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SEC Investigating SCO?
Udo Schmitz writes "As Groklaw reports, the SCO Group stated in a SEC filing from yesterday: 'In addition, regulators or others in the Linux market and some foreign regulators have initiated or in the future may initiate legal actions against us, all of which may negatively impact our operations and future operating performance.' Does this mean the SEC finally started to pull some stops? SCOs and Canopys financial dealings (Vultus acquisition anyone?) long ago lead to speculations in the Linux community about the legality of their business practices, or the whole lawsuit just being a stock scam."
I mean, seriously, at this point, who (other than investors) is going to be the least bit sympathetic?
Somebody puts a stop to this madness...
"The party adjourned to a hot tub, yes. Fully clothed, I might add. -- IBM employee, testifying in California State Supreme Court"
:)
Relevant? I say yes
Doomie
I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but will someone please inform me exactly what SCO is/does...I hear alot about them on /. but just cock my head like a dog at them.
$sig$
Really?
Santa Claus Operation and speculations goes together?
No sig for now.
There is another link I should've added to the submission: This site assembles some very interesting information from the Yahoo SCOX Financial Board.
I've mostly forgotten about SCO these days, as they were all bark and no bite. My question is, what took so long? I remember people constantly writing to the feds and calling for investigations into this company last year. What was the freakin' holdup? Even non-tech people can see the writing on the wall.
In any event, the business was failing, so scam or not, it's a desperate game to try to stay alive and relevant for another few years.
The corporation's responsibility is working in the best interest of their shareholders - everything short of breaking the law in order to turn a profit for those who own stock. If that means suing a company just to stay relevant, so be it.
That's how public corporations work. It may not be morally correct (for some definition of morality), but they are responsible for protecting their shareholders... In the end, the trick may work the way they wanted - extending the life of a failing company for another few years so that shareholders have time to sell and salaried employees can collect a few more dollars.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
who'd be happy to piss on their grave? raise your hand.
Every corporation has malcontents among the shareholders.
It's the cost of raising capital through common stock.
They must have run out of money to buy off the key Congress critters. The rest belongs to Darth Darl.
have initiated or in the future may initiate legal actions against us, all of which may negatively impact our operations and future operating performance
/. posters.
Yea so what? Like you haven't cost other companies millions of dollars, hundreds if not thousands of man-hours, and that is not even to mention all the lost work hours from us
I hope you get sued into the ground.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
What a wierd company.
Many corporate actions are just games designed to artificially increase stock price.
SCO just happened to have the balls (or the incredibly stupid idea) to sue the 2nd largest software company in the world for an astronomical figure.
Consider this perspective. Even if IBM had rolled over and paid SCO some big number in a settlement, that wouldn't impact the company's value nearly as much as the potential of winning the huge case. So basically, the threat of the huge payoff, magnified by stock market gambling, would (and did) push the stock price up far more.
Everyone with inside information then cashes out (inside meaning executives, primary funding investors, and Martha Stewart-type friends) while the stupid general "investing" public buys more stock after reading the daily press releases.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Who is the mod who was stupid enough to classify these comments as Troll? These are dead-on ontopic and informative/insightful.
I wish I had points. You deserve better.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Now it should be the FBI. They've moved well beyond a simple stock manipulation scheme and have enetered the realm of criminal interstate stalking.
Someone needs to go to jail, and not some white-collar posh Martha Stewart prison. They need to go where the other predatory criminals (stalkers, rapists, etc) go.
If the SEC eviscerates the company and that's all that happens, they got off easy.
How come every time I hear about Canopy group in this case I cant help but thinking about the Umbrella Corporation? O.o;
while it's tempting to read more into it than is there, the fact is every corporation warns against a worst-case scenario in its financial filings to avoid shareholder suits down the road. LNUX and RHAT filings also contain similar template language, but no one anticipates they will go under in the next quarter.
This is absolutely no indication that there's a SEC investigation on the horizon and shows how really ignorant of standard business practices the Groklaw and anti-SCO folks really are. SCO is nicely imploding on its own; no reason to start a lot of false rumors (and speculating falsely about something that can effect stock prices is prosecutable, by the way; Ms. Jones should know that) when there's simply no need.
This exact language was in their 10-K filed last month. There have no other filings recently that would normally have a "Risk Factors" section, so that's why you wouldn't have seen this sort of language elsewhere. I don't think this is really news.
It is standard operating procedure to include in SEC filings discussion of any factors that will or reasonably may negatively impact business.
This CYA language is meant to prevent both SEC probing and shareholder lawsuits should something go wrong. This language is often copied verbatim in later filings, so it often is written to be as broad as possible.
Mere inclusion of such language does not mean that these factors have happened or will happen, only that the company thinks there is some non-zero chance of it happening.
Not surprisingly, SCO's language is pretty mushy here, but the wording, "have initiated or in the future may initiate" makes me believe that they're simply being prudent.
Of course, the fact that they feel the need to mention regulator investigation says a great deal about the company, regardless.
You know I didn't think anything would make me giggle like a little girl. I was wrong.
"Our stock price could decline further because of the activities of short sellers. Our stock has attracted the interest of short sellers. We believe the activities of short sellers have in the past and could in the future further reduce the price of our stock or inhibit increases in our stock price. " ha ha ha. Next on the Nature channel: How the activities of vultures and buzzards inhibit and reduce the activities an otherwise perfectly healthy wildebeest.
multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
Walking down a street in Salt Lake City and you happen upon a homeless guy. He looks up and with stunned shock you say, "Hey! Didn't you used to be Darl McBride"? ;P
Bwahahahahaha!!! I kill myself!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's the sound of the world's tiniest violin, playing just for SCO.
Check out the prospectus of any publically traded company. It's completely normal to list just about every possible thing that could happen to the company negatively which would affect shareholder value. Think of it as "cover your ass" material.
Seriously, read the prospectus of a company you know and understand very well, such as a traditional retailer like Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, or Barnes and Noble. They'll list things like potential litigation, seasonal variances, competitors, natural disasters, affect of the institution of internet taxation on their business, etc., etc.
So, this is SCO's way of trying to prevent a class action suit by shareholders in the event that they are sued by companies/persons in the Linux community.
Canopy sued Microsoft and made a bundle without actually having to go to court. SCO was a Canopy company and both had Ralph Yarro as part of the organization.
It was reasonable to assume that if they sued IBM over its use of UNIX, that IBM would also cave in and give them a bundle of cash. Given what the lawyers have cost so far, it would have been cheaper. Oops, IBM didn't cave.
There are very serious issues involved in the SCO vs. IBM case which could have made many businesses worry about adopting Linux. IBM had bet the farm on Linux. IBM had no choice to fight.
Not only did SCO not have a leg to stand on but it seriously looked like they were perpetrating a fraud. Their only chance to stay out of jail is to make it look like they really believed their claims about IBM. SCO, therefore, had no choice but to fight to the bitter end.
What have we gotten out of this whole mess? Linux is unencumbered by anybody's copyrights. All doubt has been removed. The extra publicity may actually have promoted the uptake of Linux. We have gotten a wonderful legal education on Groklaw. We have been activated. A lot of people realize the importance of the next big fight (patents) and have started writing their congresscritters.
So, thank you SCO. Good luck staying out of jail.
SCO's management claimed that the stock sales (which you can find on their Form 4 filings with the SEC) were part of a pre-arranged sale plan that had absolutely nothing to do with the litigation. The sale plan was filed two months before the lawsuit was filed. That sure seems plausible to me.
I really hope someone nails these slimeballs.
(P.S. I've posted several notes on /. about this;
here's one from back in June 2003.)
Who modded this funny? Insightful, yes, Informative yes, but funny? I don't think there's anything funny about it.
/. should also limit AC posts to one every 10 or 30 minutes.
Through the use of cookies and ip addresses, I think
If you want to be an AC, then exposure should be limited.
It is not what have been said but rather whom have it been said by that is really important here. We as a community of programmers, coders, hackers, engineers and otherwise intelligent people knew it from the beginning. We had no doubt. We avoided those pathetic scam artists like fire, we abandoned their products, we laughed at their employees (I even stopped visiting Santa Cruz every year for that matter) but let's face it: the uneducated masses kept happily buying their stock like there had been no yesterday. This time, however, we finally have got someone to refer our CEO to while talking about SCO, and who could possibly serve that purpose better than SEC? This is a very important step on our way to victory of the Freedom of Software. Kudos to everyone who kept fighting against those immoral bastards. Kudos to SEC, kudos to fellow Slashdotters, kudos to the Groklaw team, and especially kudos to Pamela Jones without whom the already inflated SCO stock would probably be worth twice as much today. Thanks Pamela!
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Battle of the acronyms, film at 11.
I parse this to mean the statement is true if one or more of the conditions are true now or in the future. We know that 'others in the Linux market' are already suing (RHAT, NOVL). However, the statement as it stands doesn't say that SCO are being prosecuted NOW by regulators, but they may in future be prosecuted by regulators.
Therefore, I think the statement refers to the fact they are currently being sued by RHAT and NOVL, and might be prosecuted later by regulators (although this is not yet certain).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
If there's any group out there who is claiming that they are doing something that the SEC is going to have to investigate, they need to disclose the risk to make a shareholder lawsuit less likely.
If there is some risk that a company doesn't disclose, where there was some way for them to know that it was a posibility, they can be sued by shareholders if the stock goes down as a result of it comes true.
You often find really silly risks listed in safe harbor statement like that. For example, Walmart lists as a risk that they may not be able to buy from certain vendors if political instability takes place in their country. They also disclose that they won't do as well if they can't hire good employees.
Also, if they know about a SEC investigation or lawsuit against them, a company would usually give more information than that in a 10k (lest the SEC investigate them for the way they disclose their risks in their 10k).
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
This is what happens when corrupt corporations stop paying off the SEC.
why? forty-two.
You're right about profitability but completely wrong about share price. Shares are initially issued to raise capital. After that it's a secondary market and they fight among themselves for how much the shares are worth. Profit not share price should be the determining factor for the corporation.
It used to be that the two were related, profit divided as dividends was the the primary motivation for determining share price - or the potential to control the company via the votes accrued. Now that it's all speculative - stockholders have hijacked the original purpose of the corporation which was a *business* to make money. This has led to SCO, HP, Nortel, Time Warner/AOL etc where short term decisions to help the stock price have resulted in long term harm to the corporation's viability and profitability.
I'm not saying that this is wrong either - but it really isn't very good for the economy overall when otherwise productive businesses are gutted to be made more appealing to the sucker buyer. The worst excesses (SCO, ENRON) should probably be punished. But there's not much that can be done about it as long as there are fools that want to get in on the sinking ship...
I think every single annual report I have ever read contains a very similar statement. The first time I saw it in my own company's report I freaked out, thinking that it referred to some specific, impending doom. A more senior business person clued me in that every company says that as protection (CYA, if you will), i.e. should they lose a lawsuit, they can claim that they already warned investors, stakeholders, et. al.
Ok, I give up. Is/was "trolltalk" a real article as some point? Why/how does it link to goatse.cx?
This is one of those moments I wish there were sarcasm tags on /. Not sure if you meant waht you wrote, so anyway, here comes my answer :)
Look at this thread starting with a post by Quatermass of Groklaw fame. There he writes:
"In January 2003, O'Gara published an article about SCO's plans to monetize their IP allegedly in Linux. This was two months before SCO sued IBM. This was six months before SCO announced their Linux IP licensing program. This was long before SCO had made any public statements about their plans for licensing Linux, or alleged infringements in Linux."
And an AC replies with the insightful "Securities laws prohibit purchases and sales of securities on the basis of material non-public information."
Anybody remember any editorials/posts by people who took the position that SCO had a legitimite gripe when they first announced that Linux stole their code? You know, the people who said "SCO is just protecting what is theirs, etc."?
This is a serious flaw, everyone should know about it. I can't believe it's not on the /. frontpage yet!!!!!
We have been activated.
Wonder geek powers, activate! Form of: an 800lb. gorrilla! Form of: a tidal wave of litigation!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There is only one other company who's financial situation I followed the last years: AAPL. I just checked some of their SEC filings for similar sentences and: Nope, couldn't find anything like this.
Anyway, I don't foresee a serious SEC investigation until the lawsuit is settled. It would be a waste of resources to start an investigation when all that really needs to be done is to sift through the broken remants of a case. If a judge dismisses the case because SCO never had any more evidence than "It looks like UNIX so they must have copied it!" then I expect the SEC would crawl up SCO's ass with a microsope at that point.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now would seem like the ideal time for anyone investing in SCO to sell everything they have in it because i fear it's probably not going to be going back up...
> It was reasonable to assume
1) must be some definition of reasonable I'm unfamiliar with.
2) what every phys. ed. says with respect to the word assume.
Ads are broken.
The problem with that is not "morality" (whatever that means for a business), but efficiency and effectiveness. Efficacy. Viability.
A company should exist to provide the best products it can to as many customers as it can. In the long run, that will provide the most return for shareholders. Be customer driven, not shareholder driven, and you will have both.
Trying to run the company to please the shareholders is like driving a car down the highway looking back in the rear view mirror. You may stay on the road, but be careful when passing, and those toll booths are really tough.
A business is only bound to stoop to whatever depths their bylaws and SEC filings say. When Google puts in their paperwork that they won't be evil (and they spell out what they mean), it allows them to make decisions based on morality and ethics as they define them. Prospective stock buyers are informed, and can't demand that Google be anything else.
Not that Google is the standard - I'm just using that as an example. It's possible to run a company within guidelines of good citizenship. Most executives would rather just take the money, it seems.
sigs, as if you care.
"LNUX and RHAT filings also contain similar template language[...]"
Just checked the last LNUX filing and found sentences like: "The Company is subject to various claims and legal actions arising in the ordinary course of business." I bet you'll find stuff like that in the filings of a lot of listed companies, but I didn't find mentions of "legal actions" "initiated" by "regulators".
They're probably referring to nearly getting delisted for failing to file their financials. Being SCO/Canopy, they're just putting the maximum "hard done by" spin on it.
I'll ignore your confusion over "Santa Clara" vs. "Santa Cruz", since several others have corrected you already. But the Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella, recently purchased by Sun) is a completely different company! This "SCO" is "The SCO Group". The "SCO" in their name doesn't stand for anything; their name is simply "The SCO Group".
This "SCO" was formerly known as Caldera, and they were originally formed to create a desktop environment (the "Caldera Network Desktop" or CND) for Linux. And they helped fund the creation of Red Hat, in order to have a stable base for the CND. Later, they decided to go their own way, and forked the Red Hat distro to make their own Linux distro ("Caldera OpenLinux"). Then they bought some assets (vague and unspecified, but definitely including the "SCO" trademark) from the Santa Cruz Operation, changed their name, started pretending they'd never heard of Linux before, and sued IBM.
Sure, it's a fun place to dig up speculative dirt, but that's all it is: speculation, and anyone who reads an SEC filing without this basic understanding of what he's actually looking at is... the kind of person who posts stories like this to Slashdot.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
WTF? SEC investigating SCO? LOL!
I tend to repeat myself, but I can't remember mentions of "legal actions" "initiated" by "regulators" in the filings I read.
but then on the final you had to end it with Linux is unencumbered by anybody's copyrights. and make a complete fool out of yourself.
How many clue-by-four are required to make some people understand that the only bloody thing that makes projects like Linux possible IS copyright and someone having the copyright for some stuff?
If noone had any copyright to any of the Linux code, it would be public domain. Don't fool yourself, and PLEASE STOP spreading such crap as if it was a fact. Be humble, or get an education.
I can see the manga strip already :)
That is perhaps the funniest investment related quote I've seen on /. :)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Won't work...you can delete a cookie at anytime and you can use any number of open proxies to route messages thru...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
But thats not how it works now. The long term interest of shareholders should be what the senior management should strive for. But in today corporations shareholders interest comes in 3rd. Senior management first real goal is to inflate short term profits so their options and bonuses kick in. However after awhile, alot of companies falter on this steroid type of mentality, then management work out deals to save the bondholders. Shareholders are suppose to have power through the board of directors who are supppose to be independant of senior management. Unfortunately, those two groups are conflated in modern times so the shareholder interests are only a secondary concern.
Blah Blah Tacos
SCO-IBM
IBM-Linux
SCO-Linux
minix-linux
go read it...
Some time last year I got fed up with the irritation that is SCO. I got interested to see if the SEC was digging into what seems to be false claims on their part. It seems that the SEC does not offer any information publicly about ongoing investigations.
Since I didn't know what, if anything, was happening, I reported them to the SEC. I was shocked to get a call the NEXT DAY from a man who identifdied himself as an attorney with the SEC. We spoke for about 45 minutes. At the conclusion of the conversation, he indicated that he thought he understood my issues with them - their apparent lies, their seeming stock manipulation, etc but doubted that he could proceed without more specific information about how they knowingly lied to the public.
If sufficient evidence was produced, he seemed interested in protecting the public from abusive corporate officers. He was not satisfied with what I offered him.
Unless someone has subsequently provided more and better evidence than what I knew about as an interested observer, it is doubtful that the SEC proceeded.
I was displeased that I was unable to move them to action.
Regards,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
...to see why Paul Murphy either knows nothing about what he's talking about, or maybe he's just a paid shill. It's that clueless an editorial.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
SCO has not done this before. It's hardly standard for them. So your anti-SCO/Groklaw slam is misinformed and misguided.
To be fair, the Yahoo financial boards are rife with spam, garbage, and deliberate misinformation.
Yep. And the only difference between a normal Yahoo board and the SCOX board in that respect is it is the pumpers who primarily spew the garbage and deliberate misinformation moreso than the dumpers. The board is mostly filled with noise.
And the site in your post merely notes a few hits from Caldera sites - that could very easily be a worker checking the message boards for clues about what's going on with SCO, not neccessarily any monitoring by SCO management.
As the person responsible for the site in question, I think there is a bit more there than that. In fact, the Caldera information is the least interesting page there and something I actually regret having posted.
Of more interest is the examination of a fund manager who had invested in SCO and how he reacted when the SCOForum 2003 code that SCO showed was shown to be utter bunk in under 24 hours. The story of how that fund manager acted and what happened to the shareprice is much more interesting than caldera.com webhits.
Or, there is my guess (informed by Yahoo SCOX discussion) on the early timeline--back in the summer and fall of 2002 before SCO went public with anything. I happen to think that Morgan Keegan was likely the entity that brought in both MS and Boies.
More recently, there is an interesting reverse merger related to a currently private Redmond, Washington based company that SCOX has at least a 10% ownership of. I suspect it is a backdoor attempt to get some money into SCO's coffers so they can continue a bit longer.
It is speculation and could very well be wrong--but it is also information I haven't seen anywhere else and is definitely not "spam, garbage, [or] deliberate misinformation."
Too lazy to post a link, so search for Trolltalk on Wikipedia. Apparently, someone has been crapflooding the trolls hidden SID.
SCO owns Unix and therefore immune from SEC federal Investigations. In other recent news, Al Gore created the internet.
They also have more amusing risk factors than that one. (All text from SCO's current 10k)
You forgot one:
ZZZ. We are Evil. We have crossed over to the Dark Side and will be eventually defeated by the Forces of Good.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We have been activated.
... it is far, far stronger than the dark side of the stock manipulator.
Wonder geek powers, activate! Form of: an 800lb. gorrilla! Form of: a tidal wave of litigation!
Actually, if anyone remembers, it was the tidal wave of slashdot-expanded open source coders that got the SEC to force the Red Hat stock to be pulled out of the pockets of stock manipulators and reissued to the open source Friends and Family group of IPO stock.
So, don't underestimate the power of the good side of the geek
Trust the Geek, Luke.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is a collection of old regurgitated fallacies that have been floating around since 2003. If this is an example of Mr. Murphy's research and writing capabilities, than I'd group him with Enderle, Didio, Brown, & O'Gara. Move along. Nothing to see here, folks...
Every time I see SCOX, I think "scrumpox". My jewels itch just thinking about it...
I thought companies were created to organize people to produce useful goods and services.
I don't know in which planet it would be morally acceptable to be a bunch of social parasites making money out of the loopholes of a porous legal system.
When the new pope talked about moral relativism I am sure he had in mind this kind of attitude, not having the balls to condemn something obviously morally unnacceptable: these people are deceiving willfully others.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That was me. My keyboard is unplugged and my mouse is on the blink. Would it help if I said sorry?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Thousands of geeks simulateously ejaculated their splooge onto their screens.
Eww!?
It's not a FUD article. Of course if you didn't read it...
Pray tell, what fallacies does Murphy offer?
Remember Bre-X, the Canadian mining Company that claimed to have made a huge gold strike, but the assays were falsified? Insiders knew this and were prosecuted accordingly, but making the false claims was a crime in itself and prosecuted as such. Why is SCO any different? SCO should be held to the same standards as Bre-X, or any publicly traded mining co. It made the claim that it had a chance to make a large/fantastic amount of money from the near unlimited goldmine that is IBM. Shouldn't an independant and accurate assesment of the value and the percentage chance of it's winning that claim be required as well? Darl and his insider buddies obviously knew it was a snowballs chance, and sold their shares as quickly as possible. Why should Joe investor be denied that knowledge?
SCO held the license to issue licenses for other Unix vendors. In addition, they are claiming that they own Unix. But if the Novell stuff proves out, Novell will hold total control over Unix, and has the right to revoke the issuing from SCO. And they have already said that SCO no longer has the right to issue unix licenses. If so, SCO is nothing but paper. And very very very expensive paper.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A cursory reading offers 2 major fallacies immediately to one with only a perfunctory knowledge of the case.
1) The crazy idea that SCO can prevail simply by demonstrating that anyone associated with the AT&T effort was also associated with Linux development. This seems to be the basis of the first half of the article. It's ridiculous. It would imply that no-one can work in the same industry as the company they've left for fear of using a memory that was formed at the previous company. Nonsense. The reason this avenue wasn't pursued in the lawsuit, is that it's a cul-de-sac.
2) The fact that minix doesn't show up in Linux doesn't mean it wasn't once in Linux and got refactored out. Ergo, not finding UNIX code in Linux is a poor defense indeed. This argument is the second half of the article. Well, it's ridiculous also. Minix was 5000 lines long. A tiny fraction of UNIX. The idea that natural refactoring would result in ALL of the original code being lost will be looked upon with great suspicion by anyone who's ever supported legacy code. And should be responded to with 'then what evidence DO you have?'
In short the article says that the fact that SCO has no evidence should not lead people to believe their claims are baseless. It either reads as professional trolling ("You, Murphy, write me 2000 words on why SCO are justified. Let's boil some blood out there") or funded PR/journalism.
Is this really such a big deal? That ominous sounding "foreign regulators" stuff might merely be referring to the action in Germany which forced SCO to stop talking trash about Linux's alleged illegitimacy there.
I'm not saying there mightn't be some MORE fire somewhere with all this SEC smoke, but people, let's keep perspective. This could merely be a description of regulatory trouble we already know all about.
Hey, I post numerous insightful, funny comments!
Paul skips over several requirements for SCOX to have a valid case. They must prove they own copyright. Must show copyright to which code ATT might have transfered to Novell. Must show Novell transfered copyright to oldSCO. Must show old SCO transfered copyright to newSCO. Must show newSCO owns copyright to code that IBM developed. Must show Linux contains code that infringes protected code from newSCO. Instead he raises completely irrelavant arguments as if newSCO owns appropriate copyrights so these technologies must be reverse engineered. Where are the documents for all of these tranfers and most important of all when did IBM transfer copyright for code it develped to either oldSCO or newSCO. What a worthless article.
sid 20721 : here
Naturally, we find property so useful in building society that it is nearly universally granted as a right, at least in the case of exclusive resources. This begins to make sense when you consider freedom as including future plans, so that having a known body of exclusive resources to hand becomes an important part of it, but we do not make property out of air, which although plentiful, is also exclusive (although we do create tradeable pollution permits) because the transaction cost is greater than the gain in investment.
Similar tradeoffs occur elsewhere. Rights are actually restictions upon other's freedoms, and far from being inalienable, are the result of long evolution, yielding an approximately utilitarian result, resulting in very roughly "the greatest freedom of the greatest number".
I'll agree with you that government, all too often, moves us away from this optimum, though.
Wikileaks, no DNS