SCO's legal gun takes aim at Linux

Now people are saying, "just show it to us, and we'll fix it." But the cat is out of the bag now. If this case were just about 80 lines of code -- first of all, there wouldn't be a lawsuit -- people could sit down and try to fix it. That's not what this case is about. They're just going forward with respect to everything.

Who is this silent majority of supporters that SCO chief executive Darl McBride referred to? Are we going to see people come out and support the company in statements or legal filings?
We'll have to see. The case is really in its infancy. There haven't been any amicus briefs yet. It certainly wouldn't surprise me because a lot of issues in this case have applications outside of this narrow area.

How so?
We're talking about copyright and how, in the Internet age, people are able to take protected material and have free access to it and make it accessible to millions of people at the flick of a switch. That's something that was unheard of in the past. And the recording industry has struggled with this with Napster. I'm impressed that these people were able to come up with free file-sharing. How somebody was able to figure out how to do that, I'll never understand. It was clear that you can't do that. It was litigated, including by David Boies who represented Napster, and the recording industry won that case. DVDs are finding their way onto the Web before they're released to the public.

(The SCO case) is really getting to the meaning of copyrights in this Internet age. That's the one hand. On the other, a lot of these issues were dealt with at the turn of the last century. For example, we had motion pictures. There were copyright issues then where if I said, 'I'll give you a license,' you can perform this play. And you turn around and you decided they just invented motion pictures. (And you think): if I get a movie out of this instead of a play, I could make a lot more money.

But courts have said you had the rights to make a play, not a motion picture. You didn't have the rights to do that. That's what's happening here. These companies had the right to make their own flavour of Unix, (and) they did that for a while. But a new thing came out, open source, and they went into that but they weren't licensed to do that. While the case has the fresh angle of the Internet, it also goes back to historical roots similar to copyright infringement at the turn of a different century.

What about with radio or the VCR, which caused the music and movie industries to freak out and say their businesses were ruined and their stuff was going to be stolen? Eventually, the industries adopted a different business model that was better for everyone and they didn't have to sue their customers.
I don't think SCO is champing at the bit to sue every customer. I don't think the recording industry is champing at the bit to sue every customer. And we're now starting to see with [Apple Computer's iTunes music store] and other ways to download music that it may not be free... It's now playing out that the industry is finding a business model that works for everybody and not just people who want free music. To the extent that a business model can be worked out -- so it's fair to the intellectual property holders as well as people that want access to the software -- great. But in the absence of that, SCO has no choice but to go forward and make sure its intellectual property rights are protected.