SCO Website Using Groklaw's Content

darkonc writes "It looks like they didn't learn from the BSD debacle (where, having sued Berkley for copyright infringement, AT&T found that they were using BSD code without acknowledging it's source). Groklaw has an article detailing how SCO has documents created by and for Groklaw on their site -- without even acknowledging the source. It seems that the defenders of the holy IP principle have hoisted the skull and bones."

Comments

Head of Canopy, Noorda's Daughter killed herself

[ThoreauHD]

http://www.linuxbusinessweek.com/story/48789.htm?D E=1

Happened last week- old news in internet time. But applicable her because SCO's financial backing literally took a bullet to the head. I think the least of their concerns would be Groklaw's stolen pdf files.

Docs pulled from both groklaw and tuxrocks

[wol]

Groklaw notes that SCO was pulling from both groklaw.net and tuxrocks.com. Even accepting that these are legal documents in SCO's own cases, it is amusing that they can't convert their own documents, but have to pull from OSS sites.

That's the 2nd "suicide" in 4 months.

[khasim]

1 in December.
1 in March.
Both people involved in Canopy.

Nothing strange or unusual about that. No sir.

Re:Court documents

[igrp]

Well, we went over this last night went the story hit Groklaw. To sum it up, from memory:

• There is handwriting on at least one of the scanned documents. It's questionable whether that means that sufficient additional creative content has been added to the non-protected derivative work.
  Personally, I think it doesn't. Comments might but we're talking about markings here. This is just my personal opinion though. This still doesn't rise beyond mechanical duplication, IMHO.
• It could be argued that putting together individual filings, and organizing them qualifies as a copyrightable compilation. (For those who are interested, here's a good basic introduction to get you started).
• This could also be a license violation as Groklaw's articles are covered by the Creative Commons License which requires attribution with republication.

I think it's questionable whether the PDF files count as a transcript which would be necessary since you would have to have a copyrightable work in the first place.

If memory serves me correctly, there was also a general consensus that

a) SCO sucks b) C&D'ing SCO could prove to be a very interesting publicity stunt c) SCO sucks.

Re:Petty

[anagama]

• Scanning didn't create a derivative work. Scanning added no actual content. Plus, as legal filings they're arguably public domain in the first place in which case they'd still be public domain after scanning.

Tell that to Westlaw or Lexis. Both of these companies supply the full text of court decisions, statutes, administrative decesions, etc. etc. All of these are available free at the respective courthouses, gov't offices, libraries where they are stored. Why then would a basic subscription to the state law databases of one state cost around $125 per month? Because the gathering and reformating of this widely dispersed inconveniently printed material has imense value. Westlaw and Lexis do not own the content, but they do own the manner in which it is presented. In a simialr vein, while groklaw doesn't own the content of the documents it has presented, it certainly owns the files it has created.