>> It appears that many of SCO's claims are that their rights are infringed >> by any implementation of an SVR 3 or later interface. Indeed their claims >> against AutoZone appear to be that just because Linux implements the same >> SVR 4 IPC interface that the mechanisms somehow must be derived from SCO's >> copyrights. IANAL, but that doesn't sound valid in of itself.
> > Nevertheless, a single-authored work might make more traceable the defense > against more honest claims that the work was copied directly and substantially > from copywritten sources. > But if the interface definition itself is protected by copyright then it doesn't matter about the implementation. We did once ask our lawyer if we could implement a translation module/library from another API to our own (no Dave it wasn't GCOMs :-)) to ease a customer's migration and were told that we could be in violation of copyright even though the API is published and intended to be used by third parties. This was many years ago and long before SCO considered this pursuit, so the idea of copyrighting interfaces definitions is not new. Note that is a "could be", the same lawyers were also unwilling to persue copyright violations on our behalf because of the low chance of success ... it's all new law, untested and unproven in courts and only for those with deep pockets. It's a stretch though in case of SV4 STREAMS though and that's only a small part of unix/linux interfaces, most of which are conformant or derived from SVID and POSIX. I don't see how this claim can fly. Not just Linux, but also BSD Unix claims to be clean room developed from the interface definitions and that's been accepted as ok. I can't see any court upholding a claim on SVID or POSIX after all these years, and even though SV4 STREAMS is not in either (is it?) ... it must surely be judged in the same light. IANAL either. Ragnar _______________________________________________ Linux-streams mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://gsyc.escet.urjc.es/mailman/listinfo/linux-streams
