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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."
This is just novells first step.
The next step will be their own series of letters to SCO reminding them of their contractual obligations to Novell.
arent the headers (especially some of those, like errno.h) published publically as ISO/ANSI C and/or UNIX Definition documents? Hence, if they look similar, it's because they're defined standards from various standards committees? Perhaps someone should point out the document name and number and page numbers.
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. Yet it also did a great deal more as special interests and corporate schmoozers managed to get their paws on the bill and turn it into more of a "dominant market player protection act" than anything else. We all agree that the amount of innovation stifled using the DMCA as justification is staggering. Yet electronic media should also be protected from the loopholes the bill originally solved. Here are a few potential solutions:
1) Remove the current DMCA and amend it such that only specific uses of media are prohibited. 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. This leaves the burden of proof with a prosecutors instead of the "guilty-til-proven- innocent" tactics of the RIAA et. al.
2) Make a specific statement for "loser pays": anyone suing under using this legislation who loses the case pays for the legal costs of both parties. Settlements don't count, and this will outright favor the bigger players, but in the American climate of "legal attrition" as a business strategy I see no other effective means of trying to relieve this aspect of the DMCA problem.
3) Allow publications on computer security to be done freely and thoroughly if tied to legitimate academic or corporate entities. Hold computer manufacturers liable if one of their components has a security flaw that causes eggregious commercial/monetary damage but which could have been fixed by repair of one of these published flaws.
4) Ensure that American laws apply only to American citizens with the express wording that products purchased in other parts of the world which belong to the consumer are theirs to do with as they please. A clause allowing rightful action to take whatever steps necessary to use that product would be nice (mod chips et. al)
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?
Bethanie: Whore...
Fan Whore
GO NOVELL! GO IBM! :-)
It may seem strange, but I really am feeling some sort of loyalty to these two companies. I am way more likely to use them in future than I think I would have before the whole SCO debacle. Although I'd still never ever in the coldest darkest hour in hell use netware or AIX again(blech).
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Larry Gasparro is the last to cash out with nearly $500k in December - Look at the latest holdings of the insider roster
BENCH, ROBERT K.
Chief Investment Officer
8-Oct-03 214,243 Shares Left
BROUGHTON, REGINALD CHARLES
Senior Vice President
17-Sep-03 95,000 Shares left
GASPARRO, LARRY
Vice President
10-Dec-03 0 Shares Left
HUNSAKER, JEFF F.
Vice President
13-Aug-03 20,494 Shares Left
OLSON, MICHAEL P
Vice President
11-Nov-03 47,330 Shares Left
WILSON, MICHAEL
Senior Vice President
14-Jul-03 0 Shares Left
WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN
Senior Vice President
15-Jul-03 0 Shares Left
Notice How little the insiders still actually own (Aside from Robert Bench)? Smells fishy to me
SCO has now asserted ownership over not just Linux, but every single C/C++ compiler out there, and every OS based on C, including the BSD variants and all the other versions of Unix out there.
SCO just keeps getting funnier every day. I've stopped being angry and have chalked it all up to entertainment.
The fact that they are now claiming copyrights on HEADER FILES is the ultimate testament to the weakness of their cases.
I mean, how could one re-engineer APIs without replicating headers. If Linux is in violation, than BSD must be in violation as well. They should be suing Apple.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
In this interview from February, SCO themselves claimed the ABI code was GPLd:
MozillaQuest Magazine: Regarding binfmt_coff, abi-util, lcall7, abi-svr4, abi-sco; are any of these modules SCO IP?
Blake Stowell: No, none of the code in the Linux ABI modules contains SCO IP. This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules. The IP that we are licensing is all in the shared libraries - these libraries are needed by many OpenServer applications *in addition* to the Linux ABI.
That's right, boys and girls, the GPL is a tool for TERRORISTS and COMMUNISTS!
Every day I see SCO's stock price and I mutter to myself, "it's just not fair."
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
From /usr/include/sys/ipc.h
* Copyright (c) 1988 University of Utah.
* Copyright (c) 1990, 1993
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
* (c) UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
* All or some portions of this file are derived from material licensed
* to the University of California by American Telephone and Telegraph
* Co. or Unix System Laboratories, Inc. and are reproduced herein with
* the permission of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
*
* This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
* the Systems Programming Group of the University of Utah Computer
* Science Department.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
* 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
The Linux code I just looked at is lacking the copyright notice like the above.
If taken from BSD or SYSV, it is a licence violation because of clause #1.
So, I hope Novell has their heart in the right place. But really, this depends on the judges. To sue over header files is so damn crazy, the real winners are obviously the people who ran off with $9 million in legal fees. What did the lawyers tell SCO that made them think this is a good investment when the case is so absurdly flimsy? That must have been a home-run sales pitch!
A lot of those delays stem from the simple fact that legal staff usually haven't got the vaguest understanding of how software is architected or compiled. They don't know that half the headers mentioned are part of ANSI and ISO C/C++ standards.
They don't know that every single platform with a C compiler since the early '80s has had an "errno.h" header file.
It's about time some limits were imposed in US courts, as in:
Then maybe the world can get back to doing business instead of letting these useless "IP companies" affect billions of dollars of purchase and deployment decisions, without fear of repercussions for their fraud.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Now isn't this funny, Novell can sue SCO former Caldera for copyright and contract breach. Caldera placed the old SYS V code under a open source license and made it available for download. So what gave Caldera the right's to do this if the code is Novell's?
Makes for Interesting Thought!
Got Code?
Thanks for clarifying, if possible
How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?
We've passed the point where the law can be patched back into usefulness; it's time to rethink on a more fundamental level.
After Darl and Co. had finished, but before most of the FUD could settle, was a Q and A period.
One of the most interesting questions was "Of the really large Linux users, how many have licenced from you?" The answer was "We haven't had anyone over the 5000 CPU amount buy a licence, but a couple of them are thinking about it."
Or, in other words: "No one big is buying our BS, cause they have a legal team that knows we are full of it. Or at least is willing to wait it out and see where the chips fall, rather than believing our hype."
To me, that speaks volumes about their case.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
So they're claiming they own the copyright on errno.h. This is insane. Even if there are substantial similarities between Linux's various errno.h-s and SCO's version, how many ways are there to implement errno.h? It's a bunch of friggin' macro definitions with more or less standard names and more or less standard values. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one could only copyright original works, but what's original about a bunch of #define-s?
Marklar: marklar
The lawsuit against IBM is still a contract dispute. Even though SCO claimed they would be adding Copyright infringement claims against IBM, they have yet to do so. My guess is they haven't made any Copyright infringement claims yet because even they are not 100% sure if they really own any of the code. And making false claims in court would kill their lawsuit.
When Caldera first obtained the old UNIX source code, they wanted to release ALL of it under an Open Source license. But they were not able to because to many other people and companies still have rights via Copyright to the code the other parties added.
The letter that SCO is sending out is just one more thing that will come back to haunt them.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
The DMCA is unconstitutional, anti-competitive, anti-innovative, and anti-american; however, after a careful perusal, I can't find anything inherently homosexual or happy about the law. Maybe you can enlighten me.
(Score:-1, Homophobic)
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Linux was/is a derivative of Minix. There is no real Minix code left in Linux, but back in the 0.9x days, Linux was still evolving. You can still download Minix from here.
Now, here's the key point: although the NAMES of the various system calls, IOCTLs, error numbers and signals are part of the POSIX standard, their numeric assignments are not. The implementor is left to define them. Not all implementations define these the same way - take a look at the Linux/FreeBSD/SYSV emulation code in NetBSD to see the kinds of translations that need to be done to provide cross-platform compatibility.
Now compare the Minix include files with those of Linux and FreeBSD. You will notice very much the same error code and signal numbers. The Linux code dates from 1991 and is pre-ATT/BSDI settlement. It's likely that Tannenbaum is also in violation of AT&T's IP, and Linux has just inherited it. Of course, there's no money in SCO suing Tannenbaum.
Does this damage SCO? Not really. Is it worth US$699/seat? Definitely not. Can SCO collect damages? Probably, knowing the U.S. legal system.
I disagree.
The DMCA also makes it illegal to "pick the lock" as well, not just the creation of the tool to pick the lock. And it doesn't distinguish between locks you own and locks you don't own.
Linux header: /* Operation not permitted */ /* No such file or directory */ /* No such process */ /* Interrupted system call */ /* I/O error */ /* No such device or address */ /* Arg list too long */
:p.
#define EPERM 1
#define ENOENT 2
#define ESRCH 3
#define EINTR 4
#define EIO 5
#define ENXIO 6
#define E2BIG 7
And the POSIX standard says:
The [errno.h] header shall provide a declaration for errno and give positive values for the following symbolic constants. Their values shall be unique except as noted below.
[EPERM]
Operation not permitted.
[ENOENT]
No such file or directory.
[ESRCH]
No such process.
[EINTR]
Interrupted function.
[EIO]
I/O error.
[ENXIO]
No such device or address.
[E2BIG]
Argument list too long.
Conclusion:
This is hogwash. Complete and utter hogwash. Even the descriptions are specified in the standard. You see some minor differences (Argument vs Arg, function vs system call) but it is simply trivial. If this is the "infringing" stuff, the replacement with completely non-infringing comments would be ready in about 30 seconds directly from the standard. I can volunteer to do a cleanroom implementation without neither SCO nor BSD code
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings