It's been conjectured before that The SCO Group's mistake is that they think of IP as property, obeying various conservation laws.
Actually, I think the problem is a more general fallacy, known as the map is the territory.
They think that Intellectual Property, simply because it's called property, is property. They think that SCO, simply because it's called SCO, is SCO. They think that copyright, simply because it's called copyright, is copyright.
I've written about the first before, based on inspiration from pfh - ideas behave differently to apples, so intuitions about apples may or may not apply to ideas.
The abbreviation "SCO" refers to two different companies: originally it was the Santa Cruz Operation, now Tarantella; these days, it usually means The SCO Group, previously known as Caldera and part of the Canopy group. The conflation is not just sloppiness on the part of journalists; The SCO Group has made the same conflation in court documents (preamble vs §65; see also §49 and following, where the definition from §65 seems to be intended; PDF).
Today's groklaw story, about whether or not Unix is copyright at all, leads me to suspect the third mistake. A quarter of a century ago, one could choose copyright protection or trade secrets, but not both. This was already on its way out, so there was a bunch of exceptions, but for the most part AT&T could've chosen one or the other, and it chose trade secrets. Today's US copyright follows the Berne convention: anything anyone writes down is automatically copyrighted. Conflating one law with the other is understandably confusing.
⇦ Classless Charity Slave Auctions | ⇨ Slashy Freelance |
