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A similar case, SCO v. IBM, is currently pending.
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2 USL's complaint 3 Pretrial 4 External links |
The suit has its roots at the Computer Sciences Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, where large parts of UNIX from AT&T's Bell Labs were gradually rewritten and extended by students doing Operating systems research. With the blessing of AT&T, the CSRG made several releases of this work beginning in 1978 -- the Berkeley Software Distribution -- but because portions of the system contained copyrighted AT&T source code they were only available to other organizations with a source code license for UNIX.
Later, students and faculty audited the code for the TCP/IP stack, removing all the AT&T code, and licensed it to the public in 1988 as NET/1 under the BSD license. As it became apparent that the Berkeley CSRG was coming to an end an effort was made to remove all the remaining AT&T code from the BSD and replace it, resulting in the 1991 release of NET/2, a mostly-complete operating system, also under the terms of the BSD license.
BSDi obtained a copy of NET/2 and began filling in the missing pieces as well as porting it to the Intel i386 computer architecture, with the purpose of selling it as the BSD/386 operating system. This drew the attention and ire of AT&T, whose Unix System Labs subsidiary filed suit against BSDi in New Jersey in April of 1992, which they later amended to include The Regents of the University of California.
In the lawsuit, UNIX System Labs would allege that:
Many of the trial documents of this case are sealed or unavailable, including the majority of those submitted by USL. Some of those that are available have had portions removed as a term of the case settlement.
Since the allegedly infringing software had been released to the public by
the UC Berkeley, most of the case would hinge on the events there. Because UC Berkeley was not originally a party to the suit, the University made it's arguments against an injuction in a series of amicus briefs.
The University submitted the licenses UC Berkeley had from AT&T for UNIX, which specifically stated that the copyright on the Berkeley software derived from 32V belonged to the University. They went on to claim that AT&T had confirmed this by allowing the free redistribution of NET/1, as well as allowing the distribution of the later BSDs, in which specific source code files were marked as containing no AT&T code and so freely redistributable. Since allowing this distribution was legally considered abandoning the copyright, that code could not have been considered a copyrighted part of UNIX even if AT&T had not explicity said it wasn't.
Assuming this was true, the University would still have to show that NET/2 did not contain any validly copyrighted AT&T UNIX code. One claim the University would make was that USL's copyright in the 32V version of UNIX that NET/2 was based on was invalid. At the time 32V was released, US copyright law did not automatically presume that a released work was copyrighted. In order to claim copyright, it was necessary include copyright notices in the work -- which 32V did not have -- or to register the work with the government. Because AT&T (as USL) didn't register the copyright on 32V until 1992, the grace period for registering an already-released work had expired.
The University also claimed that identical and similar lines of source code (which had been shown during discovery) were not infringing on USL's copyright because they had become public domain through AT&T's own actions. AT&T had promoted UNIX as a standard, licensing it to universities and allowing UNIX source code to be published and explained in books. The University submitted briefs from the UC Berkeley students and staff, explaining how they'd audited the code by looking for freely available copies of the source code and methods. When they could find none, they said, they removed the code and rewrote it using public domain methods -- and so any remaining similarities existed because USL's had effectively abandoned the copyright to them.
The University would also argue that the source code did not infringe because it was necessary for program compatibility -- that certain code could be written only one way and still be compatible with the standards set by organizations like POSIX and AT&T itself, and so was no longer a "creative" work that could recieve copyright protection under the law.
Even if the code were validly copyrighted AT&T UNIX code, the University claimed, that would not be a copyright violation because it made up such a small fraction of the whole of NET/2 that it could not legally be considered a derived work.Background
USL's complaint
On these grounds, USL asked the court for a preliminary injunction that would bar BSDi and the UC Berkeley from distributing the NET/2 software until the outcome of the case was known.Pretrial