FSF Subpoenaed by SCO

An anonymous reader writes "Bradley M. Kuhn on the FSF website: Late last year, we were subpoenaed by SCO as part of the ongoing dispute between SCO and IBM. Today, we made that subpoena available on our website. This is a broad subpoena that effectively asks for every single document about the GPL and enforcement of the GPL since 1999. They also demand every document and email that we have exchanged with Linus Torvalds, IBM, and other players in the community. In many cases, they are asking for information that is confidential communication between us and our lawyers, or between us and our contributors."

Comments

In many cases,

[Threni]

> In many cases, they are asking for information that is confidential communication
> between us and our lawyers, or between us and our contributors."

See JYA at Cryptome for how to deal with this sort of thing.

Re:In many cases,

[jdreed1024]

or between us and our contributors.

Why is that special in the eyes of the law? (seriously - the blurb does not make it clear) Attorney-client confidentiality, sure. Medical professional confidentiality, fine. Developer-packager confidentiality? I don't think so. Unless these are confidential for some other reason. Stamping "confidential" on it, doesn't make it confidential. That's kind of the point of subpoenas.

Or am I missing something?

Non issue

[Jailbrekr]

So lawyers are petitioning for confidential information from other lawyers, knowing it is confidential?

Why, preytell, have there been no petitions to have SCOs lawyers disbarred yet?

SCO attempting to prove selective enforcement?

[Aumaden]

IANAL, but that's my take from reading the subpoena. It looks to me like Darl & company may be trying to assert that the GPL is void because it's not being enforced. And, its use against SCO is a special case.

Confidential?

[MisterBad]

Why would communication between FSF and its contributors be confidential?

Re:Overburden them

[dprovine]

I understand from my attorney friends that giving people a zillion documents is known as `papering them over'. A prosecutor of my acquantance tells me that well-designed subpoenas try to avoid the situation where you end up with 23 pallet loads of paper.

What that says to me is that SCO's lawyers have specifically asked to be papered over, so as to have lots more billable hours for the time spent reading all the irrelevant paperwork.

It's possible, in fact, that they'll bill for 500 hours of reading these papers when they don't bother to read any of it at all; how would SCO prove that they didn't do it?

On the importance of GPL and FSF

[BinLadenMyHero]

My favorite part of the FSF letter:

In addition to answering and/or disputing the subpoena, we must also educate the community about why it is that Linux was attacked and GNU was not. For more than a decade, FSF has urged projects to build a process whereby the legal assembly of the software is as sound as the software development itself. Many Free Software developers saw the copyright assignment process used for most GNU components as a nuisance, but we arduously designed and redesigned the process to remove the onerousness. Now the SCO fiasco has shown the community the resilience and complete certainty that a good legal assembly process can create. (SCO, after all, eventually dropped their claims against GNU as a whole and focused on the Linux project which, for all its wonderful technical achievements, has a rather loose legal assembly process.)