On 03/17/2012 02:03 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>
> Am 17.03.2012 18:45, schrieb Dave Ihnat:
>> On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 06:24:08PM +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>> what exactly let you imagine taht this has ANYTHING to do with OpenSource?
>> Well, playing_Advocatus Diaboli_, what if some moneyed software company
>> claims Open Source software being hosted for download is violating their
>> copyrights, and uses this excuse to shut down archives?
> sorry, but this is simply bullshit in any context
>
Actually, it's been done. Remember /SCO v. IBM?/ The only reason that
failed was that/SCO/ went bankrupt, the investors grew outraged, and
they went out looking for a new company president. But not before/SCO/
tried to extort licensing fees from everyone using Linux. Darl McBride
even went to Congress to try to suggest that the GPL was
unconstitutional, because it somehow defied the power of the United
States Congress to grant patents and copyrights.
No the only reason SCO went bankrupt was because it failed.
SCO v IBM is still outstanding and SCO is going to lose at that trial
just as it did in SCO v Novell: because it never owned the copyrights
that it claimed to own in order to run its extortion racket. It lost to
Novell and went into bankruptcy to avoid certain consequences of that
loss, while it tried an appeal. The appeal court overturned the summary
judgment and help that SCO was entitled to a jury trial. It got the jury
trial and LOST again. The jury specifically found that the copyrights
had NEVER been transferred from Novell. And ALL of SCO's claims against
IBM depend upon it being the copyright owner: you cannot complain that
IBM 'improperly' copied code from Unix, into AIX and claim damages *when
you do not own the copyright*. But IBM's counterclaims are still
outstanding. It is supposed to go to trial this fall.
So although you can say "it's been tried", like many frauds you can fool
some of the people some of the time.....
As for a monied software company ("MSC") trying that tack, they might be
able to bamboozle an ISP into acting, but the DCMA notice/counter notice
regime is now quite well known and would be used to block any
precipitous actions. And then the MSC would face a real problem: say the
allegedly copied software carries a GPL notice. Did the MSC gift the
software into the GPL? There is lots of GPL'd software floating around
from Sun for example (and Universal/Vivendi was posting video trailers
on Youtube that they now claim were pirated!.
And if the MSC did NOT freely GPL the software, they will have to open
their OWN code databases up for examination. They cannot prove it was
copied WITHOUT producing the original.Oh, and did they *register* the
copyright with the USCO???
So that is NOT going to happen.
--
R. Geoffrey Newbury
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