Z:gnu-www-ja-sco-v-ibm--e578cf-The same fact stands as an irr/en

The same fact stands as an irrevocable barrier to SCO's claim that &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; violates SCO's copyright on Unix source code. Copyright, as the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized, covers expressions, not ideas. Copyright on source code covers not how a program works, but only the specific language in which the functionality is expressed. A program written from scratch to express the function of an existing program in a new way does not infringe the original program's copyright. GNU and Linux duplicate some aspects of Unix functionality, but are independent bodies, not copies of existing expressions. But even if SCO could show that some portions of its Unix source code were copied into the kernel, the claim of copyright infringement would fail, because SCO has itself distributed the kernel under GPL. By doing so, SCO licensed everyone everywhere to copy, modify, and redistribute that code. SCO cannot now turn around and argue that it sold people code under GPL, guaranteeing their right to copy, modify and redistribute anything included, but that it somehow did not license the copying and redistribution of any copyrighted material of their own which that code contained.