On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:51:00PM -0400, J Aaron Farr wrote:If you didn't take the chance to read all of it, at least read the last section:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=175171&seqNum=7
"A person can commit copyright infringement even without knowing that the work was subject to copyright, so even unintentional infringers don't get a free pass under copyright law. Thus, the open source community's success requires that every contributor understand copyright law and provide only non-infringing code. A single bad apple can spoil the barrel."
A nice reminder about keeping our own ASF code repository clean and clear.
While we *definitely* want to keep our repository clean and clear, at least one of the people commenting on the article contested the claim above; search for this section: "running a program that you legally purchased or downloaded is a legal fair use of that program, even if the one providing it to you has violated copyright laws. If a programmer misappropriates copyrighted code, or a distributor distributes copyrighted code without permission, only they are responsible." They go on later to spell out additional restrictions on this.
I'm not a lawyer either, but that doesn't seem correct. For an example from the real world, if you (even unknowingly) purchased a stolen car stereo from someone, and that person was caught and told police you had the stereo, you'd have to surrender the stereo (and get hit with a fine for purchasing stolen goods, probably), with no expectation that you'll get your money back from the thief.
SCO did ask for damages from IBM commensurate to the total loss of revenue they claim from the fact that the whole world can now use that stolen code for free. If they had won that claim, it would then be difficult for them to go after the individual Linux users to pay up or stop using that IBM code, since a judge would probably see that as double-dipping ("IBM's already paid for that other person's use of the infringing code"). But it's equally possible the judge would ignore that, and assign liability to the other Linux users.
This is actually a good thing for Open Source. Note that in our license, and in every single Open Source license, and even in most commercial licenses, there are disclaimers (often in CAPS) that spell out that we don't guarantee anything about the legal status of the code or its suitability for any particular purpose. That means that no one can bankrupt the ASF financially by sneaking in some infringing code and then convincing the IP owner to sue us for the value of everyone's infringement. They might still try to do so, but we've got a good defense.
Brian
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