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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."
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.
This stuff is too complicated for me to understand. Why didn't a slashdot editor add a quirky, sarcastic, biased comment so I would know how to think?
I don't want to read all those links. Is there any way that I can make fun of Microsoft based on any of this? That would make it easier. TIA
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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 */
The investors must be getting worried.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
I think I'm going to file a claim that I own a copyright to login.h ... this way, everytime anyone logs into their system I should be entitled to some roylaties ... this should work ...
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
Poor SCO, no one takes them seriously any more. "We own Linux-- er, UNIX, um I mean, some of it, or do we Novell? And we're going to sue everybody in existence for theft-- uh, copyright violations of this code-- oops, not that code, don't look at the man behind the curtain, we mean this code over here -- what? not that code either? OK, I mean these header files -- um, you can't copyright ideas, you have to patent them, and we have plenty of patents -- we don't? Well, we'll be threaten-- um, sending letters to our partners (aren't you happy to be doing business with SCO?) telling to to keep their noses clean and line up for a nose inspection -- what, Novell just copyrighted the same stuff we claim to have copyrighted? Don't tell the judge that! Yikes! What's our stock doing now?! Quick read this press release about, um, yeah, that's it: we just got DDoSed, um, Again! Yeah, that'll work....what's that you say? How much are we paying our lawyers for this nonsense? It's contingency, people, don't worry. Contingency all the way...except for the huge fees we pay along the way...and 20% of the company...but otherwise not much -- and yes, that just wiped out any chance of profits in this quarter, but don't worry, next quarter the legal fees go up and we still don't have any licensees yet. But step right up with $699 and you can be the first on the block to say you got rooked--, uh squared yourself with the law-- um, not really the law, with our lawyers, yeah, that's it."
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 said they would have reported $7.4 million in earnings, if not for the $9 million payout to their lawyers.
So SCO has changed from a technology company to an employment agency for lawyers? I'd be interest to see what the step was just before "Profit!"
...comes great responsibility.
If SCO wants to claim ownership of things in errno.h, then I want monetary compensation for each and every segfault, since they are now SCO's responsibility, not mine!
Boy, no more having to double-check pointers in my code, whoo hoo!
There needs to be some equivalent to Godwin's Law for the DMCA. How does "Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have ended."
If the above information is correct, SCO revenue in Q1/2004 will be around 15 M$ and net loss could be >5-10 M$. It seems they don't get more money soon, they will be out of business before summer.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
After seeing the number posted on /., I dialed it up and listened. I have to say that, even though I know what they are doing is messed up, they put some very posive spin on thier situation, albiet that is the purpose of this conference call.
One of the first questions in the Q and A period was "If I pay the $699, do I have rights to use the source and continue to run Linux?" Darl very neatly sidestepped half the question and answered "Yes, you can continue to run the binary (emphasis mine) within the agreement."
From that, I take it that if you pay, you can run the kernel, but they won't say you can play with it.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Dear Santa,
My christmas wish is for the SCO stockholders to wake up and realize they're being taken for a ride. That way the rest of the world could get on with their lives without worrying about being bitten in the ankles by Daryl McBride. For Daryl, I wish a long stay in the relaxing resort for his kind of folk known as Utah State Prison. I wish for him a large roommate named Bubba.
Peace.
An ordinary Linux user.
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.
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?
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.
Profit for SCO's lawyers: 9 million
Earnings for SCO: -1.6 million
Watching SCO die and set a precedent for anybody who tries stupid legal things with Linux: Priceless
-----------------------
You are what you think.
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
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.
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/base defs/errno.h.html#tag_13_10
Do these guys have any brains at all?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Two farmers are fighting over a cow. One grabs the cow's tail and pulls while the other farmer grabs the cow's head and pulls. This last for a long time. While all this pulling is going on, the two farmers' lawyers sit in the middle and milk it.
"We are accountable for not only what we do, but also that which we don't do." -- Moliere
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 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.
NO. You cannot slap another license or copyright header on BSD code. I do not know how this rumour got started, but the BSD license is very clear. You must retain the BSD copyright notice in the source code, and, in the case of binary redistribution, you must have the software display the BSD license. If you read the copyright information for MS Windows, for example, either on the Windows installation CD, or, IIRC, at the bottom of the EULA flashed during installation, the BSD copyright notice is there.
If a Linux kernel programmer took some header files from FreeBSD or 4.4BSD, for example, but removed the BSD copyright notice, that is a violation of the BSD license terms. HOWEVER, that does not mean that SCO was wronged. The only party that could sue for violation of the BSD license is, of course, the Regents of the University of California. AFAIK, but IANAL.
The parent link is not correct. But This is
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.
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)
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.
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
Make an original file, program, or image, run it trough a one-time-hash using the DMCA text. Have a friend post on some site how to crack your file using the DMCA text. Would it not reuire the DMCA to be banned?
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
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.