IBM Counterclaims Against SCO
On August 6, 2003, IBM filed its counterclaims against SCO. It made 10 counterclaims:
- Breach of contract
- Lanham Act violation
- Unfair competition
- Intentional interference with prospective economic relations
- Unfair and deceptive trade practices
- Breach of the GNU General Public License
- and four counts of patent infringement
In response to these counterclaims, SCO asserted that the GPL is unenforceable, void, and violates the United States Constitution, but later dropped that claim. If these claims are true, then the GPL'd applications that SCO continues to distribute (like Samba) are being distributed without the permission of the copyright owners of those applications (since the permission was the GPL itself), which would be illegal.
On September 25, 2003 IBM amended its counterclaims bringing the total number of counterclaims to 13. The new counterclaims are:
- Copyright infringement
- This counterclaim involves an alleged copyright infringement by SCO of GPL-licensed IBM code in the Linux kernel. Some commentators have pointed out that if SCO manages to invalidate the GPL, they are highly likely to be caught by this counterclaim, as it is of the same form as their claim against IBM.
- Promissory estoppel
- Declaratory judgment
On March 29, 2004, IBM amended its counterclaims again. It dropped one of the patent infringement claims, but added two new Declaratory judgments of Noninfringement of Copyrights. One of these seeks a declaration that IBM's AIX-related activities do not infringe any of SCO's copyrights. The other one seeks a similar declaration about IBM's Linux-related activities.
Read more about this topic: SCO V. IBM