We support the right of authors and their employers to use intellectual property laws to encourage cultivation of innovative works and to protect those works. We support the right of entities to enter into reasonable contracts with each other for the use of said intellectual property and to enforce those contracts through the due process of the law. While SCO claims to be fighting for these rights which we do support, they are in actuality attempting to inflict grave damage upon these rights. While it is possible that SCO might have a legitimate claim in their contractual dispute with IBM (though there is no way to know this because SCO refuses to release specifics), one legitimate claim would easily be overshadowed by the contempt and hostility that SCO has shown to the intellectual property of others and by SCO's staunch refusal to specify exactly what intellectual property has been misappropriated so that it can be removed and SCO's damages minimized.

It is with incredible irony that SCO claims to be fighting for upholding the strength of intellectual property in general when in fact they have shown, and continue to show, complete disregard for the intellectual property of others and are seeking to undermine the ability of authors and companies to distribute their own intellectual property as they see fit. SCO is fighting against intellectual property protection in the following ways:

• There are many thousands of contributors to the Linux kernel, of which SCO has a dispute with a single one (IBM) over a very small fraction of the code. SCO is demonstrating disrespect of intellectual property by attempting to hold the intellectual property of thousands hostage in a dispute that does not involve them.
• SCO's attempt to charge for Linux licenses is a gross violation of the intellectual property rights of the thousands of contributors to Linux who are uninvolved in the lawsuit. SCO is attempting to charge for work of which the vast majority is not their own. The purpose of intellectual property law is not to allow entities to charge for the work of others as SCO is trying to do.
• The most flagrant violation of intellectual property by SCO is that they continue to distribute Linux themselves in complete contempt of the license that the thousands of contributors chose to put their own work under. Even if SCO does have a claim to some intellectual property in Linux, this would hardly give them the right to all of Linux. They are distributing the work of thousands without permission and this goes directly against the core of intellectual property rights.
• SCO is seeking to undermine the very foundation of intellectual property law by attempting to have the license that Linux is distributed under declared invalid. Their argument is that the license is invalid because it allows the end user to make multiple copies of the software whereas US copyright law states that users are allowed to make one copy. The context of the law and even common sense alone make it clear that one copy is the minimum that users must be allowed to make and not the maximum. Not only is SCO's claim counterintuitive, but it also strikes against the core principal of intellectual property which is that owners of the intellectual property may control how their property is used. SCO is arguing that an intellectual property owner should not have control over the reproduction of that property. This argument would have a very broad, negative impact on the industry as it would not only invalidate the license used for Linux, but it would also invalidate a large number of other licenses for both free and proprietary software where customers are granted a site license. There is no way that SCO can claim to be a supporter of intellectual property rights when they attempt to destroy the rights relied upon by the whole industry, especially when their suit with IBM is a contractual dispute (according to SCO) and only peripherally related to licensing.