if you grab a shotgun and kill a few officers when they come to get you.
Copyright violation is a very very VERY MINOR offense and needs to be treated as such with only MONETARY damages.
sending anyone to prison for anything as silly as a stupid copyright violation is absolute stupidity.
you know this, and until this is how it is written I violently oppose any such legislation and those that support it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, this is an obvious troll but it seems the mods bit.
Let's pretend all your arguments are correct. The United States is going to collapse. Even still, the US is a massive country with a huge wealth of natural resources within its borders. It also has a powerful military to defend those borders. Argentina was never like the US.
If you want to pursue an analogy, then the US is headed to being another Russia. Russia may not be what it was at the height of the Soviet Union, but Russia is nothing like Argentina.
Not to mention the fact that they would both be guilty of sharing the information on how to use said hairpin to circumvent said home security device.
Yeah, if that DC Sniper didn't have full-auto capability, he wouldn't have been able to take down so many people. Oh, wait a minute...
You see, if I walked into a random schoolyard and started shooting, does it fundamentally matter if I'm using a single-shot muzzle-loader rifle or a modified full-auto AR-15 with a 30-round clip? I'm still a monster, right?
Sure, in practical matters, there may be more dead bodies to clean up if I had a full- (or even semi-) auto, but the fact remains that I am a disturbed person who broke the law. If all guns vanished today, if I were that disturbed, I'd simply walk into the school yard with a 3-iron and start whackin' heads on the kindergarten jungle-gym. Are you going to argue that golf club makers should make their clubs less useful for clubbing someone to death?
And I don't buy the argument that guns are specifically designed to kill/injure people. They're designed to hurl small chunks of metal, accurately, for long distances, and at very high velocities. What people choose to do with them is their own business -- until they break the law.
Yes, this is a rather morbib way to make my point, but I hate it when people still insist on blaming the instrument of crime, rather than the criminal.
Method of processing duck feet
The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.
It's more to make those who are passing the laws feel they are doing their job.
Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.
It can lead to all sorts of other issues. Especially if picking locks viewed as a more serious crime than burglary.
Posting as AC as I already modded here
I just took a look in the Mac OSX errno.h file (/usr/include/sys/errno.h) and the error definitions are all there, with the same attributed numbers as in the Linux and *BSD ones. Someone further down claimed that SCO was claiming ownership of the actual numbers, since the defined names are an ANSI/ISO standard and therefore can't be claimed.
What this means, I think, is that SCO is indeed attempting to roll open the BSD/LSI case again. I would be amazed if they were able to get away with this. I'm pretty sure a competent lawyer will be able to clam this one up in court.
Not only that but SCO is opening themselves up to truly massive claims of extortion and fraud if this is not legal, which although IANAL I really cannot see it being from their pretty wild claim in their letter. They simply claim they own these files, yet make NO mention of showing how that is so.
I am really interested as to who is going to sue SCO next.
Why should we not have laws preventing someone from getting the tool necessary to commit a massacre?
It's called the 2nd Amendment.
Is there some legitimate reason that someone would need a fully-automatic weapon with a 50 round clip?
Yes. The main reason that comes to mind is an armed revolution against the existing government, should it ever become tyranical / dictatorial / etc.
It may sound unlikely, it may even BE unlikely... but fundamentally the 2nd Amendment is all about making sure that the ultimate power lies in the hands of "the people" where it belongs.
Also, you might be interested to know that legally owned / properly licensed fully automatic weapons are almost NEVER used in the commission of armed crimes. I don't have a direct link handy, but that's from the FBI's own crime statistics.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Not quite right. While the shareholders of a corporation are not liable in case of corporate wrongdoing, its officers and board are. And they can be individually prosecuted if they were party to criminal activities, either in terms of making decisions or in terms of intentional execution. And they can go to jail as a result.
In the case of Enron, for example, Andrew Fastow is being criminally prosecuted.
However, many argue he's just a fall guy, since people that high up in a corporation often as far as they can to maintain plausible deniability. Like Ken Lay for example. But, this happens in politics, too. Say, Reagan and Iran-Contra.