SCO Copyright Claims Questioned
Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, told eWEEK in an interview on Monday that those business Linux users who are not modifying, copying or distributing the Linux kernel can not be targeted for copyright infringement.

"Possession of infringing material is not a copyright violation because the copyright owner doesn't have an exclusive right to possess the work. The copyright statute gives the copyright holder exclusive power to copy, modify and distribute the work, so those people copying, modifying or distributing in violation of the owner's exclusive rights are infringing. Those who aren't copying, modifying or distributing are not in violation," he said.

Just using infringing code was no more of a copyright violation than possessing a photocopied book, he said. That act of copying and distributing is the infringement. "So end users will probably look at this situation and assume that SCO is not talking to them, including the 1,500 global CEOs who received letters from SCO [warning them that Linux was an unauthorized derivative of Unix and warning them of potential legal liability].

"The vendors will also probably look at SCO's UnixWare license proposal and say that under Section 7 of the GNU General Public License they can't take that license and will have to decide whether there is an infringement they need to obey or simply to disregard these moves as a nuisance," he said.

But SCO on Monday made clear that it was going after business and enterprise Linux users rather than the Linux distributors and vendors such as Red Hat Inc. and SuSE Inc. SCO CEO Darl McBride and David Boies, his chief legal counsel from Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, made it clear that SCO intends to use every means possible to protect the company's Unix source code and to enforce its copyrights.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1200766,00.asp