4:12 PM

Wired News: Groklaw’s Jones Looks Beyond SCO:

WN: What do you think will happen next in the SCO saga? Give me some short-term predications and a long-range one, please.

PJ: No one familiar with law thinks it’s wise to predict a court case. But long range, and looking at the big picture, I feel confident, from what I see so far, that SCO will regret embarking on the course they chose to follow.

I saw from day one they didn’t understand the GPL (the GNU General Public License). In fact, they don’t seem to even now, and it’s their Achilles’ heel. They simply can’t wriggle out of the GPL, I don’t think, and even if they could make it void or voidable, and I personally don’t see how they can, then they’d just find themselves guilty of copyright infringement on such a scale it’s awe-inspiring to contemplate the likely damages. Then IBM has four patent-infringement claims.

Meanwhile, SCO’s case against IBM appears to be withering. They just dropped the trade-secrets claim. That’s a big admission. Novell says they overruled SCO’s “termination” of IBM’s AIX license. And you have Novell and SCO dueling over copyright ownership. Red Hat is sitting back waiting, meanwhile, watching SCO’s copyright claims get smaller and smaller. If I were SCO, I’d be worried.

WN: So what do you think SCO will do next?

Jones: SCO is now limiting their copyright claims in the IBM lawsuit to their legal theory about what constitutes a derivative work, as I understand their claims. They appear now to be saying that the “infringement” is the AIX code IBM donated to Linux. What is SCO’s claim to code that has no System V code in it? That IBM wrote itself? And owns the copyright on? I’m fascinated to find out what SCO will say about that, but from where I am standing, it looks like an uphill struggle for them.

I do expect they may try some things with the DMCA, in imitation of their hero, the RIAA. But even there, a recent case limits what they can do. So far, nothing has been going right for them from the legal perspective, in my opinion. I’m personally looking at the DMCA as the next front.