Re: SCO offers UnixWare licenses for Linux

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 11:39:50AM -0500, Yuliy Pisetsky wrote:
> A more reasonable analogy is that you download a bunch of free programs 
> while one of them has some copy-righted music in it for sound effects. 
> Surely you'd have the ability to remove this once you found out without 
> penalty?

It really depends.  If you were an end user and the amount that the copyright
holder could hope to get from you is small, probably.  If you were a distro
maker and you made $50M/year off of things which included the copyrighted
material, I doubt very much that you'd get away with it.

All this stuff boils down to money: how much the violator has, how much 
the copyright holder thinks they can get.  

Read up on the law, Google is your friend.  It is complex but the prevailing
idea here that you can just rewrite the infringing material and that's the
end of it is not true in my opinion.  If you think about it, it makes sense.
If someone damaged your business and all they had to do was say "whoops,
we'll stop", that's not much of a disincentive.
-- 
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Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm