[Fsfe-ie] open letter on IPRED2

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

About the new IP rights enforcement directive[0], I think it would be good to
publish an open letter about the lessons from the SCO case.

[0] http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/LexUriServ/site/en/com/2005/com2005_0276en01.pdf

Most people (those in the Real World) don't know the details of the SCO
case, so we should tell them:

A SCO funded code comparison concluded in 2002:
"we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright
infringement whatsoever."
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-459-22.pdf
(This wasn't public until 2005)

That SCO received funding of more than $100 million from Microsoft:
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.html
(Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1542915,00.asp

And with this funding, despite being advised they had no grounds, they did
things like subpoena FSF:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/sco/subpoena.html

Despite numerous court cases, SCO have won/proved nothing.

Therefore: copyright is being used as a substitute for competition, when MS
can't beat GNU/Linux, it funds baseless, expensive legal trouble.  So,
abuseable legislation must be avoided (and it will not help the Lison
Agenda).

I'm busy until Monday, so but maybe someone wants to give this a go.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,                               |  Support FSFE's work against
http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/              | software patents by becoming
                                                |    a Fellow: http://fsfe.org