Friday, March 16, 2007

Antispyware advocates try, try again in Congress. Antispyware advocates try, try again in Congress. A U.S. House subcommittee heard repeated praise today for an antispyware proposal similar to two previous bills that won passage in the House -- only to fail when they got to the Senate. [Computerworld Privacy News] 3:46:19 PM

Groklaw - Transcript of the March 7 Hearing in SCO v IBM Here is the transcript of the March 7th hearing in SCO v IBM, the last of the summary judgment hearings transcripts. Thanks yet again to Chris Brown for arranging to obtain the transcripts. On this day, Kimball was quite busy. He heard several motions, all the ones left over from the first two hearings on March 1 and March 5: IBM's Motion for Summary Judgment on its Claim for Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement (Tenth Counterclaim) (PDF) -- asking for a judgment that the Linux kernel does not infringe copyrights owned by SCO IBM's Motion for Summary Judgment on its Claim of Copyright Infringment (Eighth Counterclaim) -- IBM's counterclaim regarding SCO's violation of the GPL and consequent copyright infringment -- (PDF) SCO's cross motion in which it tries to say it never violated the GPL (if you spin the wording their way) (PDF) and SCO's motion for Summary Judgment on IBM's Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Counterclaims (PDF) -- SCO's motion trying to get SCO off the hook for all the trash talk in the media. On this day, we learn from IBM's attorney, David Marriott that the "mountain of code" SCO's CEO Darl McBride told the world about from 2003 onward ends up being a measly 326 lines of noncopyrightable code that IBM didn't put in Linux anyway. On the other hand, SCO has infringed all 700,000 lines of IBM's GPL'd code in the Linux kernel. SCO's GPL defense is of the lip-curling variety and quite funny. And it's also quite amusing to watch SCO try to wriggle out of responsibility for all the trash talk its executives treated us to in its PR campaign. 2:55:03 PM

The Score is IBM - 700,000 / SCO - 326. The Score is IBM - 700,000 / SCO - 326.  The Peanut Gallery writes  "After years of litigation to discover what, exactly, SCO was suing about, IBM has finally discovered that SCO's 'mountain of code' is only 326 scattered lines. Worse, most of what is allegedly infringing are comments and simple header files (like errno.h). These probably aren't copyrightable for being unoriginal and dictated by externalities and aren't owned by SCO in any event. Above and beyond that, IBM has at least five separate licenses for these elements, including the GPL, even if SCO actually owned those lines of code. In contrast IBM is able to point out 700,000 lines of code, which they have properly registered copyrights for, which SCO is infringing upon if the Court rules that it repudiated the GPL."  [Slashdot: Your Rights Online] 2:52:31 PM

© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick. Last update: 3/18/07; 11:19:43 PM.