Attorneys critical of SCO

Anonymous Reader writes: “An interesting legal commentary on SCO can be found at web page for the Law Office of Lewis A. Mettler which includes some highly critical comments about SCO, their actions, and their legal approach,
including:

• “If SCO has a beef over copyrights, contracts, trade secrets or what have you, then the beef is with those who have violated the copyright, contract or trade secrets. Attacking Linux customers is pure extortion and illegal. It is not only illegal but imposes a great potential legal liability upon SCO for harm caused to the Linux business via their inappropriate and illegal means.”
• “What SCO is doing violates more than the GPL. It violates trademark law as well. Not to mention numerous State laws against unfair competition, federal laws against antitrust, State laws against the intentional (and tortuous) interference with the contractual relations between Linux vendors and customers.”
• “And, I have to suggest that the lawyers advising SCO right now run the very real risk of being disbarred. “And, why is that? They are giving SCO incredibly poor legal advise and the likely result is that SCO will be sued because of their illegal conduct. And, right now, SCO should be sued. Big time.”

Another attorney, Tom Carey, warned that SCO needs to include terms in its new runtime [Unixware for Linux] license acknowledging that there is a possibility that the runtime license may not be needed in the first place. Otherwise, he said, “SCO will have committed the business equivalent of extortion, assuming they lose their case against IBM. And they will have some exposure for having collected substantial licensing fees and having given nothing in return.”

Mark Radcliffe, from the same firm as Carey, although he appears to have some doubts about Eben Moglen’s OSDL position paper, also points out some issues with SCO’s position in the same article.