[LAU] A weak link in the license chain: Releasing on false assumptions?

[Ken Restivo]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 07:19:07AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Nils Hammerfest <nils at hammerfeste.com> wrote:
> 
> > Now what happens? Of course the intial release was wrong and there will be legal consequences, no question. But what about the derived works and their derived works?
> 
> there is no single answer to this. it would depend on national laws
> (which vary) and it would depend on the particular case at hand. there
> are examples i can imagine where in US law, the derived work would
> immediately become as illegal as the initial work, but the
> distributor(s) of the derived work would not have any liability. there
> are other examples i can imagine where they clearly would.
> 

This sounds similar to the Novell/SCO lawsuit against Linux some years ago.

Novell claimed that there were Unix headers in Linux, thus they owned Linux.

As I recall, Linus fought it and won the suit.

-ken