[CLUE-Talk] More on SCO/Copyrights

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 08:05, Randy Arabie wrote:

> <IANAL>
> Knowing that Linux *is* distributed under the GPL, then
> users *should* be protected because any copyright
> infringment would have been "innocent"...that is until SCO
> made announced their allegations public and filed suite in
> court.  I suppose any further copyright infringments after
> that could potentially be viewed as  "knowing" and/or
> "willful".  This gets to the heart of SCO's abiguity WRT
> their allegations.  No one has enough information to make an
> informed decision about the legitimacy of SCO's claims.
> </IANAL>

I'd like to know -- can it be considered "willful" if the copyright
holder refuses to prove their claims?

If J.K. Rowling says pages 10-40 of one of the Harry Potter books are
being copied without her permission, you can look and say "yup, those
are the pages. I'd better quit." In this case, anyone can say "that's my
copyrighted material. No, I won't prove it, but you'd better stop on my
say-so." If that's held to be legal, you could easily throw a
monkey-wrench into *any* company's distribution of software -- including
Microsoft's just by claiming that their software contains your
copyrighted code. 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net