Mambo Users Are Free And Clear

ValourX writes "By now most of you have heard of the copyright infringement and code theft claims involving the Mambo content management system and businessman Brian Connolly. Legal questions have been raised, guesses have been made, commentary has flowed forth, and everyone involved in the dispute has had their fifteen minutes to relay their sad tale of injustice. Now it is time for the facts, and NewsForge can definitively say, based on material and quotes from Larry Rosen, Dan Ravicher, and Eben Moglen, that Connolly's legal threats against innocent Mambo users are baseless. Part of the new information in this article reveals that the SCO Group helped Brian Connolly by giving him some media contacts. NewsForge is part of OSTG, like Slashdot."

Comments

A couple of interesting points

[wrook]

As a few people have pointed out, the author of the article seems to have overstepped his bounds a bit. He's not really qualified to render a legal opinion. To state that Mr. Connelly is definitely in the wrong is a potentially dangerous thing. Especially given that he seems to be lawsuit happy.

That aside, I find this disagreement somewhat interesting for a few points.

First, I wonder what is copyrightable when it comes to code. For instance, if I wrote a sentence in an article of a magazine and then rewrote the sentence verbatim in another magazine, I don't think anyone would ever be able to sue you for copyright infringement. It's just a sentence. In this case, the code in question is only 9 lines (the equivelent of a sentence in a large book). At what point does this become protectable?

Second, if I hire someone to modify a GPL piece of code, I don't have to redistribute it. However, is it possible to stop the original author from distributing it? I have often wondered this. I mean, I can't stop him from having a copy and seemingly I can't bar him from his rights to do what he wants with that copy. In a sense, I have already distributed it. I can see that if I write the code myself it's a much more straightforward question.

In any case, I don't think I'll get any definitive answers to these questions this time around. Without pretending to know all the legal ins and outs here, I suspect that the code was never copied in the first place. The fact that Mr. Connelly has never even looked makes it fairly unlikely that it will ever get to trial.

Re:More of the same.

[El]

That exactly what a preliminary injunction is for -- to keep somebody that has harmed you from continuing to benefit from that harm while they tie the case up in court for years. Like most arguments leveled against open source, it falls apart when you realize that closed source is just as vulnerable or even more vulnerable.

Question: What's to keep somebody from inserting malicious code in Linux? Answer: What's to keep a disgruntled Redmond employee from inserting malicious code in Windows? The difference is, Linux code goes through a lot more peer review!

Well, this should be easy

[lottameez]

There is one big fat glaring disagreement between Sakic and Connelly that should make most of this pretty plain.

Sakic claims there was no contract. Connelly says there was.

My one semester of business law clearly makes me an expert, so here goes:

I suspect there was a contract. I suspect it said what Connelly said it does. My understanding is that in these kind of legal proceedings there has to be some "consideration", i.e, money or value changing hands. Sakic was paid to do a job. Then he gave away the results of that job, effectively removing any competitive value the task brought to connelly.

And let's face it, anybody who has ever written code (and then accidently deleted it) knows that it's real easy to write the same code the second time around.

Connelly, in my view, has a valid claim against Sakic since Connelly paid for the time Sakic took to complete the task and got very little value in return.

I don't see Connelly getting a lot of mileage (other than press) by threatening other mambo users. If the function is that simple, somebody other than Sakic should rewrite it (if someone hasn't already).

Re:Connolly replies...

[sparkz]

I've not heard of Mambo until now, but I do understand the GPL...
Newsforge say:

The red herring
When Connolly first put up his Furthermore demo site, he noticed that his server logs showed that a perceived competitor had downloaded about 20MB worth of data from his site. Connolly immediately interpreted this as wholesale code theft when, in fact, he had no reason to believe that any theft had taken place. The competitor was in the process of designing a site around Mambo OS and, like Furthermore, also employed the lead story block.

No mention of what was shown in these logs - if these logs were calling pure-library (non-HTML) PHP code from his site, I'd call that direct use of his code.

However, LiberatiGroup says:

The code committed to Mambo was done under contract and paid for by the Literati Group. The contract stipulates that "Upon finished project all copyright rights to code written by [Sakic] will belong to literatigroup.com."

If Sakic was contracted to modify GPL'd code under these conditions, that term of the contract must be void, as LiteratiGroup do not have the rights to enforce that term.

How does the GPL's use of "linking" relate here? That is, of course, for lawyers and (good) expert witnesses. But it's pretty clear that if I put a "virtual(http://yoursite.example.com/yourlibrary.p hp) line into "my" code, that I'm linking to your library. In C terms, it a static or dynamic link?

LiteratiGroup dismiss a Newsforge explanation of GPL with:

-- This confuses copyright and GPL. GPL does not automatically rob one of their copyrights.

The GPL relies upon copyright; without (c), the GPL would be meaningless. Adding (c) code to GPL'd (c) code is only possible by accepting the terms of the GPL.

LiteratiGroup replies:

BOTTOM LINE: THERE IS NO DUTY TO REDISTRIBUTE MODIFIED GPL CODE.

This is true.

I asked RMS about this quite directly back in 2001, as a hypothetical question about webhosted software: http://steve-parker.org/articles/lego/rms1.shtml