SCO nonsense rampage continues

According to ZDNET and slashdot, clever SCO has a new legal strategy: attacking the GPL. (Quotes from ZDNET article.)

IBM‘s defense will partly rest on the argument that SCO distributed its own version of Linux for many years, containing the allegedly infringing code, and that by this action effectively placed the code in question under the GPL.

SCO is planning to respond that the GPL itself is invalid, SCO‘s lead attorney, Mark Heise of Boies Schiller & Flexner, told the Wall Street Journal in a report on Thursday.

Why is the GPL invalid?

SCO will argue that the GPL‘s provisions allowing unlimited copying and modification are not compatible with US copyright law, which allows software buyers to make only a single copy, says the Journal. Heise said the GPL “is pre-empted by copyright law”, according to the report.

As many in the slashdot discussion thread linked above say, someone needs to explain to Mr. Heise the difference between a ceiling and a floor. Someone should also take him round to a printing plant, another place where people who are not the personal holders of copyright in a work routinely make more than one copy of that work. In a case marked by wrong and stupid arguments, this is surely the stupidest.

But the SCObies aren’t always wrong about everything. CEO McBride is dead-on when he says:

At issue here is more than just SCO and Red Hat[.] What is at issue here is whether intellectual property rights will have any value in the age of the Internet.

That’s exactly right. What’s at issue here is whether the intellectual property rights of all of the hundreds, if not thousands, of programmers and companies who have contributed code to Linux will be respected. They have chosen to license their works—their “property”—under the GPL. If you actually respect intellectual property rights, then you have to respect that choice. Far from being a threat to intellectual property, the power of the GPL derives entirely from intellectual property law. The GPL is a copyright license. Without copyright, it would be meaningless.

But McBride is just talking out of his capacious ass, as usual. He doesn’t respect anybody’s intellectual property rights. He doesn’t care about intellectual property. He is actively suing people to prevent them from using their own intellectual property as they see fit, for no other reason than personal profit. SCO‘s case is about pumping stock to produce ill-gotten gains for SCO and Canopy group insiders. I don’t know if these sorts of shenanigans are against the law, but they damn well should be, and McBride should be giving his next FUD-filled interview from prison.

Filed under: copyright